Can We Stop this “Intolerant Left is the Intolerant Right” Nonsense — Especially When It’s Racist?

I’ve always liked Matt Taibbi’s work. I especially got hooked on his political reporting for Rolling Stone, which I found insightful, well-researched, and witty. I probably still have a few print issues of the magazine in my library, highlighted and underscored. And even though from this point on I will be taking issue with much of what he has to say in “The Left is Now the Right,” I have to admit that I agree with parts of it — namely, his calling out of a new “anti-racist” cottage industry that provides services and cover for all manner of corporate and institutional racist practices.

I’ll let him describe his main thesis: “We laughed at the Republican busybody who couldn’t joke, declared war on dirty paintings, and peered through your bedroom window. Now that person has switched sides, and nobody’s laughing… This is separate from the Democratic Party ‘moving right,’ or in the case of issues like war, financial deregulation, and surveillance, having always been in lockstep with the right. This is about a change in the personality profile of the party’s most animated, engaged followers.”

Nothing could better represent the “old” Taibbi and the “new” one. The one I read seriously tracked the centrist-right-wing drift of the Democratic Party with dismay and a sharp wit, and an abundance of carefully tested information. The “new” Taibbi is satisfied with tracking “personality” (how does one even track that?) by citing second-hand sources.

Now certainly, we are talking about two different genres of journalistic and quasi-journalistic writing. But should not mix the two — using gossipy “information” and dressing it up as fact-based reporting. Since I am a scholar of, among other things, race and ethnicity, here are the two moments in Taibbi’s “essay” that are not only sloppy and misleading, but also seem to be so due to a laxity underwritten by racism. There, I said it.

First, Taibbi mocks the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s short-lived exhibit on “Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture,” which included “the scientific method,” “rational, linear thinking,” “the nuclear family,” “children should have their own rooms,” “hard work is the key to success,” “be polite,” “written tradition,” and “self-reliance.” White food is “steak and potatoes; bland is best,” and in white justice, “intent counts.” Taibbi registers his shock: “It seems impossible that no one at one of the country’s leading educational institutions noticed this messaging is ludicrously racist, not just to white people but to everyone (what is any person of color supposed to think when he or she reads that self-reliance, politeness, and ‘linear thinking’ are white values?).”

I am sorry to break this to you, Matt, but you know who is responsible for inventing these labels? White folk. They have held up each and every one of these “values” in order to not only degrade and diminish the lives of Black people, but also the lives of people not-yet-white (I highly recommend Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White). From Kant and Hegel onwards, non-whites have been accused of not possessing rational minds (in Kant’s case, they are thus not “rational moral beings” and therefore not worthy of human rights); of being “lazy and shiftless,” of being “welfare Queens,” and “uncivil.” The assumption was that because whites were not Black, neither were they bereft of rationality, et cetera. I saved “nuclear family” and “children having their own rooms” for a reason. Especially as more immigrants came to the United States from Catholic countries, they were viewed with suspicion — they were called Papists, and anarchists. Their lifestyles, living situations, and yes, food, were all taken as signs that they could not be assimilated. Whether it be because of preference to sharing houses or apartments with their extended families and the love and support they found amongst them, or because of lack of jobs or resources to afford “one room per person,” especially in segregated and red-lined housing markets, it did not matter. Immigrants and Blacks and the poor were deemed “not White” and even not human. They lived in “squalid conditions” out of preference and an inclination toward slovenly behavior. Their food was “spicy and garlicky and indigestible.” And these kinds of racist statements are still in use. The US set up the Dillingham Commission in the early 20th century to ponder whether or not America could withstand more tides of immigration, and this sort of parsing of white vs. non-white produced much of this kind of “evidence” that then went into making the quota system.

So, Matt, we didn’t make up this shit — white-identifying people did in order to hold themselves apart and above of other human beings, keep immigrants out, keep Jim Crow laws in. And Trump’s MAGA is precisely a paean to the good ole days. Had you done one iota of research into US racial history at some point in your life, you might have known this.

And talk about not being able to take a joke? I am not sure the Museum intended this, but I must say there is something absolutely delicious about a Black Museum putting white folks on exhibit, framed as the Museum wishes. Because whether it be Indigenous peoples, Blacks, Asians, Latinx, or other peoples, we’ve all been framed by White museums without any input, at least not until very recently. What goes around comes around.

Second, regarding the “situation” at Princeton: Taibbi tells us about a group letter calling for radical changes — “Some demands seem reasonable, like requests to remedy University-wide underrepresentation among faculty members of color. Much of the rest of the letter read like someone drunk-tweeting their way through a Critical Theory seminar. Signatories asked the University to establish differing compensation levels according to race, demanding “course relief,” “summer salary,” “one additional semester of sabbatical,” and “additional human resources” for “faculty of color,” a term left undefined. That this would be grossly illegal didn’t seem to bother the 300-plus signatories of one of America’s most prestigious learning institutions.”

I very seriously doubt Taibbi read the letter carefully at all, because every single one of the “unreasonable” demands he lists is accounted for in the letter: “Anti-Black racism has a visible bearing upon Princeton’s campus makeup and its hiring practices. It is the problem that faculty of color are routinely called upon to remedy by making ourselves visible; by persuading our white colleagues to overcome bias in hiring, admission, and recruitment efforts; and by serving as mentors and support networks for junior faculty and students seeking to thrive in an environment where they are not prioritized. Indifference to the effects of racism on this campus has allowed legitimate demands for institutional support and redress in the face of micro-aggression and outright racist incidents to go long unmet.” To which the signatories demand: “Reward the invisible work done by faculty of color with course relief and summer salary. As of the fall of the 2019–20 academic year, faculty of color make up only 7% of the laddered faculty, according to figures provided by the Office of Institutional Research, but they are routinely called upon to exert influence in hiring committees and to stand as emblems and spokespersons of diversity at Princeton. Being required to chiefly and constantly ‘serve’ and ‘represent’ in the interest of administrative goals robs the imagination and interrupts any possibility of concerted thought. Faculty of color hired at the junior level should be guaranteed one additional semester of sabbatical on top of the one-in-six provision (and on top of any leave awarded through University or Bicentennial Preceptorships).”

For those who do not work at universities and colleges, allow me to break this down for you from a very personal point of view. I have taught at Stanford for more than 30 years. I was one of two faculty hired to teach Asian American studies, as well as other specialties of mine. Since being promoted I have also served on dozens of Stanford committees and been an “outside expert” for other institutions. Here’s what the Princeton letter is referring to:

If one is lucky to be hired into a tenure-track position, one is first told to keep one’s head down and write books and articles, and teach. That’s it. But if one is a minority or a woman, and especially if one is a minority woman, one is instantly asked to “informally” serve on one, then two, then three or more committees (other untenured faculty are “protected” from having to serve on committees until they have received tenure). Why are faculty of color and women exceptions? Because the university needs “diverse” faces to front for it. In the worst cases it involves cleaning up the University’s horrible messes for it, by attesting that the University means well, is working on these issues, etc.. But unlike the “anti-racist” consultants who come in and do nothing, these faculty do something and get paid nothing. We are also called on by any number of student groups, alumni associations, to speak to them. Most difficult to turn down are students who are hungry to speak to someone who cares about race and ethnicity and can identify with the horrible alienation that takes place on campus and in the classroom. Many of us went into teaching precisely to work with these students — many of us see a bit of our younger selves in them.

The alternative is to stick to our mission to get tenure, to make an impact on the field, and this too is something we relish. So what do many of us do? We do both, and feel poorly about ourselves because we feel we are not doing enough in either respect. That the University has so few of us means the burden is shared amongst a handful of people doing double-work for single pay, and we are also most in peril because our scholarship is often in fields that the University doesn’t care about and even views with suspicion. So we have to make it fit both conventional disciplinary standards and break new ground that is often seen as “uncivil.”

The Princeton faculty speak for hundreds if not more faculty at other institutions, rich and poor, where we are drawn into unpaid labor — labor that no one else can do or wants to do. If you want to decry “illegality” then this is what you should be focused on, and not on those who seek redress. The university benefits by this work — in many, many ways. This is pure exploitation of a certain and particular class of people. And that’s cool with you, Matt?

And this kind of unpaid labor also takes the form of me pausing in writing my own book and teaching my summer class to write a response to you, Matt. I and many of my colleagues are frankly tired of having to make up for other people’s laziness, and readiness to parrot stupidities about “intolerance” to people who had to work their way up to being “tolerated” by the likes of you. Color me disappointed.