Segregation Is Already Here. (Pt 2)
The second part of a conversation with Michael Jerome Wolff on the rise of racially segregated spaces on college campuses.
This is the second part of a conversation with Michael Jerome Wolff on a new form of segregation taking place at Western Washington University in Bellingham. You can read the first part, where we dove into Black Affinity Housing, Safetyism and Ego, here.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
Kimi: I immediately thought, "I don't know if it's because your last name is Wolf, but I am reminded of the story of the boy who cried wolf. And I feel like the more we encourage these sorts of programs and, by the way, from the page about the black affinity housing, it does say that there are programs that enable black students, as a group, to participate in events on campus, such as early arrival and having mixers with black faculty and stuff.
So it's not just the housing. There are also programs around this that are segregated. Do you think by fostering this environment where we're trying to keep everyone safe, that that's going to make attending to actual issues of racism, like real serious hate crimes, more difficult?
Do you think this is going to be like the story of the boy who cried wolf, where we won't be able to differentiate between actual acts of hate and just these cries of, "Oh, my ego was hurt because someone wore a Donald Trump shirt in class!"
Michael: Yeah, I would say there's probably some risk of the boy who cried wolf problem in all of this, especially on college campuses where you're not getting any type of aggressive racism at all. Like at all. I mean, I think personally that you're more likely—like if the N-word shows up, like on a chalkboard somewhere, you know, this occasionally happens—I think that's much more likely to be somebody trying to provoke a scandal rather than trying to hurt somebody using racist words.
This happened a few years ago. There's some 13 year old kid who spray painted the N-word somewhere and the campus almost closed. I mean, we almost went on lockdown because of it. And like, you know, this was like proof that, you know, white supremacy was still alive and well and that life was miserable and intolerable for anybody of color living on campus.
But I felt like, okay, here's what we're doing. We're creating a situation in which people of color are told that if they are sensible, if they are wise, they should be traumatized by the simple scene of a word. And to us as a community, if we really want to fight racism, we have to take this so seriously as to shut down all of our operations until we root out the problem.
But what does this do? What this really does, it makes any 13 year old kid extremely powerful because now that 13 year old kid who doesn't feel like he's anybody can go off the campus with a spray paint and spray the N-word somewhere and he can cause the university to spend millions of dollars trying to fix an endemic problem that may or may not actually be affecting any students on campus.
I think that's kind of what we're doing.
Kimi: [Placing that much power into easily executed gestures, is in a way] what I understand white supremacy to mean, because you're literally giving a 13 year old, like you said, that much power.
Michael: Speaking of that, I just got done—you and I both love Thomas Sowell. I fell in love with his writings—I've read a bunch of his books and one of his last ones was A Personal Odyssey. And he talks about one of his advisors, or a mentor at Howard University when he was first teaching there or when he was a student there, I can't remember.
But it was when he was young and the advice that his mentor gave him was, "Hey, don't come running back [and insist] you didn't succeed because some white people were mean to you." And what did that mean to him? Well, okay, I can't come up with excuses for why I didn't succeed in my own life, why I didn't try.
I can't say, "Oh, because white people prevented me from doing that." And I think Thomas is a great example of how, despite racism, prejudice and other sorts of barriers, you can actually accomplish what you want in life if you stand taller than that stuff.
This is going to take you much farther in life and make you much happier. Then if you embrace the idea that, let's say, seeing the N-word somewhere or hearing it spoken from the voice of a white person is going to be so traumatic that you can't study tonight. Yeah, you can't finish that paper or you can't go on that trip that you were planning.
It gives an inordinate amount of power to people who don't deserve to have paper over you like that 13 year old kid. He's just trying to make a stink. And I think we're setting ourselves up for another generation of young black students to basically embrace that idea that any symbol or any last remaining remnant of white supremacy is going to ruin their day, ruin their semester, and make life impossible for them.
This seems like a completely counterproductive thing to me. Yeah, I think you're right about the affinity spaces in terms of, you know, coming to a university where you're like one of 400 black students in a university of 15,000 people, which means that you're likely going to be the only black student in many of your classes. This is going to be a difficult thing, I think, for some kind of affinity space I think can be very healthy.
Just take a break from it all. But I think we can take that too far. The motivations aren't even necessarily designed to address potential outcomes. But instead, they are designed to sort of reflect a political logic rather than an outcomes logic, if you will.
Kimi: Yeah. And I just want to make a little statement. Neither Michael nor I are saying that using the N-word is okay. I know that always comes up for people.
Honor
Kimi: Like I said earlier on, affinity groups, I believe, should be like training wheels where we're not encouraged to stay there. We have to kind of build and become empowered. So how do you feel Western Washington University could better acknowledge, or at least honor African-Americans in a way that is empowering, in a way that builds networking in a very healthy sense?
[Because] you don't want to just act like, oh, racism doesn't exist and we shouldn't care about our students of color at all, especially African American Descendants of Slaves. I do believe there is a place to honor people who have been historically marginalized. So what is your opinion on a better way to approach racial reconciliation [that isn't segregation]?
Michael: Well, I mean, I don't know exactly. If I were to produce a set of policy recommendations, I really don't know what I would say. But I would point out some things that would probably be helpful. One is that it would be good to acknowledge that, with our attempts to fight anti-black racism in particular, and to some extent, just like the broader field of racism, one of the problems is that we pigeonhole black people into one solid, utterly fixed identity with no flexibility, no actual recognition of diversity of experience and thought and cultural expression within the black world at all.
And so what we get is, okay, if you're black, the identity you must take on is that of the victim of white supremacy, who is angry about it, and ready to fight it in an institutional way. And that's, you know, a reasonable aspect of the black community in the United States, and it's one that definitely exists. But what we see is that that's sort of the only manifestation of cultural identity that gets embraced—and now gets institutionally embraced—within our world.
For example, we just had Ibram Kendi come speak for a Martin Luther King Day at our school. He's a big, important person who discusses race in the United States. But I can't imagine that they would ever invite someone like Coleman Hughes, for example, or Glenn Loury or John McWhorter, God forbid.
What this majority white campus thinks about black people in America is, okay, we have our representative, we have Ibram Kendi, who knows what he's talking about. He's got the right idea. He's the true cultural expression of blacks in America. And we don't see anything else. So what I would recommend, probably and I don't really know how to carry this out, is to find a way to bring a greater diversity of black speaking thinkers to campus than what we personally have. We don't have that.
And I think most black students who come here get pigeonholed into this very minimal or limited identity. The option is to be Canadian/American black. Otherwise, if not, then you're some sort of self-hating black person.
Kimi: It's complicated having discussions like this. This is why I appreciate you being open to having this discussion as a professor at that university. We need to talk about this and show people that people of color do have differing opinions and diverse viewpoints.
Michael: It's absolutely important, especially to break the stereotype of black people need to be coddled. I do not believe that at all.
Kimi: In fact, I believe that is racism and that is disempowering. But yeah, it's tricky. But thank you so much for your insight, Michael. I really appreciate it.
That wraps up the second part of my conversation with Michael Jerome Wolff. If found this eye-opening, consider subscribing to The Faction for more thought-provoking pieces on culture, division, unity and identity.
I grew up in Bellingham and my former high school is about half a mile from Western. I appreciated Michael's ideas at the end, about inviting several different viewpoints to speak on campus regarding these issues. From black people themselves. Isn't that a large part of what college is for, to challenge and interact with different ideas?
I love your artwork, by the way Kimi - it's amazing how you portray personalities, attitudes and feelings with your choice of shapes and colors. And body language! Love it