Not a week passes without a new petition appearing in my inbox or Facebook feed urging solidarity with a scholar facing employer recrimination or harassment from rightwing culture warriors. (“Harassment” doesn’t get at the racist, sexist, and homophobic vitriol that victims of these campaigns endure.) The uptick in rightwing bullying many suspected would accompany a Trump presidency has come to fruition.
Certain patterns define these harassment campaigns. Republican operatives prowl social media for provocative comments, with the help of professional snitches and everyday informants (even if your posts are private, they are vulnerable to public consumption—watch your friends list closely). Those operatives then repurpose the quotes with the aim of inflaming white anxieties. The controversies almost always originate in social media, though op-ed pieces and conference programs also come in for scrutiny.
Most people survive such campaigns in the strict sense of the term—i.e., they keep their jobs or wash out of the news cycle. But consequences remain in less obvious ways. Victims get tainted with controversy and will thus find it difficult, if not impossible, to land a different job. For the untenured, contract non-renewal looms, adding tension to their state of permanent probation. At a more basic level, it’s not fun walking around campus feeling like a freak or misfit, wondering what your colleagues really think of you. Figuring out whom to trust becomes so tricky that it’s easier to just distrust everyone. Then there is the emotional fallout of being insulted and threatened; it’s not so easy to shrug off abuse, no matter how contemptuous we are of its provenance. The travails inherent to any work that requires public engagement—from sexual violence to coordinated trolling—are a pivotal but uncompensated form of labor, one that periodically demands immersion into ugly, exhausting spaces.
Rightwing media deploy a consistent narrative: white Christian men in the USA are the most oppressed species in the universe and the last line of defense against encroaching (or extant) hordes who aspire to make decent, God-fearing Americans subservient to strangers with incurable pathologies. This aspiration is visible in universities, which are overrun by seditious, bloodthirsty people of color. Even as this crowd (like some on the liberal-left) ridicules academe as inconsequential, it tacitly affirms the importance of campus as a place where ideas can be branded and legitimized. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is particularly eager to whip up animosity. He loves inviting scholars on his program, which he can snip and edit. His peers do the same thing.
I suggest ignoring these invitations. Their purpose isn’t to advance the discourse. Many scholars have a romantic belief in the utility of dialogue or a compulsion to broaden their audience, which corporate media are happy to exploit. Just know that if you turn up on Fox News, you won’t convince viewers to give up racism; rather, you’ll be offering yourself as a target of the rightwing troll machine. When a bubbly intern for some big-name cable host inquires if you’re willing to discuss that tweet or Facebook status, understand that you’re not being asked to illuminate anything; you’re being baited into a situation that has zero upside for anybody but the demagogue fixing to play hero at your expense. Some folks find the idea of being the subject of controversy exciting or glamorous. In my experience, it is neither. Martyrdom is best left to myths and legends.
We don’t need martyrs, anyway. We need networks that operate within and beyond individual campuses to ensure that alt-right agitation can be mitigated (and, ideally, destroyed) by countervailing power. However implausible this idea seems, it’s more realistic than convincing rich people to disavow their advantages through the force of charm and reason.
Liberal media present trickier challenges. In their environs, one might enjoy nice questions, but the host still monopolizes power. And access is contingent on algorithms that limit radicals either to curiosity or spectacle. In the end, there’s little advantage to chasing their audiences other than minor fame. When I had a fleeting opportunity to appear on liberal shows, I declined for both personal and professional reasons. Personally, I don’t like being confined to pithy, partisan observations, the currency of TV punditry. (I’m also very bad at concision.) Professionally, I wanted to emphasize problems that affect multitudes and was thus disinclined to pursue anything that centered me as a story—deification or demonization is another feature of the industry. I considered myself too imperfect a face of any group and, besides, I saw it as an opportunity to challenge a deeply-felt culture of individualism. It’s impossible to develop a line to corporate media without submitting to that culture. I don’t want to imply that everybody should follow the same path, but I hope to convey that in addition to misinforming people corporate media can magnify our alienation.
Engaging corporate media can be useful, but it doesn’t take much for the effort to inhibit communal well-being. It’s easy to reproduce capitalist depredations in activist spaces. Media strategies illuminate ethical commitments. Anything within the economy of self-promotion is detrimental to the collective. The prospect of revolutionary politics is daunting enough without the added burden of supporting celebrities. And if you doubt that systemic exclusions and demands for conformity govern corporate media, pay attention to all that is missing from their platforms rather than assessing what exists. The real story, as always, is told not in the presence of information, but in the absence of dissent.
As I recall, Malcolm X was particularly good at reaching through the curtain(s) to his own true audience, no matter who thought they had him at bay. I am old and saw much of this live; little may survive in the archives. It seemed to me that his first asset was perfect control of his face, which remained stonily dignified no matter how insidious the blandishment offered. He offered nothing whatever apart from his program: remain independent of Democrats, Republicans, and attention-seekers of all kinds. Raise demands and do not beg for concessions. Speak softly. Teach. Remember that, on the stage of the entire world, you are a majority; white supremacists are a tiny, tiny minority whose apparent monopoly on power can be shown, proven, to be illusory.
The power, control, and unity of belief required to project programmatic points and not individual personality features is rare. Yet some who feel they should not even try are actually better qualified to lead in this way than they imagine. I have counted you among them. Your points about all these tricksters are valid. But I’ve seen you remain immune. To count yourself out is to injure your cause. . .
Brilliant, as always.
In addition, liberal political talk shows often reward couching one’s analysis inside some pathetic attempt at clever wording. Academics of color that appear often will undoubtedly quote a popular rap song at some point. Micheal Eric Dyson is such a gross offender, my friends and I call the practice “Dysonizing.”
Thanks, sir! Yes, the industry rewards good talking with no substance.