The microaggression farce

The closest that the administration came to acknowledging the possibility that the protesters had misconstrued the classroom dynamics was a brief passage in the Race and Ethnic Relations Committee report. According to the committee, there exists no right or wrong interpretation in alleged racial incidents—just different perspectives, each equally valid: “Any incident or experience shared by a community will always generate multiple narratives, each of which has the right to be respected and validated as an experience of events. No single version of any incident is a full explanation of a complex situation, particularly one that carries the heavy weight of issues emotionally charged by historical legacies of racism, power imbalance, and systematic abuses that often go unrecognized and without articulation in our culture.” Though the committee gave no indication that it had considered, much less “validated,” a narrative about Rust’s class that discounted the claim of racism, implicit in its invocation of “issues emotionally charged by historical legacies of racism” is the hint that there may be another side to the protesters’ portrayal of Rust’s class. That’s cold comfort, though, to Rust or anyone who cares about the truth. In fact, the committee’s seemingly evenhanded gesture of epistemological inclusiveness is even more of a moral dodge than it first appears. It lets the committee sidestep its responsibility of deciding whether the racial accusation was justified; in practice, the racism charge will always trump a denial of racism. Once such a charge is launched, every campus administration will act as if it were true and will introduce a host of measures to counteract the alleged bias.

The committee concluded by congratulating itself and the school’s leadership for identifying “the racial climate challenges that emerged in the Fall Quarter and mov[ing] quickly and decisively to address them.” The authors lacked the integrity to name these “racial climate challenges” or to specify how the school addressed them, but presumably the administration did so by cordoning off the school from Rust’s dangerous presence. The report goes on to recommend the bureaucracy inflation that is every school’s default response to racial protest: in this case, a new associate dean for equity and diversity, a permanent committee on equity and diversity, diversity training for the faculty, and a beefed-up grievance process for lodging complaints of racial discrimination, among other measures lifted directly from the protesters’ petition.