Yes,
these critics say, the student protesters need to toughen up. They need to put
their shoulders to the wheel, keep their noses to the grindstone, keep their
eyes on the prize, take heart, chin up, turn the other cheek, suck it up,
develop a thick skin, and just generally perform all the other anatomic
metaphors for relentless attention to task and resilience.
It
is enough to make one want to tell such critics to perform another anatomic
metaphor, one that would be anatomically difficult it not impossible.
These
critics do, however, have a point. Resilience, or, as some people like to call
it, grit, has its place. Perseverance in the face of adversity is what helps to
make many people, including many of the black student protesters seen in recent
days, successful. But if, as I
opined in a letter to the Wall Street Journal a few years ago, grit were a
major factor in success, more people who start life disadvantaged would succeed
more often. What these critics often conveniently ignore about many student
protesters is that they are often more resilient than critics could possibly
even imagine. Indeed, it is resilience that allows some students with
disadvantages to reach elite colleges. I think that the point that the students
are often making is that they are tired of expectations that they stoically,
unilaterally, and individually address what are in fact longstanding
institutional problems and concerns.
Parul Sehgal’s recent
article in New York Times Magazine also makes this point.
Some
critics of recent student protesters seem to see the students as actors in a play
called college life, actors who are there, literally and figuratively, to
provide local color. These actors are charged with performing outsized innate
traits of gratitude, forgiveness, and yes, resilience. These actors are not
permitted to go off script and complain about being surcharged with additional
burdens. The role of these actors is akin to that of student athletes on some
campuses, for student athletes, particularly those in prominent athletic
programs, are also often bodies of color put into motion to perform innate,
race-based physical superiority. These student athletes, as I wrote in the NYU
Review of Law and Social Change, are “new minstrels” who are prized for
their swagger, smiles, and apolitical disconnection from larger campus or
societal issues. It is no wonder that the recent
action by football players at the University of Missouri to threaten a boycott
of football related activities in response to racial tensions on campus was met
with so much surprise. Student protesters of color, like student athletes, are
supposed to get tough, big team style, even, or perhaps especially, in the face
of institutional neglect.
But
while “get tough, big team” is a rousing chant for the day of the big game, it
is also a reminder of the ways in which some student bodies are viewed as
mere performers on a stage. Get tough, big team fails to account for the pervasive
inability to imagine people unlike oneself in a way that engenders ongoing respect,
equality and morality. It is for this reason, writes
scholar Elaine Scarry, that institutions such as colleges and universities
must help to foster conditions of recognition that do not rely upon individual
action or imagination.
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