I somehow missed this when it was published nearly two weeks ago. Vincent Lloyd is an associate professor at Villanova who has written a number of books including some on anti-blackness and prison abolition. To say he’s a progressive would be putting it very mildly. But this month he wrote a description of an experience he had last year. It’s titled “A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell.”

In 2014, professor Lloyd taught a summer seminar titled “Race and the Limits of Law” for a small group of select high school students. The seminar was funded by the Telluride Association which not only paid for the six week seminar but paid for the travel and expenses of the students who were accepted and agreed to attend. Here’s how he described that experience:

Students came with extraordinary abilities; they asked probing questions; and they were sometimes awkward. Then, as the six weeks went by, I could see the students forming bonds with each other and with me, and I could see their commitment to the course. They always showed up on time. They always did the work. My daughter turned 1 during the seminar, and not knowing anyone in town, we had the students over to the house we were staying at for her birthday party.

Because he had such a good experience, professor Lloyd contacted the Telluride Association a few years later and asked about doing it again. That second seminar was held in 2022 but it was not at all like the first one. The main difference was the addition of afternoon workshops led by a recent college graduate.

…in the 2022 community, afternoons and evenings would no longer be spent having fun and doing homework. Two college-age students called “factotums” (led by one I will call “Keisha”) were assigned to create anti-racism workshops to fill the afternoons. There were workshops on white supremacy, on privilege, on African independence movements, on the thought and activism of Angela Davis, and more, all of which followed an initial, day-long workshop on “transformative justice.”…

From the initial “transformative-justice” workshop, students learned to snap their fingers when they agreed with what a classmate was saying. This practice immediately entered the seminar and was weaponized. One student would try out a controversial (or just unusual) view. Silence. Then another student would repeat a piece of anti-racist dogma, and the room would be filled with the click-clack of snapping fingers…

In their “transformative-justice” workshop, my students learned to name “harms.” This language, and the framework it expresses, come out of the prison-abolition movement. Instead of matching crimes with punishments, abolitionists encourage us to think about harms and how they can be made right, often through inviting a broader community to discern the impact of harms, the reasons they came about, and paths forward. In the language of the anti-racism workshop, a harm becomes anything that makes you feel not quite right. For a 17-year-old at a highly selective, all-expenses-paid summer program, newly empowered with the language of harm, there are relatively few sites at which to use this framework. My seminar became the site at which to try out—and weaponize—this language.

During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy…

In a recent book, John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. It was an idea I quickly dismissed. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult.

The leader of that cult was Keisha, the person hired by the Telluride Association to act as professor Lloyd’s teaching assistant. She never did that. Instead she used her position leading the afternoon workshops to undermine his efforts. The fourth week of the six-week seminar was focused on “anti-blackness” and that’s where the seminar came to a stop. Professor Lloyd had invited his students over to his home where the seminar would be held in his backyard followed by lunch. But Keisha demanded that professor Lloyd start with a lecture which he eventually agreed to do but after a couple hours he pointed out that everything he’d said in the lecture would have eventually been worked into the discussion format of the seminar. Keisha didn’t like that.

To use the idiom du jour, my comment was triggering to Keisha. She launched into a long speech about how I was ignoring the demands of a black woman, and how I had made the space unsafe for black students. She then announced that she would take the students back to their house without eating the lunch I had waiting for them…

Late Sunday night, I was informed the students were too exhausted to have class on Monday. Tuesday morning, no one was in the seminar room. I waited 10 minutes, and Keisha entered. She said the students had something to say to me. Ten more minutes of waiting in silence. Then all nine remaining students entered, each carrying a piece of paper. One by one they read a paragraph. Out of their mouths came everything Keisha had said to me during the “urgent” meetings she had with me after classes when students had allegedly been harmed. The students had all of the dogma of anti-racism, but no actual racism to call out in their world, and Keisha had channeled all of the students’ desire to combat racism at me.

Professor Lloyd told the Telluride Association what was happening but they refused to get involved. So he sent an email to everyone offering to act as a guest speaker rather than a seminar leader. He said he would react and respond to any book they presented to him. But he never heard anything from Keisha or the nine remaining students (One student had been forced to leave because of a visa problem and two Asian students were kicked out by Keisha and the other nine for some kind of wrong-think). To this day professor Lloyd doesn’t know if they continued attending Keisha’s meetings for the final two weeks or if they just went home early.

The whole piece is worth reading if you have time. Lloyd is good writer and he conveys his own shock at becoming the target of woke high school kids looking for an enemy. It’s a bit discouraging to imagine people like Keisha gradually taking over every college and high school. If someone who is, for the most part on their side with regard to the underlying issues, gets treated this badly, you can imagine how the rest of us will be regarded.