The New York Times recently published a provocative op-ed “Black Tape at Harvard Law School” by Professor Randall Kennedy. The op-ed triggered a lively conversation among legal academics, including the following response by Professor Eric Miller.
I read Professor Kennedy’s op-ed and I thought it was a challenging and thought-provoking piece, much in line with his equally thought-provoking questions about respectability politics. I read both as asking difficult questions about the politics of engagement with white-dominated establishment institutions, and both pieces asking what might be most effective. I did not interpret the NYT op-ed as challenging the rights or propriety of students (or faculty) at HLS protesting the masking tape placed across professors' faces. I did take it that Professor Kennedy was suggesting that there may be different ways to respond to the incident.
Professor Kennedy appears to argue that perhaps those engaged in developing political responses to micro-aggression ought to think carefully about adopting responses that are often associated with macro-aggression—the language of trauma. It’s an interesting thought, one that has, buried within it, important questions of race-and-class privilege, and Professor Kennedy was willing to put his personal response out there to exemplify a different political language of engagement.
The question of political tactics is an important one. Part of it, for me, is whether we are still willing to have a conversation about race with folks who are (willfully?) ignorant or uninterested, or who place their priorities elsewhere (“free speech”), or if we think we’re beyond conversing.
I’m not sure how the different campus’s issues relate to each other, and to the other struggles for racial recognition, such as Black Lives Matter. Undergraduate is a lot different than graduate school, and law school is different from other types of graduate school, in terms of the types of issues that students are exploring and the ways they are exploring them. Different campuses may have different politics and different issues. At Missouri the same and Yale, students bore the brunt of—at best—administrative insensitivity, but at different levels of the administration.
At Harvard Law School, it was the faculty that was directly targeted (although arguably that sent a message to the students), and the students responded on behalf of the faculty. Are the issues different at elite private institutions (Harvard and Yale) than flagship state institutions (Missouri)? Are campus politics a proxy for national politics? Who targets, who responds, and how should they respond? Part of the university experience is seeking out and talking through challenges to our dearly held opinions, yet, still too often, those challenges are poorly executed (by faculty, administration, and students) and minorities often bear the burden of explaining or exploring that discomfort. Sometimes we’re past conversing.
The language of trauma is perhaps one way to suggest we’re beyond conversing. The language of trauma fits with the characterization of the slight as an act of aggression, and fits the role of ending discussion and asking for plain recognition that slights inflict pain and disenfranchisement from the university community. Alternatives, including forms of respectability, might seek to promote certain types of conversation. What's appropriate when the choice is not respectability politics or nothing? This is a difficult question. Sometimes one response may work better than another, even though we might wish it were otherwise. I’d hate to think that any one of us interrogating tactics or strategy, as Professor Kennedy has done, would be confused with lack of sympathy for or support of the ultimate aim of all of us, which is a campus inclusive of all.