I wrote this post 5 or 6 times over the past 8 months. Originally, this was supposed to be published on my Rackham blog (the graduate school at the University of Michigan), and because of the nature of the post, administrators wanted the post to be carefully vetted, and it kept getting bogged down in that process. There were other rewrites that were necessary because of the unending stream of white supremacist incidents on the Michigan campus and at other universities across the country.

Every time white supremacists spoke or flyered or marched (or trolled or doxed), I rewrote this post, in the interest of making it current and relevant. At first, when Identity Europa was still relatively unknown, outside of a handful of university campuses, I thought that this post was important because it helped shed light on a problem facing campuses and facing my discipline. I hoped this post (and the post that originally was going to accompany it) would prompt a sort of conversation about what to do when white supremacists show up to your department. In the last 8 months though, this discussion has flourished on a number of blogs. While we may not have answers, we are having the discussion as a field and across higher ed.

The last rewrite I did was a version that was going to be published at the start of the academic year, and it was meant to address what to do as instructors, if (when) white supremacy shows up in your classroom. Now I’m not sure what purpose this post is meant to serve, except that I think what happened last February in the Classics Library is a story that’s worth sharing. More important than the events, however, are the conversations that it prompted. As white supremacist groups have risen to greater prominence, many people have since changed their opinions, but the questions at the heart of the debates we had have yet to be conclusively answered.

  • What do you do when white supremacy rears its ugly head in a classroom setting, as opposed to other academic settings?
  • What responsibility to you have as an educator to teach the flaws inherent in racist arguments and racist uses of classical antiquity?
  • Are you doing the most pedagogical good by engaging and dismantling problematic ideas or shutting down racist arguments?

For Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2017, the University of Michigan Classical Studies Department hosted a Teach-In on Racist Appropriations of the Classical World: Past and Present. This was a wonderful event, and it deserves a lot more discussion in its own right. Please accept this Storify in place of that discussion.

The reason I’m writing about this event (well after the fact) is that two members of the white nationalist group Identity Europa attended the event. For those who don’t know about this, Identity Europa is one of the groups behind white supremacist posters which appeared on the Michigan campus (and others around the country) on several occasions recently. This group also happen to use a lot of classical imagery on their racist posters (primarily the Apollo Belvedere), which was one of the reasons this event was organized. Presumably, this is the same reason that these two attended the talks. One of them recorded the speakers and the audience while the other asked two questions, to two of the speakers. Since I don’t want to legitimize their arguments, I’m not going to detail their questions/arguments here, but I will simply say that their arguments were the sort of willfully ignorant and discredited talking points that white supremacist groups use all over the country. I would suggest you use your imagination, but I don’t want you to actually spend time imagining this sort of insidious rhetoric.

I’m partly interested in how this fits into a much broader pattern of white supremacist actions on campuses across the country and, as the new school year starts up, it’s important that instructors (in Classics and other fields) give some thought to these issues.

Donna Zuckerberg and Sarah Bond are two targets of some of the most extreme online harassment (in the Classics field) at the hands of white supremacists. Donna Zuckerberg started an important discussion when she shined a bright light (in a public forum) on the white supremacy problem that the field of Classics has. The backlash was horrific and appalling (content warning for threats of violence and anti-Semitism). Sarah Bond wrote an article about polychromy in the ancient world (Rebecca Kennedy followed up on this discussion with a more recent article about Classics’ complicity in white supremacy) In response to these events, and others, our professional association (the Society for Classical Studies) felt compelled to release a statement in support of public scholars who have faced harassment and threats of violence.

Jessie Daniels (Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY) summed up the state of things in a way that I have to admit is depressing and also true:

With all that context laid out, what I want to discuss here is how this particular situation was handled in our Teach-In and the ensuing conversations among the graduate students in our department. At least two people mentioned that they thought that his questions could have been handled better (the moderator allowed the Identity Europa member to ask his question, but after he received a response—though not one he found satisfactory—she brusquely cut off any further follow-up questions from him). Some of my colleagues thought that we had billed this as a teach-in, and our response should have been to try to educate these two men.

Their argument (and I think they have a point) was that we should fight bad information with good information. Not—and this is important—so that we can argue down a neo-Nazi, but so that other people in the class will be able to see what’s wrong with white supremacist arguments. If we ever thought we could take it for granted that there’s weren’t any such “undecided voters” in our classes, it’s now clear that we’re naïve to think that. And why should our students come into our classes knowing that grand “western civilization” narratives are flawed? While the marching-in-the-streets-with-tiki-torches sort of white supremacists are new to the mainstream, there are far more subtle and insidious versions of white supremacy that are so baked into the fabric of our culture that we often don’t even notice them. So, as many of my colleagues argued, if we leave those flawed and racist narratives unrefuted, we risk leaving our students susceptible to the insidious alt-right radicalization that’s happening so frequently, particularly online. If we just tell people with terrible, oppressive ideas to shut up and go away, we’re just deferring a problem and hoping someone else will solve it. Hardly why most of us got into education.

That being said, I am very comfortable with how things were handled in the context of this event. In a different setting, I might agree that our responsibility as academics (as both scholars and educators) is to educate. When students present problematic or offensive perspectives in one of my classes, I do try to interrogate those ideas and engage with them in good faith. There, I am a teacher. When someone comes to an event on Martin Luther King Jr. day with the express purpose of making sure that a patently racist perspective is heard, they are not trying to learn. They are trying to derail a conversation and make an event be about whether “Racist Appropriations of the Classical World” are in fact racist. They are inserting false and discredited ideas into an event that’s concerned with actual scholarship and proven facts, and demanding that both sides get equal coverage. None of that speaks to an interest in learning. When someone has been told twice that their claim is simply not true, and literally every legitimate scholar on the topic agrees that it’s not true, but they persist in arguing that point and saying hostile and derogatory things about students of color who are in the room . . . that’s not an earnest attempt at learning, and I do not feel that we as academics have an obligation to try to teach such a person out of their pre-planned talking points.

I understand my colleagues who think we should be engaging and dismantling racist arguments, and their points are well taken. However, if one or two people want to derail an event and make an entire (packed) room of people uncomfortable and threatened (not to mention extremely annoyed—we had limited time and they took up time with racist questions that could have been far better spent digging into some more nuanced discussion), they don’t have any particular right to do that. It’s not quashing free debate or curtailing free speech to simply say that some ideas are so flawed and so far beyond the pale that they do not deserve to be addressed in a particular setting. You may have a legal right to hate speech, but you do not have a right to share it in our department and in our event. And I’m both glad and proud that that’s the stance my department took.

But what does this mean for teaching?

Well, I don’t know. There isn’t a right answer here, and context matters. A lot. Is a student bringing up a potentially racist argument that’s germane to the content of the class, or are they introducing a disruptive and inappropriate argument simply to make a point? Is the student trying to learn about something they’ve heard in the news or in the mainstream and they want to ask their instructor about it? Or are they trying to troll your classroom?

I wouldn’t have jumped to any of these cynical interpretations a few years ago, but the climate on campus has undeniably shifted. My only actual, concrete piece of advice is to think about these situations before they happen, so you aren’t blindsided if they do happen in a class or campus event. Michigan’s CRLT has resources designed to help you navigate these kinds of situations and I would highly encourage you to take their “Diversity and Inclusive Teaching” seminar the next time it’s offered.

Beyond that, all I have are my own impressions, but reasonable, thoughtful people can and likely will disagree with me about some of this. Nonetheless, since this is an ideological and pedagogical point I feel strongly about, I want to close with my own thoughts. Though I have been fortunate enough not to have anything overtly hostile or offensive happen in any of the classes I have taught, there have been moments when things have become heated and students have said things that I felt crossed a line. In a perfect world, these situations would be teachable moments and everything would be resolved and the whole class would have learned something about respectful and thoughtful debate. If that proves impossible, however, there comes a moment in these situations when I feel that I need to weigh the good of the many (the rest of the class) against the good of the few (the offending student) and if that particular student is not willing to learn why their comments are unacceptable in the classroom, then I feel like my obligation is to the rest of the class. It is more important to me to send a strong message that there is no place for hateful rhetoric in my classroom—and if that means cutting one student’s arguments short, in order to make sure the rest of the students have a good learning environment, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. At the end of the day, I feel strongly that my greatest responsibility is to preserve a good learning environment for my class as a whole. If I cannot equally serve all of my students, then I am committed to using my authority in the classroom to defend students who are being marginalized.

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