Empathy and Irony; or, The Tyranny of the Minority

An assistant manager at work proudly drew my attention to the sign she'd just made for the salad bar, which she said was "politically correct."  That seemed a very odd quality for an informational sign in a university dining room, so I read it.  I couldn't see anything "politically correct" about it in any sense of the term that I'm familiar with, so I asked her what she meant.  She said that it was "polite."  I was probably a bit more peevish than I meant to be -- it's the beginning of the semester, things have been hectic, and the heat has been getting to me -- but I managed to figure out that she was using "polite" and "politically correct" as equivalent because, as she pointed out, that's how a lot of people use the term, so it's what it has come to mean.

I'm still a little baffled by her rationale, though it makes a kind of sense -- in the same way that many people believe that the US Supreme Court banned all prayer from public schools: not just officially mandated prayer but individual private voluntary prayer by the students.  That ruling did nothing of the kind, but decades of theocratic propaganda, and the evident difficulty most people seem to have grasping the issue involved, have won out over the facts.  In the US we should and do have the right to make our own religious choices; the government does not.

I don't object to politeness, kindness, and consideration for others.  They're good attitudes and practices, and not as universal as they ought to be.  Over the last few years I've seen a number of people claim that "political correctness" is really just politeness, and I have probably made that claim myself, but while it makes a good point, it's not true.

It's difficult, of course, to say just what "political correctness" is.  In practice the term is used to dismiss and derogate opinions that one happens to disapprove, often on the excuse that they are well-intentioned but Go Too Far.  In that sense the term originated on the left, to refer to ideological conformity, but quickly became doublespeak, as snark for those who are too conformist, and judge themselves and everyone else by sectarian Party criteria.  Such people do exist, and they should be opposed and criticized, but a buzzword like "PC" is isn't really a critique: it's a way of attacking someone else's position without actually showing what's wrong with it.  And those on the left who use the term seem to forget that by most Americans' standards, they are Politically Correct extremists too.

Which is why it struck me so funny when a friend claimed that she used "'PC' in the broader sense of offending mainstream sensibilities."  As it's generally used (including by her) "political correctness" is invoked in defense of "mainstream sensibilities," the background-radiation hum of racism, sexism, and general bigotry that only some liberal do-gooder or "Social Justice Warrior" would object to: C'mon, lighten up, it's just a joke, don't be so humorless, what's your problem, smile!  When "mainstream sensibilities" are offended -- when a professional football player refuses to stand for the National Anthem, say -- it's the offender, not the mainstream, who will be accused of political correctness, and no one tells the mainstream to lighten up.

I thought I'd read somewhere that Alexis de Toqueville used the actual term "political correctness" (in French, naturally) in one of his writings on America, but I haven't been able to track down a reference.  While looking I noticed that right-wing writers discussing the subject invoked the "tyranny of the majority," which they equated with Political Correctness As We Know It Today.  But again, as it's actually used and especially by the Right, Political Correctness has nothing to do with the tyranny of the majority: it means whiny minorities picking on sensible, well-meaning, inoffensive majorities.  Similarly, this blogger wrote:

What Political Correctness really means - wherever & in whatever form it appears - is this: that The State or similar authority (the Church, society, any dominant ideology, it doesn't matter which) has decided what you can or cannot think or say. It has decided this for you. Its definition is the one you must accept. Your opinion is wrong. Your opinion should not be heard. Your opinion is Incorrect.

Well, that's kind of true, but again, more in reverse.  First, the movements the writer is denouncing were not "dominant ideologies."  Feminism, Black Nationalism, and the like were insurgent movements resisting the "dominant ideologies" of the United States.  Within those movements there was a struggle to decide who'd get to decide the new "correctness," but I don't see that any of the competing definitions ever finally won out, and they are still being contested to this day.  The blogger draws on an essay on the history of the concept of PC by Ruth Perry, which spells that out explicitly, citing a poem Audre Lorde wrote against Toni Cade Bambara's declaration that she would raise her daughter to be "a correct little sister."  I must conclude that the blogger strategically misunderstood what Perry was writing about in the service of his own ideology, which he clearly would like to be dominant, and is indignant that feminists persist in being truly incorrect.

For my discussion today, though, I'm going to stick with a version of what might be called the mainstream understanding of Political Correctness, though I don't mean that in a good way.  When most people refer to PC, they seem to be thinking of, first, a strong concern with terminology -- a belief that using the "right" label is crucial to good politics, and using the "wrong" label a sign of bad politics.  (This is largely a straw man, of course, and bear in mind that those who deride "PC" speech are extremely doctrinaire about their own preferred labels.)  Second, they mean a strong intolerance of those with the "wrong" politics (though again, they overlook their own political intolerance).

So, then: is "Political Correctness" really just another word for politeness?  From either end, no.  Politeness doesn't equal Political Correctness: politeness is perfectly compatible with political oppression.  Members of dominant castes are taught (not always successfully, of course) to be polite and kind to their inferiors.  A genteel white supremacist would never think of using the N-word to a black person; a gentleman treats a lady with respect; a king doesn't rub his subjects' noses in their lower status -- though if those inferiors fail to observe their place, the velvet gloves come off.

Nor is Political Correctness about "feelings," though feelings are often invoked.  Debates over proper terminology were about trying to find language that would describe conditions better than the preferred propaganda terms that were in general use.  The feminist consciousness-raising groups of the Sixties, for example, used participants' feelings about being housewives as a starting point.  Their feelings were a symptom of what was wrong in their lives and in society, but the aim was to go from  there to a better intellectual understanding of women's situation and what might be done to change it.  Sometimes that aim was derailed as analysis of feelings and a sophistical focus on labels became ends in themselves, which was hardly surprising when feelings, as opposed to reason, were women's assigned sphere, but one of the goals of feminism was for women to break with the stereotypical expectations that had been assigned to them.  Not to put too much emphasis on this, but if feelings had been the core concern, the goal would have been Emotional rather than Political Correctness.

I recall fondly a conversation from the Seventies between an English literature professor of my parents' generation, who took for granted a New-Critical approach to his field, and a lesbian feminist of my generation.  The professor objected to literature which examined people's lives, he thought it didactic and boring.  That's as much an emotional reaction as a principled one, though he could adduce his New-Critical presuppositions to support his emotional reaction.  My lesbian friend replied that she found it really exciting when literature explored people's lives in an inventive, politically-informed way.  Which doesn't mean that fiction should be didactic, or that all such politically-informed fiction is equally good, but that such exploration is a valid artistic project.  And it should be remembered that, as Kate Millett showed in Sexual Politics, canonical art had its own politics, usually male-supremacist and often overtly misogynist, and critics not only didn't see those tendencies as blots on the work but endorsed them -- at least until feminist critics pointed them out, and they became something of an embarrassment to be disavowed.

As Joanna Russ wrote of "political criticism" at around the same time:

... in fact, it seems absolutely impossible to write anything without immediately making all sorts of assumptions about what human nature is, what good and bad behavior consists of, what men ought to be, what women ought to be, which states of mind and character are valuable, which are the opposite, and so on. Once fiction gets beyond the level of minimal technical competence, a reviewer must address these judgments of value. Generally readers don't notice the presence of familiar value judgments in stories, but do notice (and object to) unfamiliar ones as "Political" ... To apply rigid, stupid, narrow, political standards to fiction is bad because the standards are rigid, stupid, and narrow, not because they are political [originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1979, 103; reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (Liverpool University Press, 2007), 165].

It also should be remembered that analysis and understanding do not necessarily make you feel better.  (See, for example, Joanna Russ's essay on man-hating, quoted in this post.) Oppressed groups were supposed to accept their place, and if they sometimes felt discontented, they were supposed to remind themselves that we all (even the rich and powerful) feel discontented sometimes, but that their lot was decreed by Nature, and Nothing Can Be Done About It.  When you realize that it is not Nature but human will and decisions that define your place, you may get angry, and there was a lot of anger in the social movements of the Sixties.  This, of course, was presented as a discredit to them: why couldn't they be calm and reasonable, like their rulers?  If they didn't simmer down, it might become necessary to sic the dogs on them, which would make the rulers feel really bad, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

There's a flip side to politeness' compatibility with oppression, however: those people who are most vocal in demanding politeness toward the oppressed are apt to become extremely impolite in dealing with those they disagree with.  Perhaps the tantrums directed at someone like Donald Trump are understandable, though not excusable if you want to see yourself as more rational than the Rethuglitards (and such terminology would, I'd have thought, be unacceptable to the very people who use it), but the same kind of vitriol and ragegasms are turned on different factions on the same side.  Anyone old enough to remember the Lesbian / feminist Sex Wars of the early 1980s, as I am, knows how vicious the feelings-oriented Therapy wing of feminism could be when dealing with feminists it placed beyond the pale.  This tendency turned up in the Sixties too, when lesbians were purged from second-wave feminist organizations and Betty Friedan claimed that lesbians were CIA agents trying to undermine the movement.  More recently, I've been struck by the hatred directed by some prominent trans activists at RuPaul for referring to himself as a "tranny."  Also by the fury directed by other GLBT people at the lesbian writer E. J. Graff for suggesting that "choosing" to be gay would not be a bad thing.  And also by trans people and their allies who throw tantrums over the use over the word "transgendered," even though it has been in common use by transgender writers, among others, without any pejorative intention or effect.  I've argued before that advocates of totalistic safe space have always been highly selective about whose feelings they respect and defer to.  The license to rage appears to be an expression of what F. G. Bailey calls "the moral mind" -- emotional displays (that is, tantrums) to show how deeply one feels about an issue and to establish which side one is on.  And what that means is that the tactics of the Right are considered appropriate by many on the Left, though both factions would deny their similarities.  Am I saying, then, that it's okay to trample on other people's feelings at whim?  I'm not, though remember, those who'd make that accusation are perfectly willing, even happy, to trample on the feelings of those who they don't believe merit consideration.  The trouble isn't "political correctness," but a disinclination to act according to one's own declared principles -- in this case, of respecting other people's feelings.

Consider the recent controversy known in some circles as the Bathroom Wars, over which public restrooms should be used by transgender people.  Laws have been passed in numerous places to require trans people to use the facilities appropriate to the sex they were assigned at birth, and support for such laws often took the form of ragegasms and threats to attack any trans person the frother 'caught' entering the 'wrong' bathroom.  Their pretended motive was to protect their wives and daughters from fantasized predation by men dressed as women, though I think the intensity of their rage combined with their total ignorance about transgender people was a clear sign that something else was going on, though I don't know exactly what.  I remember similar fury about the provision of "gender-neutral" restrooms, which seemed to be associated with the fantasy that any normal person who used the facility would be magically transformed into a Transgender.  I had some fun taunting some of my right-wing transphobe acquaintances by asking them why they didn't have separate sex-segregated bathrooms at home.  It's like the opponents of same-sex marriage who believe that when gay marriage is legal, everybody will have to be gay-married.

My point here is not to resolve these questions, but to point out that opposition to the Bathroom Laws generally took for granted that the feelings of trans people must be respected, even when they were just as batty as the anti-trans frothers.  I saw a couple of articles about trans people who claimed that, from an early age, they just knew that they were in the Wrong Bathroom.  Since sex-segregated bathrooms are a cultural convention, there can't really be any such thing.  In the US we're taught to respect this convention from an early age, but we also grow up in homes where everybody uses the same bathroom.  There are very good prudential reasons why trans people would want to use the public restroom assigned to the sex with which they identify, for their own safety, but claiming that bathrooms have a sex/gender buys into the assumptions of the bigots.

What intrigued me, as it has with issues like same-sex marriage, is that the feelings of the transphobes, which clearly ran very deep and strong, were not seen as worthy of respect; only the feelings of transpeople.  The feelings of a little girl who resists wearing a dress, or a little boy who wants to wear a dress, must be respected and indulged -- but not the feelings of a little girl who wants to be an anorectic Disney Princess, or a little boy who's All Boy and refuses to make his bed or help wash the dishes.  This is why the appeal to feelings is so misconceived, apart from its selectivity: What do you do when feelings clash?  When you adopt a position based on people's feelings, you can't just dismiss the feelings of other people who reject that position. You have to evaluate the problem by looking at evidence and reason, which of course no one wants to do.  I don't respect bigots' feelings, but then I oppose the whole apparatus of safe spaces and bogus respect mandated by the Culture of Therapy -- I don't respect the feelings of my fellow gay people either, and that includes my own.

I don't respect bigots' feelings, but I do sympathize with them.  I understand why many people find it upsetting to see two men holding hands, or two women getting married, just as I understand why a gay man raised in a homophobic society is repulsed by effeminate gay men, or by the thought (let alone the reality) of kissing another man.  (And yet -- I grew up in the same society, in an even more homophobic time: why don't I have those feelings?  You can't use Society as an Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for bigotry.)  But such feelings must not be given authority to decide policy and law.

Am I "politically correct" myself?  I hope so, if we're using the term in its earlier, non-snark sense: I think that it's a good thing to examine one's life according to one's principles, and to try to live by them.  But because I also believe in the value of critical thinking, I know that correctness is hard to determine and rarely if ever finally known.  I might conclude after thinking hard that my principles are flawed and must be changed.  Therefore it's important not to be dogmatic, to be open to debate, and to try to debate responsibly.  Feelings are relevant, but they don't have the final word.  And if we want to criticize the knee-jerk emotional reactions of the Right, we must be just as critical of the knee-jerk emotional reactions of liberals and the Left.

Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind

There's been a flurry of attention over the weekend to a "welcome" letter sent to incoming freshmen by the University of Chicago, advising them that the institution's

commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

This set off a predictable storm of praise and criticism.  I'm going to focus on the criticism, though I might return to the praise another time.  (Or maybe I don't need to: John Scalzi wrote a pretty good post about it.)  I've written here before at length about "safe spaces," and will try not to repeat myself too much today.  But the criticism that I've seen has mostly been dreadful: intellectually and morally dishonest.

I'll begin by saying that I have reservations about Chicago's rejection of "the creation of intellectual 'safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own."  As long as they're not explicitly called "safe spaces," such places are normal in intellectual circles.  I think that much of the panic about Creationism and Intelligent Design represents a desire to establish classrooms as just such "safe spaces," but for the Good Guys.  In practice, of course, certain ideas and perspectives are ruled out in advance in every classroom, if only because teaching the conflicts takes a lot of time.  But the phobic reaction of many secularists to religious ideas (or what they believe to be religious ideas) suggests that something else is going on, something less exalted, something like the very narrow-mindedness, fear of difference, and authoritarianism such people fondly assume themselves to be free of.  Roy Edroso posted on Tuesday about an antigay bigot's dismissal of "the 'born-this-way' myth," and rather quickly got tangled in his own rhetoric.  (I quit reading the comments after one regular jeered, inaccurately, at the Bible as a supposedly 4,000 year old work of Middle Eastern shepherds; they only got worse after that.)  Of course it's simply not debatable in Edroso's safe space whether sexual orientation is inborn, any more than the reverse is true in David French's safe space; and rationality quickly goes out the window if you question it.  But there are good reasons to question it, starting with the fact that the science doesn't work.  A reader wrote that despite everything, the idea that he was born gay has an emotional appeal.  I'm not sure what the appeal of the belief is, but whatever it is, it's emotional not rational.

But I digress.  I suppose I should do some investigation of whatever science is involved with emotional triggers, but a cursory look indicates that there isn't much, and what there is doesn't really conflict with the University of Chicago's stance as set out in their letter.  The people who are attacking Chicago seem to be using "trigger warning" extremely loosely at best.  This piece at the Huffington Post, for example, by their "Deputy Healthy Living Editor" (a title that alone inspires absolute confidence), relies on innuendo rather than reason:

In other words, students who may be susceptible to mental health issues, like post-traumatic stress disorder or panic disorders, are undeserving of a warning that a lecture or guest speaker may aggravate those issues or traumatic experiences.

Actually, no.  It could be argued that the letter itself is a trigger warning, that a liberal-arts education may "aggravate those issues or traumatic experiences."  But the writer offers no real evidence that such aggravation can be avoided by trigger warnings.  She claims that "research clearly shows that atmospheres that promote negative stereotypes can act as barriers to treatment, furthering stigma and causing additional psychological trauma."  The page she links to, however, doesn't really address what she says it does and doesn't support her argument (I'll be generous and call it that, though it's stretching the word absurdly to do so).  Later she writes:

Trigger warnings are potentially lifesaving for people who have dealt with traumas like sexual assault, hate crimes or violence. Eliminating these advisories and zones on campus suggests that someone should have to listen to someone who questions their humanity or experience.

No links there, and no evidence to back it up.  The inflationary rhetoric ("potentially lifesaving") doesn't help, and is no substitute for evidence.  As she then admits: "There is not much research on the effectiveness of advisories, but some experts do recommend that professors at least alert students of the content if it could be triggering."  Let me repeat that: There is not much research on the effectiveness of advisories; "some experts" recommend them anyway, but some experts can always be found to recommend anything you like.

Again:

Nearly 30 percent of students in 2014 reported experiencing a psychological health issue that negatively influenced their academic performance. Sexual assault ― which can lead to PTSD, among other conditions ― is also a prevalent issue. Approximately one in five women and one in 16 men will be sexually assaulted while in college.

And:

Research from the National Alliance on Mental Illness shows more than 60 percent of college students who dropped out did so because of a mental health issue, which includes cases like PTSD and trauma.

I've seen similar sloppy use of numbers in other posts about this matter.  Are trigger warnings needed by all those 30 percent of students?  Probably not.  "Psychological health issue" casts a very wide net. Sexual assault can "lead to PTSD" -- I don't doubt that, but how often does it do so, and how often will trigger warnings in class be "effective"?  How many of the "more than 60 percent of college students who dropped out because of a mental health issue" -- also a very wide net -- were actually affected by PTSD and trauma?  But 60 percent is a nice big number, very impressive if you don't care about anything but making an impression.  It's a very irresponsible piece of work, this article, and it's typical of the complaints and attacks I've been seeing about the U of Chicago today.

In the comments under John Scalzi's post, a pattern emerged: numerous people wrote about what they "thought" a safe space is, in their opinions.  (The same is true of "trigger warning."  Scalzi noticed what I had, that the U of Chicago letter was itself, effectively, a trigger warning, as are movie and television and other rating systems, according to the commonsense meaning of "trigger warning" these folks are working with.  I'm not sure, however, that they are the same thing.)  The trouble is that there is considerable disagreement about what a safe space (or a trigger warning) is or should be. As the therapist Walt Odets wrote (In the shadow of the epidemic: being HIV-negative in the age of AIDS [Duke UP, 1995]: 274f.):

In any well-run group, safety can only mean one thing: any expression of feelings or thoughts will be received and tolerated by the group, and an attempt will be made to honestly respond to it. This will be done without physical violence or undue emotional hurt to other members, and without abandonment of the group. This essential objective is most easily accomplished in a professionally facilitated therapy group, because the group leader will have the necessary skills to mediate and limit conflict to a safe and constructive level. When the idea of safety comes to mean, as it often does in poorly constructed therapy groups and many support groups, that members be polite and "non-judgmental" toward each other, then the prime therapeutic objectives are undermined. Interpersonal interaction -- as opposed to social form -- necessarily involves feelings and judgments about others, and unless they can be expressed and discussed truthfully, the group can provide neither insight nor the meaning that comes of bearing witness....

The function of a group is not to make members "feel better when they leave than when they came in," as one poorly supervised peer facilitator has routinely billed his weekly support group for San Francisco gay men. It is the function of a therapy group, like individual psychotherapy, to help people attain the insight that allows them to make themselves feel better.

As Odets's own complaint shows, though, his idea of safe space is not the only meaning in current use, even among professionals.  Whoever wrote the University of Chicago letter is evidently foggy about the meaning of the term, as of "trigger warning." When you factor in non-professionals, the sky is the limit.  (The same is true of other terms that have transitioned from jargon to mainstream discourse, like "microaggression.")  To me that's evidence that demands for trigger warnings and safe space tend to come from people who don't know what they're talking about.  It becomes pointless to argue about the "real" meaning of these terms when no one knows what they do mean, so one must look at what people think they mean by them, and what conditions and practices they are calling for.  The Huffington Post article, which is unfortunately typical of the critiques I've seen, indicates that there is some truth in the charge that advocates of "safe space" want to shut down intellectual freedom altogether (except for themselves of course).  They talk about "civility" (the word is in the U of Chicago letter, in fact) and "respect," but those qualities are conspicuously absent from their discourse.

But also from their opponents'.  As Scalzi tweeted (and quoted in his post), "The conservatives gloating about @uchicago's No' Safe Spaces' policy don't appear to think it will apply to them, too, the dear wee lads."  The reactions he got to that one from conservatives confirmed his point, though it was hardly news.  But that is one area where conservatives and non-conservatives stand together: Freedom of Speech for Me, But Not for Thee!

The HuffPost writer complains: "The problem with this interpretation of trigger warnings is that it presumes all participants have the same level of privilege."  "Privilege" is another of those wiggly, gaseous terms that gets misused a lot, I'm afraid.  I noticed when I first wrote about safe spaces that a lot of the discourse around them presumes levels of class privilege.  So, for instance, a young gay teacher-to-be denounced the word "gay" as "vulgar," and asserted that he wouldn't tolerate it in any class he taught.  Suppressing the "vulgar" means imposing a privileged, white middle-class standard of language.  Privilege isn't a simple linear scale of higher and lower, it's extremely complex and muddled: one can be privileged along one axis and de-privileged in another.  There's been a lot of criticism of the word "privilege" in some recent discussion, asserting that, say, working-poor whites in West Virginia don't have white privilege.  Of course they do, however much privilege they don't have.  But a college-educated person who presumes to lecture such people on their white privilege ignores his or her own privilege: privilege is always relative to your status and the status of the person you're dealing with.  If you want to communicate with and educate others, you will try to frame your message in such a way that they'll be able to hear it -- or to put it another way, speaking of white privilege to poor white trash sets off various triggers for them, and those who wave around "civility" and "respect" must be aware of and curb their own privilege first.

Linguistic Polyamory on a Dark and Snowy Night

It's been a busy day, so this will be a quickie, two quotations from Sarah Schulman's new book Israel / Palestine and the Queer International (Duke, 2012).  One, from page 153, refers to Haneen, a queer Palestinian activist who visited the US on a solidarity tour Schulman organized:

Similarly, she addressed the American LBGT obsession with determining words to call ourselves. 'I find it ["queer"] useful for the time being but I am not attached to it or any other term. I am happy to move along with language. I am not looking for a term to marry. When it comes to language, I believe in short affairs."

The other, from page 166, is Schulman's own opinion:

I have always hated the "safety" discourse. Feeling "safe" is not the paramount goal of life; it's being able to move forward constructively even if one is afraid. Total safety is impossible unless other people's rights are entirely infringed, and it's not a desirable state for an adult. How '"safety" of the most dominant became the agenda of the LGBT community center is beyond me.

Israel / Palestine and the Queer International is, in my opinion, Schulman's best book since 1998's Stagestruck.  I recommend it highly.

Baby, It's Marginalized Outside

I'm working my way through a new book, SAFE SPACES: Making Schools and Communities Welcoming to LGBT Youth, by Annemarrie Vaccaro, Gerri August, and Megan S. Kennedy (Praeger, 2012). It will no doubt be useful to many people, but there's something about the book that bothers me.

In the introduction, the authors declare:

Safe Spaces is not merely a book about facts, figures, and statistics. It was born out of the real-life experiences of LGBT youth. In fact, Safe Spaces gives voice to a population that historically been marginalized. ... Safe Spaces is a cultural critique of sorts, one that exposes deeply entrenched marginalization of LGBT youth in America [6, 7].

I don't deny that this is a worthwhile project. What bothers me is that the authors seem to want to give the impression that they're doing something new. Just on my own bookshelves I have several books about LGBT youth, dating back to at least the late 1980s. Most are based on interviews, so as to 'give voice' to their subjects. There are many more than the ones I own, and that's not counting increasing numbers of works of fiction about the lives of LGBT youth; there's also plenty of material online written by young people, instead of being mediated through well-meaning adults.

In this light, it's hard for me to see how Safe Spaces could possibly expose "entrenched marginalization of LGBT youth". Such exposure and giving voice to youth began a couple of decades ago, so the real question for the authors to answer is what they have to add to the conversation. So far -- but I'm admittedly only about 25 pages in -- the answer appears to be "Nothing much." That's not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe books and articles on a certain subject have to reach a critical mass before they can have much social or institutional effect. What worries me is that the authors themselves seem to think they're breaking ground, coming to the rescue of kids who'd long been marginalized until SuperTeachers flew in. That belief gives the book a self-congratulatory tone, making it subtly more about the authors than about the kids, and it's that tone that I think makes it hard for me to read.

The reason I find this annoying is that it doesn't stand alone. Aside from gay youth, another issue that gets rediscovered regularly is People Who Have Sex with People of Their Own Gender Without Being Gay. (Yet another is Gay Men and Straight Women: Best Friends -- Or Are They?) This phenomenon was not unknown even before 1948, when the first Kinsey volume was published, and the AIDS epidemic brought it into new relief, giving us the construct of Men Who Have Sex With Men. It's not surprising that popular media, which are built on identifying or inventing new trends, should be ignorant of that history. But back in the early 90s a colleague handed me a copy of a professional journal article, I think aimed at college counselors, built on interviews with a half-dozen college students who reported homosexual contact ranging from pickups to affairs while refusing to think of themselves as anything but straight. Nowhere in the article was it mentioned that this was old news. Maybe the author felt it necessary to treat it as a revelation so that the article could pass as a contribution to the field -- but why didn't the editors of the journal recognize that it wasn't?

Similarly, perhaps Vaccaro, August, and Kennedy believed they needed to present their book as something new in order to get it published and make it look impressive on their c.v.'s -- they're all academics, and I know life is hard in the Ivory Tower. But if you distort history, you're not doing any favors to your students and their students after them. I've complained before about books written by respectable academics and published by mainstream houses which contain serious errors of fact, but then I've also argued that readers need to read everything critically, whether it's in print or on the Internet.

I also have strong reservations about the whole concept of safe space, which I've written about here before at length. If I go by the index, the authors of Safe Space don't bother to define their central term; that's not a trivial omission, since even professionals don't agree on its meaning or parameters. It looks like Safe Spaces is going to be a long hard slog, so I'd better get back to work on it. There'll be more to be said on this subject, unless I manage to procrastinate more effectively.

This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 4

I once heard a gay minister snidely dismiss freedom of speech issues in the classroom. This gives him common ground with many of his opponents, who would gladly keep him and other GLBT people out of even college classrooms, let alone secondary or primary schools. This same minister was among the IU staff, students and faculty who agitated against the First Amendment in September 2003, demanding that the University censor a faculty member's antigay web log. Some of them jeered at the First Amendment and the Constitution in general, dismissing them as a piece of paper for the benefit of rich white men only. Not long after, of course, many of these same cultured despisers of the Constitution were outraged that George W. Bush wanted to change the sacred Constitution to forbid recognition of same-sex marriage.

Freedom of speech in the classroom is a sticky issue. I don't think any court would invoke the First Amendment to support a student who disrupted a class by launching into a one hour sermon complete with scriptural references. The Christian Right, for its part, only supports student freedom and activism by its own children against competing sects or secularists; in general they prefer students to be silent and passive.

Preventing a kid from harassing another kid for whatever reason in the classroom, the hallways or school grounds is not an infringement of the harasser's First Amendment rights. Some bigots might argue informally that it is (like a jaywalker who defends himself by arguing, "It's a free country!"), but I don't believe such arguments would or should stand in any court. However, students' rights are already limited enough without trying to stifle them further.

I understand that where a teacher can't (for political or other reasons) make a teachable moment out of a bigoted remark, squelching certain terms in class may be the only available course. This does not make a safe space, though, and there should be no pretense that it does. It's a stopgap, a papering over that may be unavoidable, but it isn't education. Nor does it prepare students for life in a pluralistic society.

Rather than "safe space," we need to build institutions for teaching self-defense, to help children and adults deal with difference and disagreement, even offense, without panicking; but also to defend themselves against bigotry. More positively, we need to encourage everyone to know why they hold the beliefs they do, a kind of knowledge that requires understanding of opposing beliefs. We also need structures for conflict engagement -- horizontally (person to person) rather than vertically (authority to perpetrator). Teachers would function here as referees, monitoring procedures and preventing verbal disputes from turning into violence, rather than as coaches who are trying to produce a given outcome. I realize that my proposal won't go over very well with diversity managers and other professionals, because it will ultimately teach students to defend themselves against their teachers -- and their parents. I intend it to do so.

Some gay men in an Internet chat room I frequent argued against my self-defense approach. They said that teaching everyone self-defense would just produce better-equipped bullies. These guys were mainly concerned to rationalize a do-nothing attitude, but they did stumble on a valid point, which is that bigotry is a moving target. If we try to change the school environment, the children (and their parents, and teachers and administration) will not be molded passively like clay. They will respond creatively, unpredictably, to try to prevent changes in their accustomed environment. Whatever intervention we design had better include provisions for spotting and reacting to creative, unpredictable counter-moves. I believe that a self-defense approach, based as it is on dialogue -- which means listening seriously to the other sides -- leaves room for such a response, and makes it possible.

Frustrating though it is, this same resistance to indoctrination is one of the things that makes change possible. Because some people refused social indoctrination about race, class, sex roles and sexuality, change has happened in American society -- change for the better, in my opinion, though not everyone agrees with me.

Any program which fails to take resistance into account is not only doomed to failure, but wrong-headed. One of many things I like about Speakers Bureau is that we have no real authority. We can't tell people what to think, we aren't there to enforce anything. We're there to make more talk; not less speech, but more speech.

Let me try to make one thing clear: I am not saying that minority kids need to develop thicker skins, as some apologists for bigotry have been known to suggest. I think everyone needs to develop thicker skins, including bigots as well as, well, liberals. In a much-anthologized article, self-styled free-speech champion Nat Hentoff attacked "PC" and "speech codes" because "liberal students and those who can be called politically moderate ... no longer get involved in class discussions where their views would go against the grain of PC righteousness" -- that is, where someone might disagree with them too vehemently ("'Speech Codes' on the Campus and Problems of Free Speech", Dissent, Fall 1991; reprinted in Patricia Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding [Graywolf Press, 1992], 52). Hentoff quoted a cartoonist who got "hisses from the audience" for criticizing "PC" at a "free speech forum" at Brown University. Liberal white and black faculty are reluctant to oppose "PC" publicly, Hentoff claimed, because "they want to be liked -- or at least not too disliked" (53). Minority students, Hentoff argued, should fight hostility with "more speech," rather than being intimidated. If they do so, however, people like Hentoff attack them for "PC righteousness" and intimidating liberals and moderates; the contradiction looks pretty blatant to me. "Liberals" and "moderates" (two groups which Hentoff apparently thinks contain no minorities!), however, should not be exposed to unkind words or criticism, nor need they meet them with "more speech"; they -- but not blacks, gays, or women – can simply play the victim. (Hentoff’s complaint is really quite funny in its way, for in addition to its other self-contradictions it’s exactly the people he considers “liberal … and those who can be called politically moderate” who are denounced by the Right as the enforcers of “PC righteousness.”)

There is -- how shall I put this? -- a passive-aggressive element in this liberal and moderate withdrawal from discussion, a refusal to face the undeniably unpleasant anger of minorities: if they can't ask for their rights nicely, we won't listen to them. The African-American lesbian poet and feminist Audre Lorde was sharply critical of white feminists who want "to deal with racism without dealing with the harshness of Black women." (Sister Outsider [Firebrand,1984], 126)

As gay scholar Jeffrey Escoffier wrote in a valuable essay on multicultural public dialogue (in American Homo [California, 1998], 200), "Stoicism is necessary in public debate. No one enjoys being humiliated in public. Participation in public dialogue will not be fruitful if we do not learn to accept conflict, pain, and hurt feelings. Some of the detrimental effect of political correctness stems from the fear of being criticized or misrepresented in public. Expressions of anger and hostility should be expected." Escoffier also quoted African-American activist and singer Bernice Reagon (198): "We've pretty much come to the end of a time when you have a space that is 'yours only.'" Dialogue is the primary medium through which we can construct political coalitions and a multicultural project."

Schools are among the places where such dialogue should take place. In practice, totalistic safe space too often means that what makes the teacher uncomfortable will become unspeakable, and it is expected that the teacher will become uncomfortable very easily, as an example to students. I submit that teachers should rather be guides into new and sometimes frightening realms of ideas, showing by example that what makes us uncomfortable or even offends us will not disable us, let alone kill us, and that anything can be questioned, discussed, debated.

Recently while I was rereading Lawrence Block’s murder mystery Eight Million Ways to Die, I found this wonderful passage, set in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting:

Mary, one off the regulars at St. Paul’s, had said it. She was a birdlike woman with a tiny voice, always well dressed and well groomed and soft-spoken. I’d heard her qualify once, and evidently she’d been the next thing to a shopping-bag lady before she hit bottom. One night, speaking from the floor, she’d said, “You know, it was a revelation to me to learn that I don’t have to be comfortable. Nowhere is it written that I must be comfortable. I always thought if I felt nervous or anxious or unhappy I had to do something about it. But I learned that’s not true. Bad feelings won’t kill me. Alcohol will kill me, but my feelings won’t.”

Alas, many teachers (and others) do not believe this: they agree that what offends us will disable us, perhaps permanently. They are wrong. So let me close with this question to "safe space" advocates. If, as I've been arguing, totalistic safe space is incompatible with serious dialogue about serious issues, what do you envision as a proper place for discussion?

This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 3

Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, singling out certain students as pariahs -- all these have long been part of school culture, as of adult life. Before shootings in middle-class, predominantly white high schools became a hot media topic, a certain amount of "boys will be boys" harassment and violence was considered normal background noise in school. 'Toughening them up' was even considered desirable: "The boy in America is not being brought up to punch another boy's head, or to stand having his own punched in a healthy and proper manner. ... There is a strange and indefinable air coming over the men: a tendency towards a common ... sexless tone of thought." That was the U.S. commissioner of education, an early advocate of Boy Scouting, in 1910; quoted in Colette Dowling, The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality (Random House, 2000), p. 23. This isn’t found only among boys, either: girls are capable of emotional and physical cruelty to each other, which also has been taken for granted as part of the way things are. (See for example, Leora Tannenbaum, Slut!: Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation [Seven Stories Press, 1999]; and Emily White, Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut [Scribner, 2002].)

Since inculcating social norms is part of education, teachers and administrators are expected to voice and enforce a normal level of bigotry. The infamous teacher who dissuaded young Malcolm Little (later Malcolm X) from his professional ambitions was certainly racist, but he was also reflecting and enforcing white American norms of the 1930s. The same was true in my own pre-Title IX high school days (1965-1969), when girls who got married were expelled, whether they were pregnant or not. (Not the boys who married or impregnated them, of course.) At my high school, one married teacher had to dig in her heels to go on teaching after her pregnancy began to show -- she was pressured to go on leave even earlier, but resisted successfully. God forbid students should see a married, pregnant woman: they might want to get married and have a baby when they grew up! What was really at stake was probably the social norm that respectable middle-class white wives and mothers should not work outside the home. In my parents' schooldays, a teacher would not have been allowed to work after she married.

Social norms change, however, and schools' and teachers' practices change with them. Today's bigotry was often yesterday's norm, but the process of norm enforcement continues, generally without acknowledging that change has taken place. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Four legs good, two legs bad.

Michael Bérubé, a professor of English and the father of a son with Down Syndrome, wrote (in Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child [Pantheon, 1996], 26f):

One night I said something like this to one of the leaders of what I usually think of as the other side in the academic culture wars. ... Being a humane fellow, he replied that although epithets like "mongoloid idiot" were undoubtedly used in a more benighted time, there have always been persons of good will who have resisted such phraseology. It's a nice thought, the kind you usually hear from traditionalists when you point out the barbarism and brutality of our human past. But it ain't so. Right through the 1970s, "mongoloid idiot" wasn't an epithet; it was a diagnosis.

One of the most insidious aspects of diversity management is its erasure of the history of such change, by making it seem that bigots are just bad people who need to diversify themselves, unlike the respectable people and institutions that protect minorities' feelings. Awareness of this history might produce a becoming humility in the enforcement of today's social norms. But never mind the past. Never mind that earlier in his or her career, today's diversity manager might have expelled gay students or pregnant students or female students who simply failed to return to their locked dormitories before curfew. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. That was then, this is now. You can't change people's minds overnight. Four legs good, two legs better.

What happens, though, when a commitment to diversity and respect for other cultures clashes with other commitments, such as the protection of children against violence? Historian Lillian Faderman (feminist, lesbian, daughter of an immigrant Jewish single mother -- impeccable diversity credentials) cowrote with Ghia Xiong a book on Hmong immigrants in the United States, I begin my life all over: the Hmong and the American immigrant experience (Beacon Press, 1998). "In Laos," they noted, "for a loving parent to beat a child until he was bruised was considered an appropriate, tried-and-true method of teaching him. Hmong parents are puzzled when their American children accuse them of 'child abuse,' as they learned at school such treatment is called. They are devastated when the children threaten to report them to the authorities, as their American teachers informed them they should do if they are being abused." Faderman and Xiong seem to side completely with the parents here; and I have talked to diversity managers who seem to assume that in any conflict of norms, Old Country ways should always prevail against American cultural imperialism. (See also Susan Moller Okin et al., Is multiculturalism bad for women? (Princeton, 1999) and Vijay Prashad, Everybody was Kung Fu fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity [Beacon Press, 2001].)

Should American teachers ignore bruises on Hmong children, but not on white ones? Breaking the perverse wills of children is an explicit part of much traditional Christian teaching, carried on by James Dobson and other Christian-right gurus. Should Hmong parents be permitted to bruise their kids and still be regarded as "loving" by diversity managers, while Dobson must instruct his readers how to discipline their children without leaving visible marks?

The question of parenting came up on another occasion when I was on a GLB panel speaking to an undergraduate health class. One of the students in the class asked us whether it wasn't reasonable, if the majority in a community sincerely believed gay parents were bad for their children, to take those children away from their parents? I posed an analogy: suppose that in a primarily Episcopalian community, the majority thinks that conservative evangelical parents are bad for their children; or that in a Protestant community, the majority thought Roman Catholics made unfit parents?

The questioner and some of the other students became upset, accusing me of religious intolerance. One student tried to defend me, pointing out that I wasn't really advocating the removal of children from Christian heterosexual families, only following the questioner's logic to its conclusion; but to no avail. The instructor complained in e-mail to a colleague of mine that I was "too combative." Which I am, often, but not in this case. I don't see why undergraduates couldn't follow a simple analogy; that a graduate student couldn't do so is alarming. Perhaps, instead of trying to show the questioner the flaw in her logic, I should have adopted her tactic, becoming distraught and accusing her of religious intolerance. Maybe it would have won me more sympathy from the class and instructor (though it's just as likely I'd have been accused of playing the victim), but would it have taught them anything?

I don't have a simple answer to my questions here, but I'm not asking them rhetorically either. The kind of conflict I'm talking about here is not a new one, but "diversity" sloganeering doesn't seem to have a way to deal with it. We're told, properly enough, to be respectful of other cultures (though not of very similar traditions within our own culture); but we must also protect children against abuse (as long as abuse isn't a treasured part of their exotic traditional cultures). The pretense of impartiality that diversity advocates seek to maintain simply ignores these conflicts, which is not going to make them go away.

This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 2

A few years ago our campus GLBT group began producing and distributing Safe Zone stickers, which declared that "bigotry, harassment, and ignorance will not be tolerated" anywhere they were posted. The word "ignorant" bothered me, because everyone is ignorant, not least the people who designed the stickers. People who believe that they aren't ignorant may be among the most dangerous.

(I haven't got an image of the local Safe Zone stickers, but I've found a number from other universities around the country. I was struck that most of them promise safety explicitly -- and exclusively? -- for gay people, as though other people didn't have problems and weren't entitled to be safe too.)

The same organization sponsored a showing of If These Walls Could Talk 2, a lesbian themed made-for-TV movie. The showing took place in the campus Latino center, which was well-papered with Safe Zone stickers. The audience was about evenly divided between male and female undergraduates, almost all presumably GLB. As the video rolled, several of the young gay men in the room began groaning loudly in disgust whenever two women kissed on the TV screen, or when a bare female breast was exposed. Among these young gay men was the newly-elected president of the GLBT organization, a fervent booster of Safe Zone stickers. No one spoke up, no one intervened -- including me. At the time, I found their behavior merely childish and annoying. Only later did I realize how homophobic it was, and how incompatible with the Safe Zone in which we supposedly were sitting. In any case, it was the officers of the sponsoring organization who should have spoken up. But none did, and of course one of them was one of the offenders. Who guards the guardians? Who will protect us from our protectors? This same organization later sponsored viewings of Queer As Folk, the soft-porn cable TV series about gay men. I wonder if anyone made disgusted noises at the series' male to male kissing and exposed male skin -- and if so, if they got away with it?

Some readers might object that the people I'm discussing had no qualifications or training to create a safe space. That’s right, and that's the problem. "Safe Zone" stickers were distributed promiscuously to anyone who would accept them. To put a Safe Zone sticker on one's door is to declare oneself a person for whom enforcement isn't needed. On the night I just described, "bigotry, harassment, and ignorance" were not only tolerated, they were perpetrated by the very people who proclaimed themselves to be above such things.

Who, however, is qualified to create and maintain a safe space? Who is qualified to train others to do so? How are safe spaces enforced, and by whom? On another occasion, the GLB speakers' bureau I coordinate received a request for ... not so much a speaker as a sacrificial victim. The event was a weekend-long workshop on homophobia, sponsored by the campus gay-straight alliance. The workshop leader, a graduate student in counseling, wanted the subject to be present while the participants thought of anti-gay epithets, which would be written on slips of paper, and the slips of paper would be attached to the subject's clothing. Processing would follow. No rationale was offered for this bizarre exercise, but we were assured that it would be "facilitate[d] in a safe, caring way", in a "safe environment," and all participants were "already very sensitive and empathic." I was very uneasy about asking our volunteers to consider it; fortunately the other coordinator thought it was a great idea and offered to be the victim.

The word "doublethink" comes to mind. War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Bigotry is sensitive and empathic. Abuse is safe and caring. Given the nature of the exercise, why not use a heterosexual volunteer as the victim? Why was a gay person even needed? In the years since this request came before me, I've seen numerous announcements of programs on various hot topics, at IU or connected to it, assuring prospective participants that they will be in a "safe space", and I wonder if the term is being used in the same Orwellian sense. That's apart from the hubris involved in anyone's thinking they can deal with religious or sexual issues without offending or upsetting someone.

The core problem with totalistic safe space is that no one is capable of maintaining one. No one is so enlightened or free of prejudice as to be able to guarantee a space where no one will be offended. I'm probably better informed and more thoughtful than most of the diversity managers at my university, and for that very reason I would not presume to designate myself as an authoritative arbiter and enforcer of safety. (Indeed, I want the world to be less safe for bigotry.) Those who do so are not people I trust. Totalistic "safe zones" tend, from what I've seen, to produce complacency and self-righteousness in those who claim to know how to create them.

Diversity management professionals naturally present themselves as proponents of reason and tolerance against the superstitions of the ignorant many, but professionals don't have such a great track record. Professionals conceived and ran the Satanic Ritual Abuse witch hunt of the 1980s and 1990s; professionals think they know what proper sex roles are, and feel competent to force them on small children, even unto surgery and electroshock treatment (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Child Up Gay: the war on effeminate boys” in Tendencies [Duke, 1993]; Phyllis Burke, Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male and Female [Anchor Doubleday, 1996]). Psychiatrists and psychological professionals have embraced the belief that homosexuality is "genetic" or "biological," just at a time when the scientific evidence for that position is collapsing. More whimsically, I still recall with amusement how an education professional, my first-grade teacher, ordered me to use a red crayon to color Robin Redbreast's breast. Not knowing any better, I insisted that an orange crayon was closer to the actual color. Fortunately my mother backed me up, and I was allowed to be diverse.

From castration and sterilization of the mentally ill and retarded in the US before (and even after) World War II, to the abduction of "half-caste" children from their aboriginal families in Australia and North America, to lobotomy and electroshock, to infant genital mutilation in the US today, to the unnecessary institutionalization of children with Down Syndrome to the "war on effeminate boys", professionals have shown that they don't always know what is best for the people who are put into their care. The word "ignorant" is a popular term of derogation for those with views we dislike -- see above on the IU "Safe Zone" stickers -- but I am talking about programs conceived and implemented by educated people with advanced degrees. There is evidence, in fact, that professionals tend to be less tolerant of difference than the general population.

I'm not saying this to demonize all professionals, let alone teachers. And compared to lobotomy or electroshock, totalistic safe space is fairly tame stuff. I am saying that professionals, including teachers, should be very tentative about imposing anything on their students, no matter how innocuous or even noble it may seem. A great deal of intolerance and hostility leaks out from the paternalistic façade of safe space, and I think that's cause for concern. And simply from an educational standpoint, totalistic safe space is counterproductive. Far from teaching kids how to live in a diverse society, it will stifle diversity by refusing to acknowledge it.

Though the professionals who want to produce safe spaces generally seem to see themselves as progressive, and some of their values may be so, their approach is profoundly conservative. It fits into a familiar educational tradition which sees children as empty vessels, to be filled with knowledge by the wise. But there are other traditions. One approach, advocated by Gerald Graff among others, is "teaching the conflict." This recognizes that students are capable of reflection on issues that affect their lives -- and also that teachers not only may not have all the answers, but are not themselves impartial, outside the fray.

This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 1

Obedience in the classroom is scary.

-- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

For several years now I’ve been bothered by some institutional uses of the concept of "safe space" as a tool or goal in education -- particularly in what's called multicultural education. Lately my objections have been multiplying and crystallizing, so I think it's time to try to organize them and set them forth for others' comment, response, and critique.

I’m going to draw here, not on the educational literature on safe space, but on what has been said by people I've known and worked with, in a diversity-management context, including community education in dormitories and GLB panels addressing education majors and others. In the same spirit I will also refer to some things I've read. While I recognize the limitations of this anecdotal approach, I think it covers an aspect of my subject that deserves critical attention: "safe space" as its advocates actually practice it.

I’m not concerned here with safe space in a therapeutic situation, where it might be an appropriate tool. A classroom is not therapy, however. What works in therapy, with its particular agenda and methods, will not work in other arenas. I believe that "safe space" as a concept in education is incoherent and counterproductive, and needs to be abandoned for more constructive approaches, one of which I'll suggest here.

First I had better distinguish between different senses of "safe space": Certainly I don't think students or teachers or anyone else should be subject to harassment or physical attack, at school or anywhere else. But "safe space" is also conceived in more totalistic and encompassing terms, envisioning an environment in which nothing will be said that will offend or upset anyone, or that might conceivably offend or upset anyone. As the therapist Walt Odets wrote (In the shadow of the epidemic: being HIV-negative in the age of AIDS [Duke UP, 1995]: 274f.):

In any well-run group, safety can only mean one thing: any expression of feelings or thoughts will be received and tolerated by the group, and an attempt will be made to honestly respond to it. This will be done without physical violence or undue emotional hurt to other members, and without abandonment of the group. This essential objective is most easily accomplished in a professionally facilitated therapy group, because the group leader will have the necessary skills to mediate and limit conflict to a safe and constructive level. When the idea of safety comes to mean, as it often does in poorly constructed therapy groups and many support groups, that members be polite and "non-judgmental" toward each other, then the prime therapeutic objectives are undermined. Interpersonal interaction -- as opposed to social form -- necessarily involves feelings and judgments about others, and unless they can be expressed and discussed truthfully, the group can provide neither insight nor the meaning that comes of bearing witness....

The function of a group is not to make members "feel better when they leave than when they came in," as one poorly supervised peer facilitator has routinely billed his weekly support group for San Francisco gay men. It is the function of a therapy group, like individual psychotherapy, to help people attain the insight that allows them to make themselves feel better.

As Odets's own complaint shows, though, his idea of safe space is not the only meaning in current use. This third sense, which I shall call totalistic safe space, is my subject here.

In practice, totalistic safe space doesn't really mean that no one is to be offended or upset, since the sensibilities of conservative Christians and others on the cultural right are not only not considered sacrosanct, they are often fair game for mockery and derision by safe space advocates. Epithets like "Bible thumpers" are as routine in these circles as "faggot" is in others. Those who use these epithets often belong to what they consider kinder, gentler, more inclusive religious groups, for which they are ready to demand respect -- indeed, they want a "safe space" in which to deploy those epithets. I recall a liberal minister (and university diversity manager) saying to a class that he didn't like to think of the Christian Right as Christians, since he preferred a more "inclusive" conception of Christianity. Substitute "gay Christians" for "Christian right" in that sentence, and imagine the reaction!

As a gay man who grew up in less tolerant times, I'm naturally inclined to welcome the growing, if still very limited, acceptance of gay people into American society, along with decreasing tolerance for certain forms of anti-gay ideology. But I became wary when I realized the limits of those changes: they were accompanied by a familiar class prejudice, and a demand for conformity to standard American sex roles. Those who try to combat anti-gay bigotry by marking it as low class (or "ignorant"), are just hick-baiting, without really getting at the root problem. ("Redneck" also seems to be an acceptable epithet in genteel diversity-minded circles.)

I was, I admit, mildly shocked when a young gay teacher-to-be, with whom I was speaking on a panel, said that he would not allow "vulgar" words like "gay" in his classroom. "Gay" is not "vulgar," but the unprofessional kind of lace-curtain snobbery this student exhibited is. It has no place in any classroom, from elementary to college. Some social pressure will be necessary and should be used in my opinion, but it must be sharply focused. Bigots should be ostracized as bigots, not by calling them low-class bums. Those of us who are low class bums will take offense.

The same principle applies to race and racism. It's easy and safe to condemn what Allen Chase, in The Legacy of Malthus (Knopf, 1977), called vulgar gut racism. What he called genteel racism is not only more subtle and harder to stop, it still has considerable social acceptance. (See James Waller's excellent book Face to face: the changing state of racism in white America [Insight Books / Plenum Press, 1998], and also Jane Hill’s The everyday language of white racism [Wiley-Blackwell, 2008]).

Totalistic safe space basically imposes a contemporary version of standard white middle class decorum, which has always been a tendency of American schools; but if this oversight were corrected, the result would be a classroom where almost nothing more controversial than 2 + 2 = 4 could be uttered. If everyone's beliefs should be treated with respect, those people whose religious beliefs condemn homosexuality, women's equality, Darwinian theory, or racial equality cannot be exceptions. If someone wants to argue that such exceptions can and should be made, the criteria will have to be made clear and explicit, and I don't think this can be done. Certainly it has not been done yet. If no exceptions are allowed, then a good many educated people of class will be in trouble.

On a GLB panel speaking to a university class in multicultural education for high school teachers-to-be, we were asked about our religious backgrounds. One of the other panelists mentioned that, though raised a Christian, he had not been much exposed to "fire and brimstone, and other Old Testament doctrines." I corrected his misstatement. Eternal damnation in fire and brimstone are New Testament doctrines, a major theme of Jesus' teaching in the gospels. The Old Testament has nothing to say about Hell, and very little about the afterlife at all; to this day Judaism is little concerned with existence after the individual's death. (For comparison, an actual example of an Old Testament doctrine would be "Love your neighbor as yourself", Leviticus 19.18.)

It wasn't a trivial error. What Christians call "the Old Testament" is, in Judaism, simply "the Bible." The speaker was blaming Judaism for a Christian doctrine he found distasteful. Given his evident ignorance about the Bible, he may not have realized this; his was hardly a respectful attitude towards a minority religious faith, especially when you consider that he had his facts wrong. But then, the vilification of Judaism and ancient Mediterranean paganism is standard practice in gay Christian apologetics. I don't know if there were any Jewish students in the class we were addressing, but even if there weren't, is it only wrong to defame a religion if some of its adherents are present? Anti-gay epithets are supposed to be suppressed on the same ground: you never know when one of them might be lurking invisibly nearby.

I myself enjoy mocking the Right; but I don't pretend that doing so creates a safe space, nor that I am tolerant and accepting of everyone, according respect to all belief systems. On the contrary, I think that some belief systems deserve disrespect. The crucial difference between respecting another person's right to hold an opinion, and respecting the opinion itself, is too often blurred.

Whether or not liberal Christians approve of conservative evangelicals, they are going to have to go on living in the same communities with them. Bible thumpers are people too, and some of them have children -- who are not responsible for the lifestyle choices of their parents, and who may attend the same schools and live in the same communities as more deserving children. "Respect for me but not for thee" is a poor strategy for promoting "diversity." It also exposes certain blind spots in "safe space" advocates themselves.