This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 4

I once heard a gay minister snidely dismiss freedom of speech issues in the classroom. This gives him common ground with many of his opponents, who would gladly keep him and other GLBT people out of even college classrooms, let alone secondary or primary schools. This same minister was among the IU staff, students and faculty who agitated against the First Amendment in September 2003, demanding that the University censor a faculty member's antigay web log. Some of them jeered at the First Amendment and the Constitution in general, dismissing them as a piece of paper for the benefit of rich white men only. Not long after, of course, many of these same cultured despisers of the Constitution were outraged that George W. Bush wanted to change the sacred Constitution to forbid recognition of same-sex marriage.

Freedom of speech in the classroom is a sticky issue. I don't think any court would invoke the First Amendment to support a student who disrupted a class by launching into a one hour sermon complete with scriptural references. The Christian Right, for its part, only supports student freedom and activism by its own children against competing sects or secularists; in general they prefer students to be silent and passive.

Preventing a kid from harassing another kid for whatever reason in the classroom, the hallways or school grounds is not an infringement of the harasser's First Amendment rights. Some bigots might argue informally that it is (like a jaywalker who defends himself by arguing, "It's a free country!"), but I don't believe such arguments would or should stand in any court. However, students' rights are already limited enough without trying to stifle them further.

I understand that where a teacher can't (for political or other reasons) make a teachable moment out of a bigoted remark, squelching certain terms in class may be the only available course. This does not make a safe space, though, and there should be no pretense that it does. It's a stopgap, a papering over that may be unavoidable, but it isn't education. Nor does it prepare students for life in a pluralistic society.

Rather than "safe space," we need to build institutions for teaching self-defense, to help children and adults deal with difference and disagreement, even offense, without panicking; but also to defend themselves against bigotry. More positively, we need to encourage everyone to know why they hold the beliefs they do, a kind of knowledge that requires understanding of opposing beliefs. We also need structures for conflict engagement -- horizontally (person to person) rather than vertically (authority to perpetrator). Teachers would function here as referees, monitoring procedures and preventing verbal disputes from turning into violence, rather than as coaches who are trying to produce a given outcome. I realize that my proposal won't go over very well with diversity managers and other professionals, because it will ultimately teach students to defend themselves against their teachers -- and their parents. I intend it to do so.

Some gay men in an Internet chat room I frequent argued against my self-defense approach. They said that teaching everyone self-defense would just produce better-equipped bullies. These guys were mainly concerned to rationalize a do-nothing attitude, but they did stumble on a valid point, which is that bigotry is a moving target. If we try to change the school environment, the children (and their parents, and teachers and administration) will not be molded passively like clay. They will respond creatively, unpredictably, to try to prevent changes in their accustomed environment. Whatever intervention we design had better include provisions for spotting and reacting to creative, unpredictable counter-moves. I believe that a self-defense approach, based as it is on dialogue -- which means listening seriously to the other sides -- leaves room for such a response, and makes it possible.

Frustrating though it is, this same resistance to indoctrination is one of the things that makes change possible. Because some people refused social indoctrination about race, class, sex roles and sexuality, change has happened in American society -- change for the better, in my opinion, though not everyone agrees with me.

Any program which fails to take resistance into account is not only doomed to failure, but wrong-headed. One of many things I like about Speakers Bureau is that we have no real authority. We can't tell people what to think, we aren't there to enforce anything. We're there to make more talk; not less speech, but more speech.

Let me try to make one thing clear: I am not saying that minority kids need to develop thicker skins, as some apologists for bigotry have been known to suggest. I think everyone needs to develop thicker skins, including bigots as well as, well, liberals. In a much-anthologized article, self-styled free-speech champion Nat Hentoff attacked "PC" and "speech codes" because "liberal students and those who can be called politically moderate ... no longer get involved in class discussions where their views would go against the grain of PC righteousness" -- that is, where someone might disagree with them too vehemently ("'Speech Codes' on the Campus and Problems of Free Speech", Dissent, Fall 1991; reprinted in Patricia Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding [Graywolf Press, 1992], 52). Hentoff quoted a cartoonist who got "hisses from the audience" for criticizing "PC" at a "free speech forum" at Brown University. Liberal white and black faculty are reluctant to oppose "PC" publicly, Hentoff claimed, because "they want to be liked -- or at least not too disliked" (53). Minority students, Hentoff argued, should fight hostility with "more speech," rather than being intimidated. If they do so, however, people like Hentoff attack them for "PC righteousness" and intimidating liberals and moderates; the contradiction looks pretty blatant to me. "Liberals" and "moderates" (two groups which Hentoff apparently thinks contain no minorities!), however, should not be exposed to unkind words or criticism, nor need they meet them with "more speech"; they -- but not blacks, gays, or women – can simply play the victim. (Hentoff’s complaint is really quite funny in its way, for it’s just the people he considers “liberal … and those who can be called politically moderate” who are denounced by the Right as the enforcers of “PC righteousness.”)

There is -- how shall I put this? -- a passive-aggressive element in this liberal and moderate withdrawal from discussion, a refusal to face the undeniably unpleasant anger of minorities: if they can't ask for their rights nicely, we won't listen to them. The African-American lesbian poet and feminist Audre Lorde was sharply critical of white feminists who want "to deal with racism without dealing with the harshness of Black women." (Sister Outsider [Firebrand,1984], 126)

As gay scholar Jeffrey Escoffier wrote in a valuable essay on multicultural public dialogue (in American Homo [California, 1998], 200), "Stoicism is necessary in public debate. No one enjoys being humiliated in public. Participation in public dialogue will not be fruitful if we do not learn to accept conflict, pain, and hurt feelings. Some of the detrimental effect of political correctness stems from the fear of being criticized or misrepresented in public. Expressions of anger and hostility should be expected." Escoffier also quoted African-American activist and singer Bernice Reagon (198): "We've pretty much come to the end of a time when you have a space that is 'yours only.'" Dialogue is the primary medium through which we can construct political coalitions and a multicultural project."

Schools are among the places where such dialogue should take place. In practice, totalistic safe space too often means that what makes the teacher uncomfortable will become unspeakable, and it is expected that the teacher will become uncomfortable very easily, as an example to students. I submit that teachers should rather be guides into new and sometimes frightening realms of ideas, showing by example that what makes us uncomfortable or even offends us will not disable us, let alone kill us, and that anything can be questioned, discussed, debated.

Recently while I was rereading Lawrence Block’s murder mystery Eight Million Ways to Die, I found this wonderful passage, set in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting:

Mary, one off the regulars at St. Paul’s, had said it. She was a birdlike woman with a tiny voice, always well dressed and well groomed and soft-spoken. I’d heard her qualify once, and evidently she’d been the next thing to a shopping-bag lady before she hit bottom. One night, speaking from the floor, she’d said, “You know, it was a revelation to me to learn that I don’t have to be comfortable. Nowhere is it written that I must be comfortable. I always thought if I felt nervous or anxious or unhappy I had to do something about it. But I learned that’s not true. Bad feelings won’t kill me. Alcohol will kill me, but my feelings won’t.”

Alas, many teachers (and others) do not believe this: they agree that what offends us will disable us, perhaps permanently. They are wrong. So let me close with this question to "safe space" advocates. If, as I've been arguing, totalistic safe space is incompatible with serious dialogue about serious issues, what do you envision as a proper place for discussion?

This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 4

I once heard a gay minister snidely dismiss freedom of speech issues in the classroom. This gives him common ground with many of his opponents, who would gladly keep him and other GLBT people out of even college classrooms, let alone secondary or primary schools. This same minister was among the IU staff, students and faculty who agitated against the First Amendment in September 2003, demanding that the University censor a faculty member's antigay web log. Some of them jeered at the First Amendment and the Constitution in general, dismissing them as a piece of paper for the benefit of rich white men only. Not long after, of course, many of these same cultured despisers of the Constitution were outraged that George W. Bush wanted to change the sacred Constitution to forbid recognition of same-sex marriage.

Freedom of speech in the classroom is a sticky issue. I don't think any court would invoke the First Amendment to support a student who disrupted a class by launching into a one hour sermon complete with scriptural references. The Christian Right, for its part, only supports student freedom and activism by its own children against competing sects or secularists; in general they prefer students to be silent and passive.

Preventing a kid from harassing another kid for whatever reason in the classroom, the hallways or school grounds is not an infringement of the harasser's First Amendment rights. Some bigots might argue informally that it is (like a jaywalker who defends himself by arguing, "It's a free country!"), but I don't believe such arguments would or should stand in any court. However, students' rights are already limited enough without trying to stifle them further.

I understand that where a teacher can't (for political or other reasons) make a teachable moment out of a bigoted remark, squelching certain terms in class may be the only available course. This does not make a safe space, though, and there should be no pretense that it does. It's a stopgap, a papering over that may be unavoidable, but it isn't education. Nor does it prepare students for life in a pluralistic society.

Rather than "safe space," we need to build institutions for teaching self-defense, to help children and adults deal with difference and disagreement, even offense, without panicking; but also to defend themselves against bigotry. More positively, we need to encourage everyone to know why they hold the beliefs they do, a kind of knowledge that requires understanding of opposing beliefs. We also need structures for conflict engagement -- horizontally (person to person) rather than vertically (authority to perpetrator). Teachers would function here as referees, monitoring procedures and preventing verbal disputes from turning into violence, rather than as coaches who are trying to produce a given outcome. I realize that my proposal won't go over very well with diversity managers and other professionals, because it will ultimately teach students to defend themselves against their teachers -- and their parents. I intend it to do so.

Some gay men in an Internet chat room I frequent argued against my self-defense approach. They said that teaching everyone self-defense would just produce better-equipped bullies. These guys were mainly concerned to rationalize a do-nothing attitude, but they did stumble on a valid point, which is that bigotry is a moving target. If we try to change the school environment, the children (and their parents, and teachers and administration) will not be molded passively like clay. They will respond creatively, unpredictably, to try to prevent changes in their accustomed environment. Whatever intervention we design had better include provisions for spotting and reacting to creative, unpredictable counter-moves. I believe that a self-defense approach, based as it is on dialogue -- which means listening seriously to the other sides -- leaves room for such a response, and makes it possible.

Frustrating though it is, this same resistance to indoctrination is one of the things that makes change possible. Because some people refused social indoctrination about race, class, sex roles and sexuality, change has happened in American society -- change for the better, in my opinion, though not everyone agrees with me.

Any program which fails to take resistance into account is not only doomed to failure, but wrong-headed. One of many things I like about Speakers Bureau is that we have no real authority. We can't tell people what to think, we aren't there to enforce anything. We're there to make more talk; not less speech, but more speech.

Let me try to make one thing clear: I am not saying that minority kids need to develop thicker skins, as some apologists for bigotry have been known to suggest. I think everyone needs to develop thicker skins, including bigots as well as, well, liberals. In a much-anthologized article, self-styled free-speech champion Nat Hentoff attacked "PC" and "speech codes" because "liberal students and those who can be called politically moderate ... no longer get involved in class discussions where their views would go against the grain of PC righteousness" -- that is, where someone might disagree with them too vehemently ("'Speech Codes' on the Campus and Problems of Free Speech", Dissent, Fall 1991; reprinted in Patricia Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding [Graywolf Press, 1992], 52). Hentoff quoted a cartoonist who got "hisses from the audience" for criticizing "PC" at a "free speech forum" at Brown University. Liberal white and black faculty are reluctant to oppose "PC" publicly, Hentoff claimed, because "they want to be liked -- or at least not too disliked" (53). Minority students, Hentoff argued, should fight hostility with "more speech," rather than being intimidated. If they do so, however, people like Hentoff attack them for "PC righteousness" and intimidating liberals and moderates; the contradiction looks pretty blatant to me. "Liberals" and "moderates" (two groups which Hentoff apparently thinks contain no minorities!), however, should not be exposed to unkind words or criticism, nor need they meet them with "more speech"; they -- but not blacks, gays, or women – can simply play the victim. (Hentoff’s complaint is really quite funny in its way, for it’s just the people he considers “liberal … and those who can be called politically moderate” who are denounced by the Right as the enforcers of “PC righteousness.”)

There is -- how shall I put this? -- a passive-aggressive element in this liberal and moderate withdrawal from discussion, a refusal to face the undeniably unpleasant anger of minorities: if they can't ask for their rights nicely, we won't listen to them. The African-American lesbian poet and feminist Audre Lorde was sharply critical of white feminists who want "to deal with racism without dealing with the harshness of Black women." (Sister Outsider [Firebrand,1984], 126)

As gay scholar Jeffrey Escoffier wrote in a valuable essay on multicultural public dialogue (in American Homo [California, 1998], 200), "Stoicism is necessary in public debate. No one enjoys being humiliated in public. Participation in public dialogue will not be fruitful if we do not learn to accept conflict, pain, and hurt feelings. Some of the detrimental effect of political correctness stems from the fear of being criticized or misrepresented in public. Expressions of anger and hostility should be expected." Escoffier also quoted African-American activist and singer Bernice Reagon (198): "We've pretty much come to the end of a time when you have a space that is 'yours only.'" Dialogue is the primary medium through which we can construct political coalitions and a multicultural project."

Schools are among the places where such dialogue should take place. In practice, totalistic safe space too often means that what makes the teacher uncomfortable will become unspeakable, and it is expected that the teacher will become uncomfortable very easily, as an example to students. I submit that teachers should rather be guides into new and sometimes frightening realms of ideas, showing by example that what makes us uncomfortable or even offends us will not disable us, let alone kill us, and that anything can be questioned, discussed, debated.

Recently while I was rereading Lawrence Block’s murder mystery Eight Million Ways to Die, I found this wonderful passage, set in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting:

Mary, one off the regulars at St. Paul’s, had said it. She was a birdlike woman with a tiny voice, always well dressed and well groomed and soft-spoken. I’d heard her qualify once, and evidently she’d been the next thing to a shopping-bag lady before she hit bottom. One night, speaking from the floor, she’d said, “You know, it was a revelation to me to learn that I don’t have to be comfortable. Nowhere is it written that I must be comfortable. I always thought if I felt nervous or anxious or unhappy I had to do something about it. But I learned that’s not true. Bad feelings won’t kill me. Alcohol will kill me, but my feelings won’t.”

Alas, many teachers (and others) do not believe this: they agree that what offends us will disable us, perhaps permanently. They are wrong. So let me close with this question to "safe space" advocates. If, as I've been arguing, totalistic safe space is incompatible with serious dialogue about serious issues, what do you envision as a proper place for discussion?

This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 3

Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, singling out certain students as pariahs -- all these have long been part of school culture, as of adult life. Before shootings in middle-class, predominantly white high schools became a hot media topic, a certain amount of "boys will be boys" harassment and violence was considered normal background noise in school. 'Toughening them up' was even considered desirable: "The boy in America is not being brought up to punch another boy's head, or to stand having his own punched in a healthy and proper manner. ... There is a strange and indefinable air coming over the men: a tendency towards a common ... sexless tone of thought." That was the U.S. commissioner of education, an early advocate of Boy Scouting, in 1910; quoted in Colette Dowling, The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality (Random House, 2000), p. 23. This isn’t found only among boys, either: girls are capable of emotional and physical cruelty to each other, which also has been taken for granted as part of the way things are. (See for example, Leora Tannenbaum, Slut!: Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation [Seven Stories Press, 1999]; and Emily White, Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut [Scribner, 2002].)

Since inculcating social norms is part of education, teachers and administrators are expected to voice and enforce a normal level of bigotry. The infamous teacher who dissuaded young Malcolm Little (later Malcolm X) from his professional ambitions was certainly racist, but he was also reflecting and enforcing white American norms of the 1930s. The same was true in my own pre-Title IX high school days (1965-1969), when girls who got married were expelled, whether they were pregnant or not. (Not the boys who married or impregnated them, of course.) At my high school, one married teacher had to dig in her heels to go on teaching after her pregnancy began to show -- she was pressured to go on leave even earlier, but resisted successfully. God forbid students should see a married, pregnant woman: they might want to get married and have a baby when they grew up! What was really at stake was probably the social norm that respectable middle-class white wives and mothers should not work outside the home. In my parents' schooldays, a teacher would not have been allowed to work after she married.

Social norms change, however, and schools' and teachers' practices change with them. Today's bigotry was often yesterday's norm, but the process of norm enforcement continues, generally without acknowledging that change has taken place. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Four legs good, two legs better.

Michael Bérubé, a professor of English and the father of a son with Down Syndrome, wrote (in Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child [Pantheon, 1996], 26f):

One night I said something like this to one of the leaders of what I usually think of as the other side in the academic culture wars. ... Being a humane fellow, he replied that although epithets like "mongoloid idiot" were undoubtedly used in a more benighted time, there have always been persons of good will who have resisted such phraseology. It's a nice thought, the kind you usually hear from traditionalists when you point out the barbarism and brutality of our human past. But it ain't so. Right through the 1970s, "mongoloid idiot" wasn't an epithet; it was a diagnosis.

One of the most insidious aspects of diversity management is its erasure of the history of such change, by making it seem that bigots are just bad people who need to diversify themselves, unlike the respectable people and institutions that protect minorities' feelings. Awareness of this history might produce a becoming humility in the enforcement of today's social norms. But never mind the past. Never mind that earlier in his or her career, today's diversity manager might have expelled gay students or pregnant students or female students who simply failed to return to their locked dormitories before curfew. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. That was then, this is now. You can't change people's minds overnight. Four legs good, two legs better.

What happens, though, when a commitment to diversity and respect for other cultures clashes with other commitments, such as the protection of children against violence? Historian Lillian Faderman (feminist, lesbian, daughter of an immigrant Jewish single mother -- impeccable diversity credentials) cowrote with Ghia Xiong a book on Hmong immigrants in the United States, I begin my life all over: the Hmong and the American immigrant experience (Beacon Press, 1998). "In Laos," they noted, "for a loving parent to beat a child until he was bruised was considered an appropriate, tried-and-true method of teaching him. Hmong parents are puzzled when their American children accuse them of 'child abuse,' as they learned at school such treatment is called. They are devastated when the children threaten to report them to the authorities, as their American teachers informed them they should do if they are being abused." Faderman and Xiong seem to side completely with the parents here; and I have talked to diversity managers who seem to assume that in any conflict of norms, Old Country ways should always prevail against American cultural imperialism. (See also Susan Moller Okin et al., Is multiculturalism bad for women? (Princeton, 1999) and Vijay Prashad, Everybody was Kung Fu fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity [Beacon Press, 2001].)

Should American teachers ignore bruises on Hmong children, but not on white ones? Breaking the perverse wills of children is an explicit part of much traditional Christian teaching, carried on by James Dobson and other Christian-right gurus. Should Hmong parents be permitted to bruise their kids and still be regarded as "loving" by diversity managers, while Dobson must instruct his readers how to discipline their children without leaving visible marks?

The question of parenting came up on another occasion when I was on a GLB panel speaking to an undergraduate health class. One of the students in the class asked us whether it wasn't reasonable, if the majority in a community sincerely believed gay parents were bad for their children, to take those children away from their parents? I posed an analogy: suppose that in a primarily Episcopalian community, the majority thinks that conservative evangelical parents are bad for their children; or that in a Protestant community, the majority thought Roman Catholics made unfit parents?

The questioner and some of the other students became upset, accusing me of religious intolerance. One student tried to defend me, pointing out that I wasn't really advocating the removal of children from Christian heterosexual families, only following the questioner's logic to its conclusion; but to no avail. The instructor complained in e-mail to a colleague of mine that I was "too combative." Which I am, often, but not in this case. I don't see why undergraduates couldn't follow a simple analogy; that a graduate student couldn't do so is alarming. Perhaps, instead of trying to show the questioner the flaw in her logic, I should have adopted her tactic, becoming distraught and accusing her of religious intolerance. Maybe it would have won me more sympathy from the class and instructor (though it's just as likely I'd have been accused of playing the victim), but would it have taught them anything?

I don't have a simple answer to my questions here, but I'm not asking them rhetorically either. The kind of conflict I'm talking about here is not a new one, but "diversity" sloganeering doesn't seem to have a way to deal with it. We're told, properly enough, to be respectful of other cultures (though not of very similar traditions within our own culture); but we must also protect children against abuse (as long as abuse isn't a treasured part of their exotic traditional cultures). The pretense of impartiality that diversity advocates seek to maintain simply ignores these conflicts, which is not going to make them go away.

This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 3

Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, singling out certain students as pariahs -- all these have long been part of school culture, as of adult life. Before shootings in middle-class, predominantly white high schools became a hot media topic, a certain amount of "boys will be boys" harassment and violence was considered normal background noise in school. 'Toughening them up' was even considered desirable: "The boy in America is not being brought up to punch another boy's head, or to stand having his own punched in a healthy and proper manner. ... There is a strange and indefinable air coming over the men: a tendency towards a common ... sexless tone of thought." That was the U.S. commissioner of education, an early advocate of Boy Scouting, in 1910; quoted in Colette Dowling, The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality (Random House, 2000), p. 23. This isn’t found only among boys, either: girls are capable of emotional and physical cruelty to each other, which also has been taken for granted as part of the way things are. (See for example, Leora Tannenbaum, Slut!: Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation [Seven Stories Press, 1999]; and Emily White, Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut [Scribner, 2002].)

Since inculcating social norms is part of education, teachers and administrators are expected to voice and enforce a normal level of bigotry. The infamous teacher who dissuaded young Malcolm Little (later Malcolm X) from his professional ambitions was certainly racist, but he was also reflecting and enforcing white American norms of the 1930s. The same was true in my own pre-Title IX high school days (1965-1969), when girls who got married were expelled, whether they were pregnant or not. (Not the boys who married or impregnated them, of course.) At my high school, one married teacher had to dig in her heels to go on teaching after her pregnancy began to show -- she was pressured to go on leave even earlier, but resisted successfully. God forbid students should see a married, pregnant woman: they might want to get married and have a baby when they grew up! What was really at stake was probably the social norm that respectable middle-class white wives and mothers should not work outside the home. In my parents' schooldays, a teacher would not have been allowed to work after she married.

Social norms change, however, and schools' and teachers' practices change with them. Today's bigotry was often yesterday's norm, but the process of norm enforcement continues, generally without acknowledging that change has taken place. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Four legs good, two legs better.

Michael Bérubé, a professor of English and the father of a son with Down Syndrome, wrote (in Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child [Pantheon, 1996], 26f):

One night I said something like this to one of the leaders of what I usually think of as the other side in the academic culture wars. ... Being a humane fellow, he replied that although epithets like "mongoloid idiot" were undoubtedly used in a more benighted time, there have always been persons of good will who have resisted such phraseology. It's a nice thought, the kind you usually hear from traditionalists when you point out the barbarism and brutality of our human past. But it ain't so. Right through the 1970s, "mongoloid idiot" wasn't an epithet; it was a diagnosis.

One of the most insidious aspects of diversity management is its erasure of the history of such change, by making it seem that bigots are just bad people who need to diversify themselves, unlike the respectable people and institutions that protect minorities' feelings. Awareness of this history might produce a becoming humility in the enforcement of today's social norms. But never mind the past. Never mind that earlier in his or her career, today's diversity manager might have expelled gay students or pregnant students or female students who simply failed to return to their locked dormitories before curfew. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. That was then, this is now. You can't change people's minds overnight. Four legs good, two legs better.

What happens, though, when a commitment to diversity and respect for other cultures clashes with other commitments, such as the protection of children against violence? Historian Lillian Faderman (feminist, lesbian, daughter of an immigrant Jewish single mother -- impeccable diversity credentials) cowrote with Ghia Xiong a book on Hmong immigrants in the United States, I begin my life all over: the Hmong and the American immigrant experience (Beacon Press, 1998). "In Laos," they noted, "for a loving parent to beat a child until he was bruised was considered an appropriate, tried-and-true method of teaching him. Hmong parents are puzzled when their American children accuse them of 'child abuse,' as they learned at school such treatment is called. They are devastated when the children threaten to report them to the authorities, as their American teachers informed them they should do if they are being abused." Faderman and Xiong seem to side completely with the parents here; and I have talked to diversity managers who seem to assume that in any conflict of norms, Old Country ways should always prevail against American cultural imperialism. (See also Susan Moller Okin et al., Is multiculturalism bad for women? (Princeton, 1999) and Vijay Prashad, Everybody was Kung Fu fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity [Beacon Press, 2001].)

Should American teachers ignore bruises on Hmong children, but not on white ones? Breaking the perverse wills of children is an explicit part of much traditional Christian teaching, carried on by James Dobson and other Christian-right gurus. Should Hmong parents be permitted to bruise their kids and still be regarded as "loving" by diversity managers, while Dobson must instruct his readers how to discipline their children without leaving visible marks?

The question of parenting came up on another occasion when I was on a GLB panel speaking to an undergraduate health class. One of the students in the class asked us whether it wasn't reasonable, if the majority in a community sincerely believed gay parents were bad for their children, to take those children away from their parents? I posed an analogy: suppose that in a primarily Episcopalian community, the majority thinks that conservative evangelical parents are bad for their children; or that in a Protestant community, the majority thought Roman Catholics made unfit parents?

The questioner and some of the other students became upset, accusing me of religious intolerance. One student tried to defend me, pointing out that I wasn't really advocating the removal of children from Christian heterosexual families, only following the questioner's logic to its conclusion; but to no avail. The instructor complained in e-mail to a colleague of mine that I was "too combative." Which I am, often, but not in this case. I don't see why undergraduates couldn't follow a simple analogy; that a graduate student couldn't do so is alarming. Perhaps, instead of trying to show the questioner the flaw in her logic, I should have adopted her tactic, becoming distraught and accusing her of religious intolerance. Maybe it would have won me more sympathy from the class and instructor (though it's just as likely I'd have been accused of playing the victim), but would it have taught them anything?

I don't have a simple answer to my questions here, but I'm not asking them rhetorically either. The kind of conflict I'm talking about here is not a new one, but "diversity" sloganeering doesn't seem to have a way to deal with it. We're told, properly enough, to be respectful of other cultures (though not of very similar traditions within our own culture); but we must also protect children against abuse (as long as abuse isn't a treasured part of their exotic traditional cultures). The pretense of impartiality that diversity advocates seek to maintain simply ignores these conflicts, which is not going to make them go away.

This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 2

A few years ago our campus GLBT group began producing and distributing Safe Zone stickers, which declared that "bigotry, harassment, and ignorance will not be tolerated" anywhere they were posted. The word "ignorant" bothered me, because everyone is ignorant, not least the people who designed the stickers. People who believe that they aren't ignorant may be among the most dangerous.

(I haven't got an image of the local Safe Zone stickers, but I've found a number from other universities around the country. I was struck that most of them promise safety explicitly -- and exclusively? -- for gay people, as though other people didn't have problems and weren't entitled to be safe too.)

The same organization sponsored a showing of If These Walls Could Talk 2, a lesbian themed made-for-TV movie. The showing took place in the campus Latino center, which was well-papered with Safe Zone stickers. The audience was about evenly divided between male and female undergraduates, almost all presumably GLB. As the video rolled, several of the young gay men in the room began groaning loudly in disgust whenever two women kissed on the TV screen, or when a bare female breast was exposed. Among these young gay men was the newly-elected president of the GLBT organization, a fervent booster of Safe Zone stickers. No one spoke up, no one intervened -- including me. At the time, I found their behavior merely childish and annoying. Only later did I realize how homophobic it was, and how incompatible with the Safe Zone in which we supposedly were sitting. In any case, it was the officers of the sponsoring organization who should have spoken up. But none did, and of course one of them was one of the offenders. Who guards the guardians? Who will protect us from our protectors? This same organization later sponsored viewings of Queer As Folk, the soft-porn cable TV series about gay men. I wonder if anyone made disgusted noises at the series' male to male kissing and exposed male skin -- and if so, if they got away with it?

Some readers might object that the people I'm discussing had no qualifications or training to create a safe space. That’s right, and that's the problem. "Safe Zone" stickers were distributed promiscuously to anyone who would accept them. To put a Safe Zone sticker on one's door is to declare oneself a person for whom enforcement isn't needed. On the night I just described, "bigotry, harassment, and ignorance" were not only tolerated, they were perpetrated by the very people who proclaimed themselves to be above such things.

Who, however, is qualified to create and maintain a safe space? Who is qualified to train others to do so? How are safe spaces enforced, and by whom? On another occasion, the GLB speakers' bureau I coordinate received a request for ... not so much a speaker as a sacrificial victim. The event was a weekend-long workshop on homophobia, sponsored by the campus gay-straight alliance. The workshop leader, a graduate student in counseling, wanted the subject to be present while the participants thought of anti-gay epithets, which would be written on slips of paper, and the slips of paper would be attached to the subject's clothing. Processing would follow. No rationale was offered for this bizarre exercise, but we were assured that it would be "facilitate[d] in a safe, caring way", in a "safe environment," and all participants were "already very sensitive and empathic." I was very uneasy about asking our volunteers to consider it; fortunately the other coordinator thought it was a great idea and offered to be the victim.

The word "doublethink" comes to mind. War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Bigotry is sensitive and empathic. Abuse is safe and caring. Given the nature of the exercise, why not use a heterosexual volunteer as the victim? Why was a gay person even needed? In the years since this request came before me, I've seen numerous announcements of programs on various hot topics, at IU or connected to it, assuring prospective participants that they will be in a "safe space", and I wonder if the term is being used in the same Orwellian sense. That's apart from the hubris involved in anyone's thinking they can deal with religious or sexual issues without offending or upsetting someone.

The core problem with totalistic safe space is that no one is capable of maintaining one. No one is so enlightened or free of prejudice as to be able to guarantee a space where no one will be offended. I'm probably better informed and more thoughtful than most of the diversity managers at my university, and for that very reason I would not presume to designate myself as an authoritative arbiter and enforcer of safety. (Indeed, I want the world to be less safe for bigotry.) Those who do so are not people I trust. Totalistic "safe zones" tend, from what I've seen, to produce complacency and self-righteousness in those who claim to know how to create them.

Diversity management professionals naturally present themselves as proponents of reason and tolerance against the superstitions of the ignorant many, but professionals don't have such a great track record. Professionals conceived and ran the Satanic Ritual Abuse witch hunt of the 1980s and 1990s; professionals think they know what proper sex roles are, and feel competent to force them on small children, even unto surgery and electroshock treatment (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Child Up Gay: the war on effeminate boys” in Tendencies [Duke, 1993]; Phyllis Burke, Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male and Female [Anchor Doubleday, 1996]). Psychiatrists and psychological professionals have embraced the belief that homosexuality is "genetic" or "biological," just at a time when the scientific evidence for that position is collapsing. More whimsically, I still recall with amusement how an education professional, my first-grade teacher, ordered me to use a red crayon to color Robin Redbreast's breast. Not knowing any better, I insisted that an orange crayon was closer to the actual color. Fortunately my mother backed me up, and I was allowed to be diverse.

From castration and sterilization of the mentally ill and retarded in the US before (and even after) World War II, to the abduction of "half-caste" children from their aboriginal families in Australia and North America, to lobotomy and electroshock, to infant genital mutilation in the US today, to the unnecessary institutionalization of children with Down Syndrome to the "war on effeminate boys", professionals have shown that they don't always know what is best for the people who are put into their care. The word "ignorant" is a popular term of derogation for those with views we dislike -- see above on the IU "Safe Zone" stickers -- but I am talking about programs conceived and implemented by educated people with advanced degrees. There is evidence, in fact, that professionals tend to be less tolerant of difference than the general population.

I'm not saying this to demonize all professionals, let alone teachers. And compared to lobotomy or electroshock, totalistic safe space is fairly tame stuff. I am saying that professionals, including teachers, should be very tentative about imposing anything on their students, no matter how innocuous or even noble it may seem. A great deal of intolerance and hostility leaks out from the paternalistic façade of safe space, and I think that's cause for concern. And simply from an educational standpoint, totalistic safe space is counterproductive. Far from teaching kids how to live in a diverse society, it will stifle diversity by refusing to acknowledge it.

Though the professionals who want to produce safe spaces generally seem to see themselves as progressive, and some of their values may be so, their approach is profoundly conservative. It fits into a familiar educational tradition which sees children as empty vessels, to be filled with knowledge by the wise. But there are other traditions. One approach, advocated by Gerald Graff among others, is "teaching the conflict." This recognizes that students are capable of reflection on issues that affect their lives -- and also that teachers not only may not have all the answers, but are not themselves impartial, outside the fray.

This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 2

A few years ago our campus GLBT group began producing and distributing Safe Zone stickers, which declared that "bigotry, harassment, and ignorance will not be tolerated" anywhere they were posted. The word "ignorant" bothered me, because everyone is ignorant, not least the people who designed the stickers. People who believe that they aren't ignorant may be among the most dangerous.

(I haven't got an image of the local Safe Zone stickers, but I've found a number from other universities around the country. I was struck that most of them promise safety explicitly -- and exclusively? -- for gay people, as though other people didn't have problems and weren't entitled to be safe too.)

The same organization sponsored a showing of If These Walls Could Talk 2, a lesbian themed made-for-TV movie. The showing took place in the campus Latino center, which was well-papered with Safe Zone stickers. The audience was about evenly divided between male and female undergraduates, almost all presumably GLB. As the video rolled, several of the young gay men in the room began groaning loudly in disgust whenever two women kissed on the TV screen, or when a bare female breast was exposed. Among these young gay men was the newly-elected president of the GLBT organization, a fervent booster of Safe Zone stickers. No one spoke up, no one intervened -- including me. At the time, I found their behavior merely childish and annoying. Only later did I realize how homophobic it was, and how incompatible with the Safe Zone in which we supposedly were sitting. In any case, it was the officers of the sponsoring organization who should have spoken up. But none did, and of course one of them was one of the offenders. Who guards the guardians? Who will protect us from our protectors? This same organization later sponsored viewings of Queer As Folk, the soft-porn cable TV series about gay men. I wonder if anyone made disgusted noises at the series' male to male kissing and exposed male skin -- and if so, if they got away with it?

Some readers might object that the people I'm discussing had no qualifications or training to create a safe space. That’s right, and that's the problem. "Safe Zone" stickers were distributed promiscuously to anyone who would accept them. To put a Safe Zone sticker on one's door is to declare oneself a person for whom enforcement isn't needed. On the night I just described, "bigotry, harassment, and ignorance" were not only tolerated, they were perpetrated by the very people who proclaimed themselves to be above such things.

Who, however, is qualified to create and maintain a safe space? Who is qualified to train others to do so? How are safe spaces enforced, and by whom? On another occasion, the GLB speakers' bureau I coordinate received a request for ... not so much a speaker as a sacrificial victim. The event was a weekend-long workshop on homophobia, sponsored by the campus gay-straight alliance. The workshop leader, a graduate student in counseling, wanted the subject to be present while the participants thought of anti-gay epithets, which would be written on slips of paper, and the slips of paper would be attached to the subject's clothing. Processing would follow. No rationale was offered for this bizarre exercise, but we were assured that it would be "facilitate[d] in a safe, caring way", in a "safe environment," and all participants were "already very sensitive and empathic." I was very uneasy about asking our volunteers to consider it; fortunately the other coordinator thought it was a great idea and offered to be the victim.

The word "doublethink" comes to mind. War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Bigotry is sensitive and empathic. Abuse is safe and caring. Given the nature of the exercise, why not use a heterosexual volunteer as the victim? Why was a gay person even needed? In the years since this request came before me, I've seen numerous announcements of programs on various hot topics, at IU or connected to it, assuring prospective participants that they will be in a "safe space", and I wonder if the term is being used in the same Orwellian sense. That's apart from the hubris involved in anyone's thinking they can deal with religious or sexual issues without offending or upsetting someone.

The core problem with totalistic safe space is that no one is capable of maintaining one. No one is so enlightened or free of prejudice as to be able to guarantee a space where no one will be offended. I'm probably better informed and more thoughtful than most of the diversity managers at my university, and for that very reason I would not presume to designate myself as an authoritative arbiter and enforcer of safety. (Indeed, I want the world to be less safe for bigotry.) Those who do so are not people I trust. Totalistic "safe zones" tend, from what I've seen, to produce complacency and self-righteousness in those who claim to know how to create them.

Diversity management professionals naturally present themselves as proponents of reason and tolerance against the superstitions of the ignorant many, but professionals don't have such a great track record. Professionals conceived and ran the Satanic Ritual Abuse witch hunt of the 1980s and 1990s; professionals think they know what proper sex roles are, and feel competent to force them on small children, even unto surgery and electroshock treatment (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Child Up Gay: the war on effeminate boys” in Tendencies [Duke, 1993]; Phyllis Burke, Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male and Female [Anchor Doubleday, 1996]). Psychiatrists and psychological professionals have embraced the belief that homosexuality is "genetic" or "biological," just at a time when the scientific evidence for that position is collapsing. More whimsically, I still recall with amusement how an education professional, my first-grade teacher, ordered me to use a red crayon to color Robin Redbreast's breast. Not knowing any better, I insisted that an orange crayon was closer to the actual color. Fortunately my mother backed me up, and I was allowed to be diverse.

From castration and sterilization of the mentally ill and retarded in the US before (and even after) World War II, to the abduction of "half-caste" children from their aboriginal families in Australia and North America, to lobotomy and electroshock, to infant genital mutilation in the US today, to the unnecessary institutionalization of children with Down Syndrome to the "war on effeminate boys", professionals have shown that they don't always know what is best for the people who are put into their care. The word "ignorant" is a popular term of derogation for those with views we dislike -- see above on the IU "Safe Zone" stickers -- but I am talking about programs conceived and implemented by educated people with advanced degrees. There is evidence, in fact, that professionals tend to be less tolerant of difference than the general population.

I'm not saying this to demonize all professionals, let alone teachers. And compared to lobotomy or electroshock, totalistic safe space is fairly tame stuff. I am saying that professionals, including teachers, should be very tentative about imposing anything on their students, no matter how innocuous or even noble it may seem. A great deal of intolerance and hostility leaks out from the paternalistic façade of safe space, and I think that's cause for concern. And simply from an educational standpoint, totalistic safe space is counterproductive. Far from teaching kids how to live in a diverse society, it will stifle diversity by refusing to acknowledge it.

Though the professionals who want to produce safe spaces generally seem to see themselves as progressive, and some of their values may be so, their approach is profoundly conservative. It fits into a familiar educational tradition which sees children as empty vessels, to be filled with knowledge by the wise. But there are other traditions. One approach, advocated by Gerald Graff among others, is "teaching the conflict." This recognizes that students are capable of reflection on issues that affect their lives -- and also that teachers not only may not have all the answers, but are not themselves impartial, outside the fray.

This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 1

Obedience in the classroom is scary.

-- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

For several years now I’ve been bothered by some institutional uses of the concept of "safe space" as a tool or goal in education -- particularly in what's called multicultural education. Lately my objections have been multiplying and crystallizing, so I think it's time to try to organize them and set them forth for others' comment, response, and critique.

I’m going to draw here, not on the educational literature on safe space, but on what has been said by people I've known and worked with, in a diversity-management context, including community education in dormitories and GLB panels addressing education majors and others. In the same spirit I will also refer to some things I've read. While I recognize the limitations of this anecdotal approach, I think it covers an aspect of my subject that deserves critical attention: "safe space" as its advocates actually practice it.

I’m not concerned here with safe space in a therapeutic situation, where it might be an appropriate tool. A classroom is not therapy, however. What works in therapy, with its particular agenda and methods, will not work in other arenas. I believe that "safe space" as a concept in education is incoherent and counterproductive, and needs to be abandoned for more constructive approaches, one of which I'll suggest here.

First I had better distinguish between different senses of "safe space": Certainly I don't think students or teachers or anyone else should be subject to harassment or physical attack, at school or anywhere else. But "safe space" is also conceived in more totalistic and encompassing terms, envisioning an environment in which nothing will be said that will offend or upset anyone, or that might conceivably offend or upset anyone. As the therapist Walt Odets wrote (In the shadow of the epidemic: being HIV-negative in the age of AIDS [Duke UP, 1995]: 274f.):

In any well-run group, safety can only mean one thing: any expression of feelings or thoughts will be received and tolerated by the group, and an attempt will be made to honestly respond to it. This will be done without physical violence or undue emotional hurt to other members, and without abandonment of the group. This essential objective is most easily accomplished in a professionally facilitated therapy group, because the group leader will have the necessary skills to mediate and limit conflict to a safe and constructive level. When the idea of safety comes to mean, as it often does in poorly constructed therapy groups and many support groups, that members be polite and "non-judgmental" toward each other, then the prime therapeutic objectives are undermined. Interpersonal interaction -- as opposed to social form -- necessarily involves feelings and judgments about others, and unless they can be expressed and discussed truthfully, the group can provide neither insight nor the meaning that comes of bearing witness....

The function of a group is not to make members "feel better when they leave than when they came in," as one poorly supervised peer facilitator has routinely billed his weekly support group for San Francisco gay men. It is the function of a therapy group, like individual psychotherapy, to help people attain the insight that allows them to make themselves feel better.

As Odets's own complaint shows, though, his idea of safe space is not the only meaning in current use. This third sense, which I shall call totalistic safe space, is my subject here.

In practice, totalistic safe space doesn't really mean that no one is to be offended or upset, since the sensibilities of conservative Christians and others on the cultural right are not only not considered sacrosanct, they are often fair game for mockery and derision by safe space advocates. Epithets like "Bible thumpers" are as routine in these circles as "faggot" is in others. Those who use these epithets often belong to what they consider kinder, gentler, more inclusive religious groups, for which they are ready to demand respect -- indeed, they want a "safe space" in which to deploy those epithets. I recall a liberal minister (and university diversity manager) saying to a class that he didn't like to think of the Christian Right as Christians, since he preferred a more "inclusive" conception of Christianity. Substitute "gay Christians" for "Christian right" in that sentence, and imagine the reaction!

As a gay man who grew up in less tolerant times, I'm naturally inclined to welcome the growing, if still very limited, acceptance of gay people into American society, along with decreasing tolerance for certain forms of anti-gay ideology. But I became wary when I realized the limits of those changes: they were accompanied by a familiar class prejudice, and a demand for conformity to standard American sex roles. Those who try to combat anti-gay bigotry by marking it as low class (or "ignorant"), are just hick-baiting, without really getting at the root problem. ("Redneck" also seems to be an acceptable epithet in genteel diversity-minded circles.)

I was, I admit, mildly shocked when a young gay teacher-to-be, with whom I was speaking on a panel, said that he would not allow "vulgar" words like "gay" in his classroom. "Gay" is not "vulgar," but the unprofessional kind of lace-curtain snobbery this student exhibited is. It has no place in any classroom, from elementary to college. Some social pressure will be necessary and should be used in my opinion, but it must be sharply focused. Bigots should be ostracized as bigots, not by calling them low-class bums. Those of us who are low class bums will take offense.

The same principle applies to race and racism. It's easy and safe to condemn what Allen Chase, in The Legacy of Malthus (Knopf, 1977), called vulgar gut racism. What he called genteel racism is not only more subtle and harder to stop, it still has considerable social acceptance. (See James Waller's excellent book Face to face: the changing state of racism in white America [Insight Books / Plenum Press, 1998], and also Jane Hill’s The everyday language of white racism [Wiley-Blackwell, 2008]).

Totalistic safe space basically imposes a contemporary version of standard white middle class decorum, which has always been a tendency of American schools; but if this oversight were corrected, the result would be a classroom where almost nothing more controversial than 2 + 2 = 4 could be uttered. If everyone's beliefs should be treated with respect, those people whose religious beliefs condemn homosexuality, women's equality, Darwinian theory, or racial equality cannot be exceptions. If someone wants to argue that such exceptions can and should be made, the criteria will have to be made clear and explicit, and I don't think this can be done. Certainly it has not been done yet. If no exceptions are allowed, then a good many educated people of class will be in trouble.

On a GLB panel speaking to a university class in multicultural education for high school teachers-to-be, we were asked about our religious backgrounds. One of the other panelists mentioned that, though raised a Christian, he had not been much exposed to "fire and brimstone, and other Old Testament doctrines." I corrected his misstatement. Eternal damnation in fire and brimstone are New Testament doctrines, a major theme of Jesus' teaching in the gospels. The Old Testament has nothing to say about Hell, and very little about the afterlife at all; to this day Judaism is little concerned with existence after the individual's death. (For comparison, an actual example of an Old Testament doctrine would be "Love your neighbor as yourself", Leviticus 19.18.)

It wasn't a trivial error. What Christians call "the Old Testament" is, in Judaism, simply "the Bible." The speaker was blaming Judaism for a Christian doctrine he found distasteful. Given his evident ignorance about the Bible, he may not have realized this; his was hardly a respectful attitude towards a minority religious faith, especially when you consider that he had his facts wrong. But then, the vilification of Judaism and ancient Mediterranean paganism is standard practice in gay Christian apologetics. I don't know if there were any Jewish students in the class we were addressing, but even if there weren't, is it only wrong to defame a religion if some of its adherents are present? Anti-gay epithets are supposed to be suppressed on the same ground: you never know when one of them might be lurking invisibly nearby.

I myself enjoy mocking the Right; but I don't pretend that doing so creates a safe space, nor that I am tolerant and accepting of everyone, according respect to all belief systems. On the contrary, I think that some belief systems deserve disrespect. The crucial difference between respecting another person's right to hold an opinion, and respecting the opinion itself, is too often blurred.

Whether or not liberal Christians approve of conservative evangelicals, they are going to have to go on living in the same communities with them. Bible thumpers are people too, and some of them have children -- who are not responsible for the lifestyle choices of their parents, and who may attend the same schools and live in the same communities as more deserving children. "Respect for me but not for thee" is a poor strategy for promoting "diversity." It also exposes certain blind spots in "safe space" advocates themselves.

This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 1

Obedience in the classroom is scary.

-- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

For several years now I’ve been bothered by some institutional uses of the concept of "safe space" as a tool or goal in education -- particularly in what's called multicultural education. Lately my objections have been multiplying and crystallizing, so I think it's time to try to organize them and set them forth for others' comment, response, and critique.

I’m going to draw here, not on the educational literature on safe space, but on what has been said by people I've known and worked with, in a diversity-management context, including community education in dormitories and GLB panels addressing education majors and others. In the same spirit I will also refer to some things I've read. While I recognize the limitations of this anecdotal approach, I think it covers an aspect of my subject that deserves critical attention: "safe space" as its advocates actually practice it.

I’m not concerned here with safe space in a therapeutic situation, where it might be an appropriate tool. A classroom is not therapy, however. What works in therapy, with its particular agenda and methods, will not work in other arenas. I believe that "safe space" as a concept in education is incoherent and counterproductive, and needs to be abandoned for more constructive approaches, one of which I'll suggest here.

First I had better distinguish between different senses of "safe space": Certainly I don't think students or teachers or anyone else should be subject to harassment or physical attack, at school or anywhere else. But "safe space" is also conceived in more totalistic and encompassing terms, envisioning an environment in which nothing will be said that will offend or upset anyone, or that might conceivably offend or upset anyone. As the therapist Walt Odets wrote (In the shadow of the epidemic: being HIV-negative in the age of AIDS [Duke UP, 1995]: 274f.):

In any well-run group, safety can only mean one thing: any expression of feelings or thoughts will be received and tolerated by the group, and an attempt will be made to honestly respond to it. This will be done without physical violence or undue emotional hurt to other members, and without abandonment of the group. This essential objective is most easily accomplished in a professionally facilitated therapy group, because the group leader will have the necessary skills to mediate and limit conflict to a safe and constructive level. When the idea of safety comes to mean, as it often does in poorly constructed therapy groups and many support groups, that members be polite and "non-judgmental" toward each other, then the prime therapeutic objectives are undermined. Interpersonal interaction -- as opposed to social form -- necessarily involves feelings and judgments about others, and unless they can be expressed and discussed truthfully, the group can provide neither insight nor the meaning that comes of bearing witness....

The function of a group is not to make members "feel better when they leave than when they came in," as one poorly supervised peer facilitator has routinely billed his weekly support group for San Francisco gay men. It is the function of a therapy group, like individual psychotherapy, to help people attain the insight that allows them to make themselves feel better.

As Odets's own complaint shows, though, his idea of safe space is not the only meaning in current use. This third sense, which I shall call totalistic safe space, is my subject here.

In practice, totalistic safe space doesn't really mean that no one is to be offended or upset, since the sensibilities of conservative Christians and others on the cultural right are not only not considered sacrosanct, they are often fair game for mockery and derision by safe space advocates. Epithets like "Bible thumpers" are as routine in these circles as "faggot" is in others. Those who use these epithets often belong to what they consider kinder, gentler, more inclusive religious groups, for which they are ready to demand respect -- indeed, they want a "safe space" in which to deploy those epithets. I recall a liberal minister (and university diversity manager) saying to a class that he didn't like to think of the Christian Right as Christians, since he preferred a more "inclusive" conception of Christianity. Substitute "gay Christians" for "Christian right" in that sentence, and imagine the reaction!

As a gay man who grew up in less tolerant times, I'm naturally inclined to welcome the growing, if still very limited, acceptance of gay people into American society, along with decreasing tolerance for certain forms of anti-gay ideology. But I became wary when I realized the limits of those changes: they were accompanied by a familiar class prejudice, and a demand for conformity to standard American sex roles. Those who try to combat anti-gay bigotry by marking it as low class (or "ignorant"), are just hick-baiting, without really getting at the root problem. ("Redneck" also seems to be an acceptable epithet in genteel diversity-minded circles.)

I was, I admit, mildly shocked when a young gay teacher-to-be, with whom I was speaking on a panel, said that he would not allow "vulgar" words like "gay" in his classroom. "Gay" is not "vulgar," but the unprofessional kind of lace-curtain snobbery this student exhibited is. It has no place in any classroom, from elementary to college. Some social pressure will be necessary and should be used in my opinion, but it must be sharply focused. Bigots should be ostracized as bigots, not by calling them low-class bums. Those of us who are low class bums will take offense.

The same principle applies to race and racism. It's easy and safe to condemn what Allen Chase, in The Legacy of Malthus (Knopf, 1977), called vulgar gut racism. What he called genteel racism is not only more subtle and harder to stop, it still has considerable social acceptance. (See James Waller's excellent book Face to face: the changing state of racism in white America [Insight Books / Plenum Press, 1998], and also Jane Hill’s The everyday language of white racism [Wiley-Blackwell, 2008]).

Totalistic safe space basically imposes a contemporary version of standard white middle class decorum, which has always been a tendency of American schools; but if this oversight were corrected, the result would be a classroom where almost nothing more controversial than 2 + 2 = 4 could be uttered. If everyone's beliefs should be treated with respect, those people whose religious beliefs condemn homosexuality, women's equality, Darwinian theory, or racial equality cannot be exceptions. If someone wants to argue that such exceptions can and should be made, the criteria will have to be made clear and explicit, and I don't think this can be done. Certainly it has not been done yet. If no exceptions are allowed, then a good many educated people of class will be in trouble.

On a GLB panel speaking to a university class in multicultural education for high school teachers-to-be, we were asked about our religious backgrounds. One of the other panelists mentioned that, though raised a Christian, he had not been much exposed to "fire and brimstone, and other Old Testament doctrines." I corrected his misstatement. Eternal damnation in fire and brimstone are New Testament doctrines, a major theme of Jesus' teaching in the gospels. The Old Testament has nothing to say about Hell, and very little about the afterlife at all; to this day Judaism is little concerned with existence after the individual's death. (For comparison, an actual example of an Old Testament doctrine would be "Love your neighbor as yourself", Leviticus 19.18.)

It wasn't a trivial error. What Christians call "the Old Testament" is, in Judaism, simply "the Bible." The speaker was blaming Judaism for a Christian doctrine he found distasteful. Given his evident ignorance about the Bible, he may not have realized this; his was hardly a respectful attitude towards a minority religious faith, especially when you consider that he had his facts wrong. But then, the vilification of Judaism and ancient Mediterranean paganism is standard practice in gay Christian apologetics. I don't know if there were any Jewish students in the class we were addressing, but even if there weren't, is it only wrong to defame a religion if some of its adherents are present? Anti-gay epithets are supposed to be suppressed on the same ground: you never know when one of them might be lurking invisibly nearby.

I myself enjoy mocking the Right; but I don't pretend that doing so creates a safe space, nor that I am tolerant and accepting of everyone, according respect to all belief systems. On the contrary, I think that some belief systems deserve disrespect. The crucial difference between respecting another person's right to hold an opinion, and respecting the opinion itself, is too often blurred.

Whether or not liberal Christians approve of conservative evangelicals, they are going to have to go on living in the same communities with them. Bible thumpers are people too, and some of them have children -- who are not responsible for the lifestyle choices of their parents, and who may attend the same schools and live in the same communities as more deserving children. "Respect for me but not for thee" is a poor strategy for promoting "diversity." It also exposes certain blind spots in "safe space" advocates themselves.