PRESIDENT PAXSON: So thank you
and thank you for everybody for joining us here tonight. I think this is going to be
a really interesting panel. As you probably
know, it's titled Charlottesville Perspectives
on the Origins and Implications of White Nationalism in the US. Just to give you a
little bit of background, this is part of a series
called Re-Affirming University Values that the provost Richard
Locke and I started last year. And in a letter to the
Brown community last year announcing the
series, the provost stated the following that
I want to repeat here so you get the idea. Through a series of
lectures and workshops, we will consider
how to cultivate an environment in which
we, as a community, can discuss conflicting values
and controversial issues in constructive
and engaging ways. So last year, for those
of you who weren't here, we talked about many
different things. We had lectures on
free speech, on campus, on civil disobedience,
science denial, Islamophobia, our refugee policy, and
a number of other issues. And later this semester, we will
hear from Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla, and
several Brown faculty members-- Charles Larmore and Prerna
Singh on identity liberalism. So today the topic
is the set of issues that were raised by the
Charlottesville incident. And as I said yesterday
at convocation, my immediate reaction
to Charlottesville was anger and horror,
followed by the realization that I needed to learn more
about the historical and political context that generated
that really dreadful weekend. Unfortunately, as we
all know, hate groups and racialized violence
are not new phenomenon. And maybe it's the
optimist in me speaking, but I thought after
Charlottesville that maybe perhaps this
was the incident that might be the watershed
moment that would provoke a deep examination of white
nationalism in America-- maybe, maybe. And it may not happen in
the rest of the country, but it might as well
happen right here at Brown. And I hope that we can
begin to do this today. Now what this panel isn't on-- we are not here to talk about
the specifics of what happened that day, that weekend. We are not here to talk
about the political response the following week. That could come up in Q&A, and
that's fine if you want to, but that's not what we've asked
the panelists to focus on. Instead, what we
asked them to do was to think about and
talk about the more nuanced and contextualized
issues around Charlottesville, so that we can understand better
what happened, why it happened, and what we can do
about it going forward. I know that I have
many, many questions, and I'm sure many of you do too. When I think about that weekend,
I think about things like, why are Confederate
statues and memorials still so prominent in this
country, in the south? And why are they now-- as opposed to other times-- at the center of conflict? What was the meaning of
these memorials to groups when they were elected? How do they impact people who
live with them, walk by them, sit near them every day? What are the
historical forces that fuel anti-black, anti-immigrant,
anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim sentiments that we see coming
out of white nationalism? And what role has the
state played, perhaps, in legitimating violence based
on race, religion immigration status and other things? And what does
Charlottesville say about how our
society is structured and what we can do to change it? I know that this
is one short panel. And these are many,
many, very big questions, and I know that there
are more out there. And we will only be able to
scratch the surface here. What I hope,
though, is that this is the beginning of a
set of conversations that will take place
throughout the year and also to give all of you,
especially students, just a sense of the types of issues
and the types of scholarship that our faculty are
working on here at Brown. So what we've done, we've
invited several Brown faculty members from a range
of areas of scholarship to speak about these issues. Each of them has exactly
seven minutes each to give a short talk on what
they think people most need to know coming out
of Charlottesville, and then we'll have time for
Q&A. Not to cut into the time, I'm not going to give the
typical long biographical sketch of each person. They're all Brown
faculty members and you can read
about them all online. Hopefully you'll be
taking their courses. And I'll just say a
few words about them now in the order in
which they'll speak. The first is Professor
Bonnie Honig-- they're seated from
right to left-- she's the Nancy
Duke Lewis professor in the departments of Modern
Culture and Media and Political Science. She's currently serving
as the interim director of the Pembroke Center. I asked her to do this, she
told me she couldn't, she had to leave early. She'll try to come back
later, but what she has to say is important enough that
I really wanted her here. So I'm glad she could do it. Next to Bonnie is Professor
Michael Vorenberg, he's Associate
Professor of History. I want to note that
he was actually a member of Brown's Steering
Committee on Slavery and Justice that produced the
report that I hope all of you have taken some time to look at. Next is Professor Emily Owens. She is Assistant
Professor of History and a faculty fellow at the
Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Then Professor Monica
Munoz Martinez-- she is the Stanley J.
Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies
and Ethnic Studies and a faculty fellow with the
John Nicholas Brown Center for the Public Humanities. Next on this bench, we
have Professor Maud Mandel. She's professor of History
and Judaic Studies and dean at the college. Professor John Tomasi, he's
the Romeo Elton professor of Natural Theology and
Professor of Political Science and director of the
political theory project. You're getting the idea
that people at Brown often wear many hats. Professor Tricia Rose the
Chancellor's Professor of Africana Studies and
director of the Center for the Study of Race
and Ethnicity in America. So please join me in
welcoming our panelists. [APPLAUSE] PROFESSOR BONNIE HONIG:
OK, hi, I have PowerPoint. That lets me say more, faster. So it's your first week, you
guys just got here mostly, and you see that we're
hitting the ground running. I want to talk to you today
about affect citizenship in the DACA inclusive sense
of political belonging and public things. By affect, I mean things
like anger, care, concern. By citizenship, I
mean working together to build power and
equality in a democracy. By public things, I mean the
furniture of democratic life. The contested statues of
Civil War heroes in the south are not public things. Many were installed
by private groups, like the United Daughters
of the Confederacy, with no public debate,
vote, or accountability. Such groups colonized
public space with objects that send
a message about who counts as the public, whose
history gets commemorated, who's in charge. Claiming public
space for themselves was also the aim of the
Unite the Right organizers in Virginia, who noted
the importance of coming out, being seen, and
working together in real life. "We don't have the
camaraderie," one said, "we don't have the trust
level that our rivals do, and that camaraderie
and trust is built up through our activism." Images from Charlottesville
bore him out. Depicting not only the anger-- militant and frightening--
that I expected to see, but also startling scenes
of care and mutual aid. In one, a man poured
milk over another's face to counter the effects of
mace, then gently tilted his fellow Nazi's chin in his
hand and asked, is that better? Watching these men enjoy
care and attention in public, listening to them
claim camaraderie, I began to see them as
longing for citizenship. In the last half
century, US citizenship has been thinned out. Our sense of shared,
overlapping, contending, and conflicting purpose replaced
by law, neutral procedure, and the importance of
listening to all sides. These latter commitments may
express admirable virtues, like tolerance and fairness. But they can also serve-- the proceduralism,
the neutrality-- as a bright neon
sign of values they can see that advertises the
devitalization of public life. Chanting "Jews will not replace
us," the men at that march united around horrifying
values rather than none. Gathered together
in public, they created conditions for mutual
care rather than isolation. They were coming out,
they said, showing up, part of a larger whole,
having a great time. They wanted to see
and be seen in public. Ironically, the public
they want to access now is one that whites
have abandoned over the last few decades. Take, for example,
public pools-- they were once a white
middle class delight, well-supported by public funds. After they were
integrated though, suddenly private
pools became popular. The same with public
schools, after integration or desegregation often
comes white disinvestment and abandonment of
the public thing. Going private is better. Here, neoliberalism, which
prefers privatization for its own reasons, aligns
with white supremacy, which wants control. Decades after
abandoning rather than integrating public
life, emboldened by a president and a party
that coddle rather than condemn them, white supremacists
now want the public back, but without the
divisions and conflicts that vivify public life. They want the public
without the politics. That is the dangerous dream
of every ethno-nationalist, as we know from the
political theorist Hannah Arendt, a
German-Jewish refugee who talked about our obligation to
share the world with others. For Arendt, political
action means joining with others
across difference and as fulfilling and exciting,
erecting or toppling statues, staging theater,
mounting protests, running for office,
joining groups, are expressions of care and
concern for a common world-- without them, we're at risk. Arendt drew on her
experience in 1930s Germany. She saw how the Nazis made
gains because people acquiesced, many were afraid or busy. They didn't want
to be political, and soon it was too late. Arendt's experiences echoed in
the words of a Charlottesville activist today. There's a Jewish story
about a great European rabbi of remarkable faith. The man went to sleep every
night with his shoes arranged just so by his bed. Why, his students
asked, do you do that? What's with the shoes? He wanted to be
ready, the rabbi said, in case the messiah turned up
in the middle of the night. Arendt wants us to cultivate
that kind of readiness for politics. She was always on the
alert for any sign that the ball had been dropped. Take the Declaration
of Independence, drafted by Jefferson,
UVAs founder. "We hold these truths
to be self-evident that all men are created equal." Now we know about the
ironies of this lofty phrase authored by a slaveholder
and aimed only at propertied white males. But Arendt, who was
sometimes deaf to the nuances of racial politics,
noticed something else. Why say both, that
we hold these truths, and that they are self-evident? Which is it? Either the truth is self
evident, in which case we don't need to hold it,
or we hold it, in which case it is not self-evident. Arendt argued that
Jefferson made a mistake when he reached for the
certainty of self evidence. "All men are created equal"
is a political claim, and it depends on us holding it. "We hold" means we promise,
we care, we're in it together as equals. Jefferson got that
part right, she said. So did Dubois, Baldwin,
Rustin, and many more, they all invite us to become
a we, a community that holds ourselves together. But building a community is kind
of like learning a new dance. At first we're clumsy and
step on each other's toes. We need not to get too mad
about that when that happens. And we need time to learn
the steps and practice them. We practice on the
streets and at university. And that is why those men
marched at a university. Because universities
are places of holding without self-evident
guarantees, our commitment is to think, to think
critically about the obvious, aspirationally about the fixed,
historically about the settled. We are not liberal,
ideological, or partisan. We do not indoctrinate. We seek understanding,
and we do not teach both sides because there
are never only two sides. Those people who marched
on UVA see the university as a battlefield. Recently, white
supremacists tried to get a classicist
fired for daring to say that all those
ancient white marble statues that we admire were originally
painted in bright colors. Historically, she said,
a cult of whiteness had sprung up
around the statues, but it rested on an error-- she got death threats. We need university
administrators-- I'm glad you're here-- we need university
administrators to help secure the
conditions that underwrite the university's mission. These conditions are not
mere and more freedom in a neutral zone. It is not enough to say, we
don't agree with her views, but we defend her
right to say it. That's pretty good
though, I'll take that, but it's even better
to be ready-- shoes by the bed ready--
to say, we reject the drive-by efforts
of unauthorized parties with their own partisan agendas
to target our community, and we will not respond to them. That is not our mission. This is the last thing
I'm going to say. Five days after the
Charlottesville violence, the UVA students
reclaimed their space. To the men who chanted
on their campus, you will not replace
us, UVA students gathered together and
replied, we replaced you. It was awesome-- [APPLAUSE] --but there's a lot more
work to do and a lot more dancing ahead. With that in mind, I
leave you with some words from James Baldwin. If you haven't been
reading him already, it's a great place to start. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] PROFESSOR MICHAEL
VORENBERG: I want to thank President Paxson
and Provost Rick Locke for organizing this event,
and also Marisa Quinn for handling the
logistics so quickly. This could not have been easy. So some of you know,
I'm Michael Vorenberg, and I'm a member of the
history department here. And I've had a number
of roles at Brown, but there are two that
connect to some of the issues that we're talking
about tonight. First, and probably
foremost, I'm a historian of the American
Civil War and Reconstruction. I teach a course on
that subject here. It's often a very large course. Why is it a large course is
kind of an interesting question. It's a large course in
most places it's taught. The Civil War has a way of
gripping people's imagination, of reminding people that as
one of William Faulkner's characters said-- a character fixated on the war-- that "The past is not dead. It's not even past." On the surface, at least, and
maybe only on the surface, the events in
Charlottesville were connected to the Civil War-- specifically to a
statute of Robert E. Lee, the most revered of the
Confederate generals in the south. Should the statue stay? Should it go? Should it somehow be put into
better historical context? On that issue, I would refer you
to the recent easily available statement of the
American Historical Association made
about such statues and also about the
Confederate flag-- a flag by the way
which was never the flag of the Confederacy,
but rather came into popular use only as a banner
of white supremacy in the 100 years
after the Civil War as a counter-reaction to
the civil rights movement. The American Historical
Association, as stated, reminds us that "memorials
to the Confederacy were intended in part-- I would say in large part-- to
obscure the terrorism required to overthrow reconstruction and
to intimidate African-Americans politically and isolate
them from the mainstream of public life. Events in Charlottesville
and elsewhere indicate that these
symbols of white supremacy are still being invoked
for the same purposes." I'll add to that,
President Paxson asked a good question-- or
a number of good questions-- about why are these statues? How'd they come to be and
what happened to them? I would just point
out that the movement to take such statues down,
to put them in a museum, to put them in
historical context is not something that came
after the election of 2016. It has really
gained acceleration in the last few years-- also renaming of things. Why that is, I'll leave
to other panelists and maybe to the discussion. I think some of the
reasons are rather obvious, but others maybe
are worth exploring. As for Robert E Lee and
whether he deserves a statue, I don't think I want to waste
your time too much on that. To those who would say that he
does deserve a statue, that he was a great man, and that he was
by incident only a slave owner or who was someone who simply
merely tolerated slavery, I could marshal much
evidence against you. I mention just one thing that
when Lee's troops invaded Pennsylvania in 1863
in an invasion that would lead to the
Battle of Gettysburg, while in southern Pennsylvania,
his soldiers engaged in what they jokingly called a Great
Slave Hunt, in which they went into the southern
Pennsylvania countryside, they seized free
African-Americans, and they enslaved them. A practice that
technically then, as now, is regarded as a violation
of the laws of war-- a war crime. But while I condemn Lee,
and for that matter, the entire Confederate
war effort, I am also aware of the
danger that in doing so, I risk drawing
once again on what the poet and novelist
Robert Penn Warren called The Treasury of Virtue. The southern-born
Warren, writing at the centennial
of the Civil War, used The Treasury of
Virtue as the term to describe Northerners
who merely because they were on the winning side
claimed moral perfection. Now I am a child of New
England, born in Boston not too long after
Warren wrote his essay, and thus I know a lot about
claims to moral perfection. But as a member of
the Brown community, I should know better
than to make such claims. Across the green from us at the
west entrance to Manning Chapel there is a plaque honoring
21 Brown students and alumni who died for the Union
in the Civil War. Those are just 21-- there are others
that we know about. There is no mention there of the
18 Brown students and alumni-- the 18 we know about that is-- who died fighting
for the Confederacy. As much as I wish to disavow the
connection of those 18 or more to Brown, and thus to me,
I cannot and must not do so, which brings me to the
second reason I might be here tonight, as President
Paxson mentioned. It just happens I'm the only
member here on this stage that was a member of the Slavery
and Justice Committee, the Steering Committee that
President-- then President-- Simmons created in 2003,
and that issued its reports three years later. All of that material can be
found on Brown's web site. In President Simmons'
charge to the committee, she issued words that
our committee turned to again and again at
moments of impasse, or when we somehow lost her way. And I suggest that
these words should guide Brown, that
they do guide us in the difficult discussions
that must take place ahead. And they remind us of the
extraordinary opportunity and privilege of being at a
place-- especially this place-- which invites rather then
avoids such discussions. President Simmons
charged us a wide range of complicated legal
questions, moral issues, and historical
controversies need to be examined
rigorously and in detail. These are problems
about which informed men and women of goodwill
may ultimately disagree. However, the goal will not
be to achieve a consensus, but to provide
factual information and critical perspectives that
will deepen our understanding. I want to be clear that what
President Simmons articulated was not cold fact-finding
or moral relativism. It was moral commitment
without easy sanctimony. It was the moral certainty of
Abraham Lincoln's 1862 message to Congress, which demanded
an end to slavery, combined with that message is humility. Humility, the
vanishing commodity in political leadership today. We have a president
after all who says that Lincoln was the only
president more presidential than he. Humility that Lincoln showed
by asking in that message, can we do better? And he answered that question
with an extraordinary choice of a word. Can we do better? Yes, but we must first
dis-enthrall ourselves, thank you. [APPLAUSE] PROFESSOR EMILY
OWENS: I also want to thank President Paxson for
calling us together tonight and for in the last weeks,
being so vocal and so public about this
university's commitment to stand against racism,
hatred, bigotry, Islamophobia, which I think is a real
testament to this community and what we stand for. And also to thank my
colleagues, who I'm so glad to sit among tonight. Like Professor Vorenberg, I
am interested in why and how the past appears in the present. I'm a historian of
US slavery, and so I'm going to talk a
little bit about memory, but I'm also going to
talk about violence. Through their call
to unite the right, the folks who marched at
Charlottesville some weeks ago, brought attention to
the ideological convergences of historically
distinct institutions-- the mid-nineteenth
century Confederate States of America, the
late 19th century foundation of white
vigilante terrorism, and Germany's 20th century
Third Reich and the Holocaust. Their particular
obsession with protecting monuments of
Confederate generals and their use of symbolism
that evokes the Confederacy, actually speaks volumes, as
professor Vorenberg noted, of the 20th century and it's
lifetime of white racism. But I also think it
makes sense to take these guys at their word. When they mobilize the symbols
and ideas of the Confederacy and the KKK, they
are remembering-- and I think that's
important to distinguish from historicizing-- groups
of people who enacted violence to preserve, and later, to
try to reinstate slavery. When people at this
moment say that we need to make this
country great again, they are, as feminist theorist
Clare Hemmings might say, telling stories about the past. In this story they tell,
some previous time-- both vague and specifically
represented through very specific symbols tied
to slavery's legacy-- this time that they invoke was
a great time for white people and shouldn't form a
vision for the future. The people of this
current movement invokes the historical
members of the Confederacy and the early Ku
Klux Klan were also themselves devotees of memory. If the contemporary
movement makes heroes out of the soldiers and
generals of the Confederacy and the founding members of
white vigilante terrorist groups, then the heroes
for actual Confederates and actual founding members
of the KKK were slaveholders. Those 19th century
white supremacists were very explicit. They thought slavery was great. They thought the
Antebellum Period was a great time for white people. And they wanted the chance to be
slaveholders, and many of them wanted that for the first time. In other words, multiple
levels of memory were operating in
Charlottesville. and the vector of layered
memories leads straight back to slavery. Yet when you follow
the trail back to the vision of
slaveholders themselves, things start to fall apart. Because even as the
institution of slavery was undeniably an expression
of white supremacist ideology, the ideology
itself was rather fragile. The violence that
was so present was extremely real for the
people who lived through it, and I'm going to talk more
about that in a minute. But in terms of
the idea that there was some great time
for white people that America needs
to return to again, I think there's some
room for clarification. What I mean to say
is this, slavery was always as bad
for enslaved people, for free people of color,
and for indigenous Americans as they said it was. And slavery was never as
good for slave-holders or poor white people as
they thought it was then, or as they seemed
to think it was now. Pro-slavery Southerners,
particularly those writing in the last two decades
before the Civil War, cultivated and
nurtured a fantasy about the world around them. They convinced themselves that
slavery was a positive good. They told themselves in their
diaries and their accounting books that they
themselves had grown bales and bales of cotton. They told themselves in
pro-slavery publications and public forums
that enslavement civilized these
wretched Africans, gave them language
and God and virtue. They told themselves in the
law that enslaved people were and could be at once
both persons and property, human and alive enough
to toil, emotional enough to be afraid of punishment,
or to be able to have family bonds used against them-- while
at the same time, thing enough, dead enough to be
manipulated at will, to have no feelings
of consequence at all. Slaveholders told themselves
that if they were focused and they were careful, and if
they accounted for everything that happened on
their plantations, that the system would flourish. And that the black people
who lived among them would be happy and
docile and obedient, and that they would love them. In that fantasy,
slaveholders were on top. They were comfortable
and they were safe. It's important to know that
they really experienced their logic as coherent. And that they vehemently
believed that their way of life would go on in perpetuity
right up till the end. But here's what enslaved
people knew then and what historians know now. Those slaveholders were
actually terrified-- and they should have been. Enslaved people knew
themselves not to be property and found ways to nurture
themselves and their kin, teaching each other to read
and to write and to worship and to have hope. Enslaved people broke
tools, they worked slowly, they told jokes at the expense
of the people who owned them, and also, just to
make each other laugh. Enslaved people took up the
tools of their labor, axes and pitchforks, and
revolted for freedom. Or they took to the woods
or the swamps or the river to make their way to Ohio or
Massachusetts or Nova Scotia. Enslaved women tied to
plantations because they were often caring for children or
elders, took off into the woods or into the swamps
too, or hid in places inside the house, refusing to
work until they could negotiate for more food, or to end
sexual pursuit or prosecution against them, or to not be
sold away from their children. That is to say that
slaveholders never perfected the art of owning
other human beings. They never perfected the
system of white supremacy. And all that time, while
slaveholders were anxiously trying to make white
supremacy work, enslaved people were
studiously, constantly, vigilantly perfecting
the art of survival. Here's where violence comes in. Violence was a fundamental
condition of slavery. The white supremacist
fantasy was quite fragile, and it needed the strong
arm of physical violence to take it beyond their
dreams and bring it into the material world. Slaveholders and their
deputies used it constantly to realize their vision. But of course, the
requirement of violence betrayed the white supremacists. For if their vision of
slavery as a positive good had been true, violence would
not have been necessary. The whip was not the main
site of violence and slavery. The main site of
violence and slavery was the daily grind,
the daily torture, what literary theorist
Christina Sharpe calls "the climate of fear." The whip was an aberration,
but as a symbol of terror, because it announced
the enforcement of slave-holding fantasies. What is important to remember
is that although that terror was literally felt in the
bodies of enslaved people who bore the weight of
the lash, it was also felt in the slaveholders core. For to use the whip,
to need the whip, was to betray the vision
of white domination, to admit that an enslaved
person had indeed resisted. Violence erupts then when the
lie at the heart of the fantasy is laid bare. It is a reaction to that
exposure and an attempt to make the fantasy once again. This is to say that the
march on Charlottesville relies on several
layered levels of memory. A memory that is at its
root actually a fantasy. We might want to
better understand how someone can have a memory
of something that didn't exist. And we might want
to understand how we can all have such different
versions of the past. It is also to say that
the eruption of violence at Charlottesville is not
the sign of white supremacist strength. But rather it is a sign of
white supremacist panic. That does not make
it less dangerous, but it might remind us that
they are not winning, thank you. [APPLAUSE] PROFESSOR MONICA MUNOZ MARTINEZ:
Hello, good evening, everybody. Thank you, President Paxson for
convening this stellar group of colleagues. I am proud to participate
in the conversation. Also to the provost,
Marisa Quinn, for bringing us all together. I actually just arrived
from Texas yesterday. I was working with a
group of professors. We started a nonprofit
that's called Refusing to Forget that is
working to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of a period
of anti-Mexican violence on the Texas-Mexico borderlands. We're working to coordinate
historical marker unveilings, and so we won't talk
about that here. But in the Q&A,
I think we should be asking not only what
monuments we should take down or that we should correct or
that we should engage with, but also which monuments
we want to install. How many of you are thinking
about DACA and immigration? OK, me too. We are living in a moment,
monumental time where we as a nation are
at a crossroads. We can become the
nation that continues to embrace white supremacists,
xenophobic immigration policies, brutal policing
policies, and that witnesses the repeal of civil rights
like voting rights, transgender rights. Or we can become the
nation that takes advantage of this
opportunity and the moment-- that we create a moment that
future historians will reflect on as the moment when Americans
corrected our course of history and chose an alternative,
more just path. The moments for
opportunity to eliminate white supremacy or racism and
discrimination are often-- come in the wake of
moments of racial violence. But they increasingly
come at the behest and of the calls of
civil rights activists that identify when white
supremacy is rising. History teaches
us that there are grave consequences
for not correcting the rise of white supremacy. Namely, that it will
continue to spread and be entrenched in our laws,
policies, and daily life. And so today I want to
think about the relationship between the rise in white
nationalism, and the promotion of anti-immigrant sentiment,
and the practice of restricting the category of who belongs
in the United States. And I want us to
think about a moment in the early 20th century
after World War I, when you saw the re-entrenchment
of white supremacy in law and policy. There were actually
opportunities during World War I-- labor
organizers were participating and successfully
gaining labor rights, civil rights activists were
protesting and mobilizing, especially the
National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, the NAACP, was opening chapters
across the country to protest the expansion of
lynchings of African-Americans. In a state like Texas,
for example, in 1919 there were 38 chapters of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And they we're actively
working to get governors and the President
of the United States to pass anti-lynching
legislation. At the same time, you had
Mexican-American civil rights activists that were
protesting the brutal policing of the US-Mexico border. It was a period of a rise
of brutal mob violence, but also police violence that
targeted racial minorities. But to match that, there were
civil rights gains in making these acts of violence public. And so one example is that
in 1919, Jose T. Canales was a state representative. He was the only Mexican-American
elected official in Texas. And he drew attention
to the rampant practice of anti-Mexican violence at
the hands of the state police. How many of you know who
the Texas Rangers are? OK, so they're not
just a baseball team, but they're actually the state
police of the state of Texas. And they were formed
in the 19th century to police not only native
bodies but black bodies and Mexican bodies. And by the early
20th century, they were charged by the
governors of Texas, by sheriffs, by
local politicians, and by the media to police
Mexicans with brutality. Mexicans were being
profiled by eugenicists in the early 20th century
as an inferior race. They were being criminalized
as inherently violent, and they were being
profiled as bandits. So ethnic Mexicans in
the early 20th century, especially during the period
between 1910 and 1920, they were being profiled as
threats to American security. And the militarization
of the border was being called for by
governors and local residents. And so you had a
culture of impunity in which governors,
local courts, justified the murder
of ethnic Mexicans-- whether they were American
citizens or Mexican nationals. Now historians estimate that
between 1910 and 1920 hundreds of ethnic Mexicans,
if not thousands, were murdered in collaboration
between the Texas Rangers, local police officers,
US soldiers, and Anglo vigilantes. Now in this investigation
that Canales was successful in
bringing to the state, Texas Rangers were found guilty
of committing heinous crimes. One included the
Porvenir massacre, which is one of
the events that we have a historical
marker unveiling coming to fruition next year. Texas Rangers collaborated
in executing, massacring 15 men in the presence of
their wives and children in 1918 in West Texas in a
small town called Porvenir. And there were no prosecutions
of those Texas Rangers. And so the investigation
exposed not only the collaboration of Texas
Rangers with vigilantes to create a rein of terror,
but this investigation exposed how the
state was complicit. Governors offered
their pardoning power for the racial profiling
that was happening and the acts of racial violence. And the investigating
officers of these crimes also dismissed and justified
the murders themselves. And so as a result, the Texas
governor William P. Hobby supported the
congressional decision not to prosecute any
of the Texas Rangers. Instead, they reduced the force
from over 1,000 Texas Rangers to just under 70. And instead of prosecuting
the Texas Rangers that they had found guilty
of committing lynchings and massacres and murders
in the name of securing the border, those Texas
Rangers that were dismissed, like the one that organized
the massacre in 1918, went on to become sheriffs,
prison guards, and eventually they would create
the border patrol. They would be the architects
of the US border patrol that was established in 1924. And so when you see
the opportunities. When you actually saw
what the investigation did is that it created the
opportunity for the governor William P Hobby to intervene
in the violent border policing that was ongoing. But instead what he
did was he embraced it and actually charged
the Texas Rangers to also dismantle the efforts
of the NAACP in Texas. And so by 1920,
the Texas Rangers had helped to intimidate
the NAACP chapters in Texas and reduced the chapters
from 38 to just seven. And so as a result, we saw
the rise of white nationalism in Texas. The KKK had a
resurgence in the 1920s. In 1922, Texans elected a
card-carrying member of the KKK to the US Senate. The Texas State
Historical Commission made October 23rd of 1923,
the KKK day of Texas history to be celebrated
and commemorated. And that not only created the
celebration and endorsement of white nationalism as a
performance of patriotism, but it also created the systemic
sanctioning of border policing and the criminalization
of immigrants. Now I am thinking
about the parallels between the pardoning
of racial profiling and the anti-immigrant
sentiment. In many ways, we
forget the connection between white nationalism
and anti-immigrant sentiment because anti-immigrant sentiment
and xenophobic immigration policies are sanctioned
by the state. And so when we think
about the repeal of DACA, we also need to think
about the vulnerability that immigration
policies have created for immigrants that are trying
to come into the United States. So when we think about
immigration reform, we also need to pay
attention to the fact that four counties where we're
having the historical marker unveilings also host
detention centers. Right, so the ongoing practice
of violent border policing, and the exclusion and
policing of immigrants is something that we're
grappling with 100 years later. And the last thing
that I'll say too is that when we think about who
belongs in the United States, we also have to pay attention
to the immigration policies that have been passed
since the 1990s. Since the installation
of Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold
the Line in the 1990s, 7,000 people have died trying
to cross into the United States. Right, and this is a
humanitarian crisis that when we think
about white nationalism, and the participation
of making vulnerable, lives that are
minority lives, we have to consider not
just the acts of violence through rhetoric or the
policing of people that are in the United States, but
the ways in which the nation makes, actually, the
border a place of violence and a place of death. So for me,
Charlottesville helps us to disrupt popular assumptions
that histories of violence can be reconciled
just with time. And that if we
don't attend to them and intervene when white
nationalism is called out and when white
supremacy rears itself, and especially when
the state endorses it, we can bet that there will be
a rise in continued violence. So I'm so glad to be here and to
participate in the conversation and hope that we can talk
more about white nationalism and immigration, and how it's
affecting our campus today, thanks. [APPLAUSE] PROFESSOR MAUD MANDEL:
So I'll add my voice to the chorus of thanking
the folks who organized this. I also want to take a moment
to thank everybody in the room for coming out on this first
day of classes when I know the buzz of starting
this semester is keeping you're really busy. It's great to see
so many people here. I'm going to talk about
two things in the minutes available to me. The first, I want to address the
question of why demonstrators chanted anti-Semitic
lines like, "Jews will not replace us"
as part of this event. And if I have time
remaining at the end, I want to talk a
little bit about some of the lessons of the
history of anti-Semitism, and how it's been enacted from
prior periods that can help us think about today. So at a rally ostensibly
about protecting a statue of Robert E. Lee,
asserting the legitimacy of white culture
and white supremacy and defending the legacy
of the Confederacy, we had demonstrators, as we've
heard, speaking and chanting "Jews will not replace us." This was a demonstration
suffused with anti-black racism but also with anti-Semitism. Marchers displayed
swastikas on their banners and shouted slogans like "blood
and soil," a phrase, which is drawn directly from Nazi
ideology and prior anti-Semitic ideologies before that time. So it's not actually common in
the 21st century United States to see these two forms of
racism so dramatically fused, because structural
racism in this country deeply affects the lives
of black and brown people. But most Jews do not, in fact,
face this kind of limitation on their lives-- in
the housing market, in the educational world, in
the criminal justice system, and in the occupational
landscapes. These are all places where
structural racism has really fundamentally undermined the
lives of people of color. And while Jews were
very much targeted by many of these forms
of structural racism in this country, in the early
parts of the 20th century, by the middle of the
century, they had reduced. And in fact, most of these
forms that we associate now with racism in this country
have diminished for Jews significantly and happily. So at the same time then,
it is easy to forget that anti-Semitism
and anti-black racism are often closely entangled. And they're really
two reasons for this that I want to underscore today. The first is from drawing on
the works of historian David Nirenberg, who has traced
what is sometimes referred to-- although he
actually problematizes-- the history of what scholars
have called the longest hatred. That is a form of anti-Jewish
racism that dates back really to St. Paul and the
birth of Christianity, and then all the
religions born from it, including Islam and then the
secular philosophies of Europe that follow-- many of which "learned to
think about their world in terms of overcoming
the dangers of Judaism." And that's a direct
quote from Nirenberg. This is not a timeless
and linked form of hatred. But it is a fact that over
and over and over again in the history of our
times, one of the ways majority societies have
come to understand and think about difference is by focusing
on the Jews in their midst. And this reiterates in times of
conflict over and over again, and we see it in
Charlottesville. But I think probably,
more importantly, the point I wanted to focus on
is the history of 19th century European nationalism
when an ideology emerged that fused anti-Semitism
and racialized imperialism informs the distance, the
white dominant European classes from what they view to be
their racial inferiors. This is not to argue that
anti-Semitism and other forms of racism were identical. No historian would ever
make that kind of argument. But while historians have
traditionally argued that-- and traditionally,
I mean 20 years ago, you would have found a
lot of works emphasizing the uniqueness of distinct forms
of racism in the 19th century, and the uniqueness
of the Holocaust, and the uniqueness
of slavery, and you would have found a lot of
scholarship emphasizing that. In recent years,
scholars have really started to think much more
about the ways in which anti-Semitism,
colonialism, Islamophobia, and colonial violence were
actually all deeply rooted in a similar racial hierarchical
formation that worked again to help European nationalists,
and the ideological frameworks of nation state building
in the 19th century, to distance and hierarchicalize
the different peoples in that world. So when Hitler came
to power, of course, we've come to know that
for him, the world was seen in a racial hierarchy. And white Nordic
people were at the top of that racial hierarchy,
followed by Slavs, blacks, and Arabs, and even
lower, Jews, who were believed to the existential
threat to the Aryan master race and were therefore
at the bottom. These beliefs of course became
the government ideology, and were spread
through propaganda, and turned out to be
extremely dangerous basis for the reordering of
German and European society. The phrase "blood
and soil," which came out in the events
we're talking about today, was an early Nazi
slogan used in Germany to evoke the idea of
a pure Aryan race, and the territory it
wanted to conquer. The concept was foundational to
Nazi ideology and its appeal. And blood referred to the
goal of a racially pure Aryan people. Soil invoked a mystical vision
of the special relationship between the Germanic
people and their land, and a tool to justify the land
seizures in Eastern Europe, and the forced expulsion
of local populations all deemed to be
racially inferior-- in favor of ethnic Germans. But this term was
also a rallying cry in the 1920s and '30s before
the Nazis had taken control. And while anti-Semitism
did not have the same kind of widespread violence support
it did in Europe and the United States, bigotries against Jews
was a common way in which white supremacist ideology expressed
itself in the United States-- where Nazi groups here
drew on tropes and themes and ideological models that
were articulated by the Nazis in the 1930s. For such individuals
in this country, being anti-Jewish and anti-black
were clearly and obviously linked. And that's why for rioters
in Charlottesville, who look to Nazi ideology
as the connection between African-Americans
and Jews, is clear for them because they have their
roots in this form of hatred going back in time. I don't have much more time,
so I want to just make one very brief concluding point, which
is much of the scholarship on anti-Semitism in Europe in
the 1920s and '30s has focused on the concept-- and here
I'm drawing on one particular scholar, a woman
named Marion Kaplan, who's written
about this period-- has focused on the
concept of social death. And that what preceded a
violent, genocidal death in Europe was first
the social death when neighbor
turned on neighbor, boycotted the stores
of their neighbors, turned away when
somebody they had known and been friendly
with previously was harassed in the street. And I think one of the lessons
of the history of anti-Semitism for us in our times is the
call to us not to engage in this kind of turning away. And I think sessions like this
are a powerful reminder that we are all implicated
in making sure that the society
in which we live in is a socially just one
for all, thank you. [APPLAUSE] PROFESSOR JOHN TOMASI:
Good afternoon, thanks for coming this evening. Which public monuments
ought to be taken down? President Trump wants to focus
our attention on that question. He does this by asking us to
look down, down onto a slope that he claims is slippery. Robert E. Lee today, Stonewall
Jackson tomorrow, who's next? George Washington. [LAUGHTER] I want to invite you to
join me in considering a more powerful and a
more positive question. This question requires
that we look up, and then we look up together. At this historical moment,
what new public monuments should be erected? The purpose of a public
monument is not merely to acknowledge our past. Instead, the selection
of a monument is essentially a
forward-looking activity. As my colleague, Melvin Rogers,
remarked to me recently, when we think
about monuments, we are deciding what
events from our past should live on into our future. By the monuments we choose
to erect, I suppose, we reveal the kind of
community that we are. More importantly, we state
publicly the type of community that we aspire to become. This is true of nations,
such as America. It is also true of
institutions and universities, such as Brown. So now I narrow my question,
and in narrowing it, I direct it to
you, the generation of students and faculty
and administrators now at Brown, what new
public monuments ought Brown to erect at this moment? Brown's history is both
wondrous and terrible. What moments from
Brown's history should we allow to
live into our future? Which moments from our history
should we honor precisely because they express
the kind of university that we hope Brown could become? Allow me to propose a few. Inman Page is
widely hailed as one of the first black
graduates from Brown. There are two portraits of
Page on campus that I know of, and an important
organization bears his name. More significant, I
think, is that in 1877, Page's classmates,
most all of them white, elected page to be
their class orator. They did not choose Inman
Page because he was black. Indeed, according
to some accounts, they may have chosen
Page despite the fact that he was black. Why did they choose him? They chose him
because Inman Page was manifestly the greatest,
most brilliant orator at Brown. At that moment,
the Brown community affirmed their commitment to
a precious and common ideal of university life. That ideal is that
we search out and we honor individual excellence
wherever we find it. I hope Brown will consider
erecting a statue to Inman Page in the act of oration. This will be a monument,
not simply a page, not simply to his classmates. Rather, it'd be a public
statement of Brown's commitment to excellence
regardless of race. That is a new monument, Inman
Page and the act of oration, that I think we
could all get behind. There are other moments
from Brown's history that I think might be
worth commemorating. Some of these are controversial. Chris asked me to
speak, so I'm going to just tell you what I think. In 1963, when Governor
George Wallace visited campus to debate Brown students,
there was an astonishing act of bravery by a black
leader from our community. Time prevents me
from going into it. We can discuss it
later if you like. In 2013, when a group
of angry students began shouting down an invited
speaker, one brave student-- this one white-- turned
and faced that angry crowd all by himself. And he noted that in
silencing the speaker, they were silencing him too. My personal favorite though,
is from Convocation Day, 2001. One of my favorite days
on this university it was Ruth Simmons' first
Convocation address as president of Brown. Some might say that we should
erect a monument to Ruth Simmons because she was
Brown's first black president, and the first in the Ivy League. Perhaps, but I think the real
reason that we should honor Simmons is because
of values that she used her position as
president to defend that day. Quote, "While other
types of communities devised covenants so
as to avoid conflict, our covenant is rooted in
quarrel and opposition. We encourage ideas and
opinions to collide in the service of learning,
we each freely trespassed boundaries, we criticize
each other's views, test every theory, no idea
is beyond range or out of bounds," close quote. This is a difficult and lofty
vision of university life. A public monument, perhaps a
plaque, bearing those words-- the words that Ruth
Simmons spoke that day, might help her vision live
on into the future at Brown, thank you. [APPLAUSE] TRICIA ROSE: All
right, good evening. How is everybody doing? You're holding up? It's been a tour de force
up here of many disciplines and incredible
insights, so let me see if I can speak in
fewer than seven minutes and actually have my own version
of the clock, just in case. I know everyone has thanked
you, President Paxson, but I really want to thank
you as well, because this is an important
conversation to have, particularly at the
start of the year. And I'm delighted to be a
part of it and participate. We really need to
learn as much as we can about the deep and complex
roots of white supremacy. And how we got here-- how
we got to Charlottesville. And this is really the only
way we can truly decide where we will go from here. So this is an
important beginning. And I've learned a whole
lot from my colleagues today, so thank
you all for that. I want to move us to the
relatively present moment, and ask us some kind
of hard questions about the reality of the
world in which we live. I want to make an
opening statement, which is the basis of the
rest of my comments, which is that white
supremacy is not a marginal or leftover fringe
ideology in the United States. Nor is it limited to the
extremist displays and acts, such as what we saw
in Charlottesville. I'm going to say
that one more time. White supremacy is not a
marginal, leftover fringe ideology in the United States. Nor is it limited to the
extremist displays and acts such that we saw
in Charlottesville. Why am I saying this? I'm saying this because it's
absolutely crucial that those of us who believe
in racial justice, who understand ourselves
as wanting to create a just and multi-racial democracy,
that we deal with the reality of the range of the
performances of white supremacy and the
institutionalization of it-- not only it's extreme
marginal expressions. And this is actually
critically important, so I'm going to spend
most of my time on this. I will say I also know it can't
feel terribly comfortable. It's hard to say. I had to say it twice, so I
made sure I didn't skim over it. But it's very important
that we confront that. If we don't, tremendous
peril is in front of us. White supremacy
is a core ideology of the founding and governance
of the United States, and this has not
been fully erased. It's not actually abated as much
as contemporary conversations suggest. It's evolved and reduced
in some important ways, but it's also reinforced
itself in some ways in the last 30 to 40 years
that were not the case before. Most importantly, the
centrality of white supremacy as a way of
understanding the world and normalizing significant,
not just disparities, but institutional impediments. That centrality of the
obscuring of white supremacy is the heart of the
problem we're in right now. One of the ways in which
this practice of supremacy has been obscured is
by narrowing the range of what constitutes racism. So over the last 30
or 40 years, there's been an ever-contracting space
that one could call racist. So it's basically, you have to
be in the Charlottesville rally in this year to be a racist, or
to believe in racist ideology, or to support
structures that produce racist outcomes, whatever
the circumstances may be. And that has left the
rest of us-- presumably, we don't have a tiki
torch contingent in here. I'm just going to assume that
at Brown, for the moment, but that may not be
a safe assumption. But let's assume
that it's true-- that the rest of us are
therefore, not racist. So the system of the
world in which we live is therefore not
producing racist outcomes. And these are
these fringe groups that if only we could somehow
control and get rid of, the rest of the world
would operate properly. In that moment, we make the
gravest mistake, I would argue. And I would really encourage
you to both challenge that kind of extremist
white supremacy, but look more deeply in the
world in which we live today. So that when we
say this is not us, and we look with
shock and horror, there is a moment
in which I want to encourage you to
say, well, actually it is part of who we are. And the vestiges of
that are everywhere, and the practices of
it are all around us. In fact, most white supremacy is
very civil-- it's very polite. It's not in any way as extreme
and filled with hate speech as we witnessed. Some historians have
argued that the extremist wings of white
supremacist thinking is actually the perfect cover
for the more institutional ways that inequalities are
generated and produced, and hierarchies are constructed. So what do I mean by this? I'm just going to be a
little bit more specific. When we think of
white supremacy, we focus very specifically
on the language of white superiority, right? And that's what makes
neo-Nazis and the KKK and other supremacist
hate groups very visible, because they focus on the
idea of white supremacy and superiority. But if you look at the
ideologies about race that dominate our culture and our
political landscape long before Trump-- so that's not a helpful
marker for this conversation-- we find that it's about
non-white inferiority that we learn about
white supremacy. We learned that whites
are superior by having constant conversation about the
inferiority of black people, the inferiority of
Mexican-Americans and immigrants of color, the
inferiority of people of color, generally. That's how we learn. We learn about their
sort of penchant for crime, their lack of
cultural interest in education, we learn about their
inability to save money. We learn about et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. All these highly
normalized, often very scholarly and
polite conversations that tell us who is superior. In these conversations,
it's never that we start with
superiority, but we establish the inferiority
of everybody else. This goes on institutionally
in mass incarceration. And I've been working
on structural racism. I won't repeat this
great detail here because I don't have much time. But when we have a
significant level of systemic and structural
impediment, past and present, past, unremediated, and
present, reproduced. When we have that
kind of condition, and then we continue to
discuss the outcomes as if it's a meritocracy,
that's white supremacy. This is what we
have to confront. You simply cannot make
an argument that you have the level of structural
impediments that are widely understood to be
significant and real, and at the same time make the
case that it's a meritocracy. That practice obscures
structural constraint, makes us look only at
hate as a form of racism, and reproduces a
hierarchy around race that then gets
understood as cultural and personal and specific. They work harder,
they did a good job, they functioned as individuals. And this is basically
group superiority that is institutionalized. So we're involved in
a collective practice that I want us to
really attempt to stop. And this is true for all of
us, in one degree or another. Patricia Williams, the
critical legal studies scholar, has this phrase I adore called
"the transgressive refusal to know." And I love this phrase,
because it's not just that we don't know. It's that we do know, but we
kind of don't want to know, and so we actively in a very
kind of edgy, challenging, or compassionate
way refuse to know. And she talks about the
kind of perpetual shock that people of color
look around and think like, why is this shocking? As in Professor Honig's
display when the woman said, what are you talking about? We have this all the time. So what world has
been created, right, that you think this
is exceptional? Are we living in
the same universe? | want to involve you in
the practice of refusing this transgressive refusal
to know, and to let this be like the last moment of
shock and surprise, this circling back to how
can this be who we are. And it seems to me, that
we need to focus here on the campus in challenging our
own curriculum to do a better job teaching us about race. Because I think it's a crime
that we have such a crisis in this regard. And higher education
as a whole, ultimately, marginalizes this
kind of conversation. And that's part of
the crisis itself. Human exercises of
unjust power and hate require our best and
most determined selves. It requires that we
refuse, and that we refuse the exercise of unjust
power in hate in our responses. And I want, just very quickly,
to just partially close on how much anger and
frustration and hate hate produces. It looks like the
only way to win is to be more exclusionary,
to be more angry and hateful than what comes to us. But I would like us
to think of a kind of prefigurative politics. That is to say, that
we behave according to the rules of the society
we hope to create-- not the one that we may be denying. This means being active,
and just, and courageous, and agents for change. I am, in fact though, angry,
and I'm sad about this. And I want to say that,
because we're all scholars-- we have a lot of big ideas and
our brains are sort of crowded. But my heart is unhappy,
it's sad, it's in pain. But I am determined not to
let despair and anger rule me. The level of hate being
supported by the halls of power in our society is at
a very toxic level. But we cannot let it
determine who we are, or who we want to be. I believe, despite
what I see right now, the power of the human
spirit, and I always will. And I believe deeply
in the power of ideas to change the world for
good, thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] PRESIDENT PAXSON: I want
to thank all of you. Those were just amazing,
amazing remarks. There are some people
I know who have to leave and go off and do other
things, so thanks for coming. We have about 20-- a little bit more than
20-- minutes for Q&A. And I thought we would
just go straight into it. So we have speakers
on both sides, and it's a teach-in,
which means you're here to ask questions and talk and
get some discussion going up here, so please come forward. And we'll start on this side. AUDIENCE: Cool. PRESIDENT PAXSON: Can you say
who you are, if you don't mind? AUDIENCE: I can
certainly say who I am. PRESIDENT PAXSON:
Great, thank you. AUDIENCE: Hi everyone. Thank you so much. My name is Aaron Mayer. I am afraid this is
going to fall down-- I'm rather tall. I'm a senior, I'm studying
philosophy, specifically moral philosophy and
political theory, and I have a few questions, but
I'll just start with this one. I believe in moral
truths very much. I believe that white
supremacy is wrong, and neo-Nazism is wrong in
the same way that 2 plus 2 is 4 is always right. I think that's very,
very clear to me. And I also believe very
much in free speech and the Democratic ideals
that this nation upholds. For instance, I may not
agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the
death your right to say it. I believe very strongly in the
moral value of those ideals. However, I'm also the grandson
of Holocaust survivors. My great aunts and uncles were
all murdered in Auschwitz. So I shudder at the
rise of neo-Nazism and the resurgence
of white supremacy. But I also shudder
perhaps more so at the potential erosion of
censorship and anti-free speech practices that perhaps could
be a natural and perhaps, righteous response. So my question is,
what are the means that we can take legal,
or extra legal, that demonstrate our
hatred for hate groups and repudiate their
values, while also upholding our ideals
of free speech and the robustness that
allows this country to thrive, thank you. PRESIDENT PAXSON: Thank you,
so who wants to take that? It's a good question. MICHAEL VORENBERG:
These all work? OK. Oh you're still standing,
that would be good. So maybe you could talk
about, if you would, where you see free speech
under assault right now. Because that's implicit-- and
actually somewhat explicit-- in what you said. And I'm hearing this a lot-- I often hear it a lot
when usually there's other issues actually going on. Where do you see
free speech erosions, and are we really in a
crisis of free speech? And I asked that question, I
must confess, in a loaded way-- [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: I couldn't tell. MICHAEL VORENBERG:
--of skepticism. It reminds me a little
bit of proposals to amend the
Constitution to prohibit the burning of the American flag
when there is no one burning American flags. AUDIENCE: That's an
excellent rebuttal. [LAUGHTER] Well, I mean, mostly,
actually I would say it's evident, at
least in my experience, from conversations with
fellow Brown students and other friends when
they say, oh how can we allow this to happen? Why don't we just prevent
them from assembling in the first place? Or why don't we enforce
more rigorous hate speech laws that would prevent this
type of visceral verbal abuse? So perhaps it's not being
proposed or entertained in any serious legislative
way, but certainly I mean, I would love to outlaw
neo-Nazism right now, and I think many of us would
perhaps feel that righteously. The question is, how can we
express that extra legally, such that we don't erode
those free speech laws? JOHN TOMASI: Can I? PRESIDENT PAXSON:
Thank you, John. JOHN TOMASI: So free speech
is an epic phenomenon. What matters is how we think,
and focusing on speech-- I agree with Mike to
some degree I think-- might be a mistake. It's obviously
crucial to maintain norms of free speech,
especially the ones at this university, which are
not often spoken, but maybe should be spoken and affirmed. But much more important to
me, and I think perhaps to you as well, if I understand
you, is the question of what's the state
of our thinking? How free are people thinking? What opportunities are we
giving students at Brown, for example, to
think new thoughts? How often are they challenged
to see things in different ways from one another? How often do they encounter
people in their classrooms, and in their dorms, and
in their friendships, who see the world in radically
different ways that they do? Or how often do they find
themselves living, thinking, talking, and breathing
with people who share the same general outlook? So I think that's
the tough issue. At a university especially,
it's the thinking, and the quality of
the thinking, that we should be most concerned about. PRESIDENT PAXSON: Does anybody
else want to respond to that? Or we can move to
the next question. No? OK, thank you. Thanks to both of you. Right here. AUDIENCE: Hello, my
name is Danny Satlow. I am a junior studying
religious studies, and my question is directed
at Dr. Mandel, in particular, but as always, everyone
is welcome to answer it. In a recent statement put
out by the Jewish community, several rabbinical
organizations condemned the racism in Charlottesville,
and the anti-Semitism, except for two
rabbinical organizations who happened to be in
the orthodox community. And it interests me,
kind of this relationship between a kind of Jewish
Judaism and whiteness. So my question
is, how do you see this developing in the future? Do you see in the
Jewish community Jews trying to pass as white? And have you used
the channels of power in order to continue
this, or do you see many members of the Jewish
community trying to stand and fight for racial justice? MAUD MANDEL: OK, thanks
for the question. Is this on? PRESIDENT PAXSON: Can't tell. MAUD MANDEL: Yes? Can you hear me? No? Let me try a different one. I have many choices. OK, thanks. So first I'll do the
disclaimer of the historian, right-- hard to predict
the future when your when your source of evidence
is decades in the past. And context, in
fact, in the future will shape the answer
to that question. So I'm going to answer
it by looking back, rather than by looking
forward, perhaps as a way to shed light
into your question. Whiteness is a social
construction, right? Race is a social construction. That's something we all
study and learn at Brown. And Jews' relationship to this
thing you've called whiteness has shifted over time. And one of the
things I was trying to allude to in my comments
when I spoke, is there was certainly a time
in American history when talking about
structural racism and Jews would have made more
sense than it makes now when we talk about racism
in the United States. There's still
anti-Semitism and bigotry-- that was also a
point I was making. But some of the ways in which
racism operates in this country now towards Jews is
different than the way it operated in the past. And not surprisingly,
therefore Jews' responses to it have changed. So as the social
construction of who they are shifts with changes
over time and context and society, the ways in
which Jews respond-- and Jews are not, in fact,
any community right. There are multiplicities
of responses and ways in which people encounter
structures and attitudes. But those responses have
shifted over time as well. So I think the
easiest, and probably the safest response
to your question would be to say it
could shift again. Right, as social constructions
are never fixed in time. And that could
potentially shift again. In the world in which
we live right now, it seems to me that-- and this is to a different part,
I think, of your question-- that the alliances
and that maybe-- and this is a more
ideological hopeful thing, I'm going to say-- that working together
to fight the forces that seek to undermine anybody in
this society, in my opinion is the direction we
should be headed. And that would certainly
be my hope for the future. But the historical constructions
that have shaped the past may have a stronger
play in that. PRESIDENT PAXSON: Thank you. Over here. AUDIENCE: So my name is Emily. I'm a sophomore concentrating
in public health, and my question is, I think
Charlottesville revealed very clearly that
there's a pretty deep fracture in this country. And there's a decent number
of white supremacists in this country. And as a Jewish
person, and an ally of the students all around
this campus and the broader community, it was
incredibly hurtful to me. But at the same
time, I don't know what the solution
is because we can't shun these people from society. So I suppose my
question is, what is the way forward
where we accept these people as fellow
citizens but wholly reject their ideology? And I'm sorry, I know
many of you are historians and you aren't big on
future predictions. PRESIDENT PAXSON: Emily or
Martina-- somebody, Tricia? EMILY OWENS: I think
my first thought about that is that it's
a little bit of curiosity around what shunning these folks
from society might look like. I'm not a fan of
shunning in any regard. But I do think that
we are encountering a moment in which
white supremacist ideology, and the
people who espouse it, are entering, as Professor
Honig was talking about, the public sphere in a
different kind of way than say 20 years ago. That's not to say that the white
supremacy wasn't there then. Or that it wasn't manifested,
as Professor Rose was talking about, in all kinds
of systems other than in verbal
articulations of hatred. But I do think that
there is something-- it was very striking to me to
be in the middle of my summer, and to turn on the television,
and to see people with swastikas and KKK insignia
marching into a town that I know-- that I have visited
many times, that I have friends who live and work in. Those marches were, by
the way, happening too in places that didn't quite make
the evening news in Providence. But I do think that we are in
a moment of a different kind of normalcy. And I think that there
is an opportunity not to shun, but to
say this does not belong in our public sphere. This kind of vitriol does not
belong in our public sphere. The people who espouse
it, if and when they are willing to work
toward equality and diversity and inclusion, and
the sort of ideals that we as this
university culture. But I think also as the deeply
troubled and problematic history of our nation
sort of is down for. If they're willing to get
into that, then great-- that's great. That's what we all
ultimately want. But I don't think that
we need to conflate that with an embrace of hateful
speech in public spaces. MONICA MUNOZ MARTINEZ:
Can I also say something? Yes, something that's really
striking as a historian of racial violence. Often when I'm writing
or giving talks, I talk about the
phenomenon of forgetting-- of the public forgetting
of the atrocities, of genocide, of racial
violence, of lynchings. And the consequences that that
has on the future of the world that we live in today. And what we're
actually seeing now is that there's a
very public nostalgia for a return to periods
of extreme violence that we have to figure
out how to grapple with. And in many cases, it's
because we haven't as a nation reckoned with
histories of slavery, history of colonization,
histories of native genocide, in a constructive
way so that people can think about the lessons of
the past and not recreate them. And the curiosity that I
have about these groups, and what it means
to shun them, also is that we have to realize
that they are already members of the community. And they could be
police officers, and they could be
loan officers, or they could be school principals. I grew up in South Texas
where Confederate flags and racial slurs were the norm. And people who espoused
these racial slurs were in positions of power. And so when we think about these
were these members of fringe elements of society that
converge in a public space, we also have to ask
really important questions about what kind of work
they do in their daily lives to affect people living
in their communities. And that kind of question of
how we have dialogue with people to actually make social
change, to actually have a more just world, really recalls
Professor Rose's point that we can't think
about people with hate, or that are espousing hate,
as fringe elements of society, but they are part
of our society. And now with a sort
of public resurgence of calls for nostalgic
past, we have to really question how we can
push forward the conversation, and not look back
in a way that's destructive to communities
or that incites terror. Again, as we relived
and re-debate things like the Civil War. And so the question,
the curiosity, I think, is important. But we have to make sure that
we're thinking critically about starting the
conversations that we want to have that actually
make the more just world. PRESIDENT PAXSON:
Thanks, anybody else want to react to that? No? Right over here, thanks. AUDIENCE: Hi, can you hear me? PRESIDENT PAXSON: Yes. AUDIENCE: Great,
my name is Jessica. And we've been at
this panel talking about a lot of these
issues at a system level. And I mean, this
might sound cliche, but I realize that
what often shapes these events is a build
up of daily experiences, frustration, angst,
conversations, friendships. But change begins on a
person-to-person level. And the reason that these
things are manifesting, I guess, at the system
level, is because things are awry when it comes to
those person-to-person daily interactions. And so my question is,
I'm interested, of course, in moving forward. But practically, how is
one to navigate the desire to right these racial wrongs-- frustration with others,
transgressive refusal to know-- with the belief that
growth is possible, even with individuals
who might frustrate very deeply in a
non-self-righteous way-- in a non-condemning way? Is that clear? Yes? PRESIDENT PAXSON: Tricia. TRICIA ROSE: Boy,
that's a big one. AUDIENCE: Thank you. TRICIA ROSE: So I guess I want
to start where you began, just a little bit, with the idea
that individual dynamics sort of happen, and then
they create structures. You sort of started
with the individual. And I guess, I might
want to suggest that it's a reciprocal project. That there is already a
structure in which people have exchanges, and that
pre-produces certain structures as well as exchanges. So there might be more
dynamic interaction there, which I think is important for
your other point about how we would go about dealing with it. I think we have a
tendency in this society to think very
individualistically. And it's not to say that
individuals don't do amazing things as individuals. But that our drive to
hyper-focus on individuals, obscures how those structures
are actually playing out in every exchange,
right-- in ways that are bigger than who we are. So I guess my first
piece of advice would be to think
about how to retain the spaces of open-heartedness,
right, which are not places where you get caught up
in difficult conversations all the time-- where
you have to have sort of your own
internal components. Because it's pretty
exhausting to manage this from near or far. But the second thing,
I think, I mean, we're here at one of the premier
universities in the world. And I think we need to use more
of our intellectual capital, really unpacking, as I said,
not just the category of race, but structures of
racial hierarchy as they play out in the world in which
we live-- in our curriculum. We have that opportunity. I would say we haven't actually
done our best with that, honestly. Not here and not anywhere else
that I know of, personally. It doesn't say it
doesn't happen-- not saying they're not
incredible minds working on it. But I would say that most of the
trajectory of higher education has been into disciplines
and methods that usually marginalize,
precisely, this conversation. And it leaves that work on
a small number of people. And I think that is really
where we learn how our-- we can have these debates about
the different points of view, but the topic itself needs
to be at the heart of it. And it seems to me that
fundamental literacy, which I think stems-- what Professor Martinez
was talking about-- around in nostalgia, right? Because our educational
system has been just atrocious on this question. Look at any public school
textbook on the history of African-American history--
just slavery alone-- which should take up more
than the five to six pages it usually takes up. And the narrative, the
political narrative, that we're actually educating
the populace on these issues about is producing the kind
of righteous resentment and a misunderstanding
of racial history that takes a very long
time to overcome if at all. So it's stoking the fuel
of racial resentment, through not just
illiteracy, but again, back to be the queen over
here of white supremacy, but that there's a kind of
drive to reproduce itself through that means. So I think we have
those kinds of tools at our disposal in an
institution of higher education. That and an open heart, and
I think I think you'll be OK. PRESIDENT PAXSON: Thank
you, thanks a lot. Over here, thank you. AUDIENCE: Thanks,
my name is Patrick. I'm a junior in philosophy. And I wanted to kind of build
on this line of questioning, in particular, by
asking what some of the proposed ideal
structural reforms would look like for
upcoming generations. I think something
that we've learned from the experience of like, in
particular, mass incarceration, is that ideas of what structural
reform and institutional reform should look like are often
ultimately deleterious, or don't achieve their intended
impact in various ways. For example, like notions
like colorblindness that were originally advanced
to promote racial justice have actually become,
in many ways, ways in which things like mass
incarceration are reinforced, as Michelle Alexander
documents, right? And so, I guess,
I want to ask how upcoming structural reforms-- the kind of form that
those reforms would take. In particular, there is, I
guess, this kind of tension between-- on the one hand, we
want to make it clear that we set an explicit
public norm about inclusion and diversity in
our public sphere. And at the same time though,
we do want to, I think, reach out to people who have
white nationalist leanings, and try to have dialogues
with them and understand and I guess, communicate,
so that they'll understand historical issues
and normative issues that are motivating this position. So at the same time, as we want
to set an explicit public norm against their position, we also
want to open lines of dialogue, I suppose. Or maybe we don't,
but that's also something worth discussing. And so I wonder what kinds
of institutional reforms we can take that would make
outcomes ultimately align with, I guess, both of
those priorities. Because, in particular, a lot
of the institutional reforms we currently propose are kind
of formal in nature, right? So how can we move from formal
prescriptions and institutions to more substantive
kinds of reforms? PRESIDENT PAXSON: That's
a really big question, and we have one minute to
answer it, but no, I'm just-- would somebody like to
just take a crack at that? EMILY OWENS: OK,
this is not an answer to actual structural reform. This is an answer
looking back to the past. But I think that one thing that
we didn't talk that much about today-- but that is really present
in the conversation about who these groups are-- these groups who
we keep invoking-- who the men are who are
marching in Charlottesville. It's about class. And I think that when we
think about white supremacy and the history of white
supremacy in America, we would be remiss to not
also think about the ways that moments of the
resurgence of white supremacy are often moments of class
conflict, in which it becomes very obvious that people of
color and poor white people should stick together. And what has happened in
various historical moments-- and I'm thinking of one in the
18th century, in particular, but there are many-- is that white supremacy
as an ideology that is propagated by
people at the top-- wealthy white folks,
right, slaveholders in the 18th and 19th
century, in particular-- comes in to inject
into the situation and change the narrative. So that it seems beneficial
to people who have access to whiteness but not any
capital that whiteness is going to be the thing that
allows them some social power, even though everything
else remains a mess. And so I do think that in
terms of thinking structurally about the future,
I'm not someone who thinks about the future. That's not my job. That's not what
I'm trained to do, but I do think that looking to
the past, as Dean Mandel would say, as a lens on what could
come, might be helpful. And I do think that this
sort of relationship between class warfare and racial
warfare is very, very tight, and tells us a lot about-- maybe not what kinds
of structural things need to happen in
the future to make changes, but certainly about
the kind of ideological work that's happening to support
white supremacist visions that allow these kinds of
systems to continue. PRESIDENT PAXSON: Thank you. MICHAEL VORENBERG: I think the
ideal of disagreeing and having the moral high ground,
but also reaching out is a really great ideal. But I think we have to be
realistic that reaching out to, let's say, the marchers
at Charlottesville isn't going to do much good. That is, the idea of
persuasion is a great ideal. Francis Wayland, one of the
former presidents of Brown, believed that anyone
could be persuaded. He spent many years trying to
persuade one of his friends who was a pro-slavery
advocate, and it failed. And so one answer that's really
quite boring but incredibly important has to do
with voting reform. And what I think is the
most important issue that actually deals
with all of this-- I mean, we can call
it voter suppression-- which it is-- but
it's other things too. The most important case
facing the Supreme Court right now is redistricting for the
sake of partisanship only. And of course, embedded in
that is the Voting Rights Act of 1965. You probably can't reach
out to these people, but you can outvote them-- but not now, not
as things stand. And this is the
issue of the day. In the Warren Court,
Earl Warren said, the most important
issue of his day was Baker v. Carr
and the other issues around districting
one person, one vote. Here we are again,
many years later, and the Supreme Court is
on the edge of doing this. I'm not sure what the answer
is, but somewhere in there is an answer that's based on
my idea, which sounds hostile, but after all,
voting is a process, and it's a democratic process. And we're not doing it
well in this country, to put it lightly. And embedded in it, is
white supremacy, obviously, but other terrific
injustices of norms. PRESIDENT PAXSON: Thank you. AUDIENCE: Thank you. PRESIDENT PAXSON:
So what I'd like to do-- we have two
very patient people. Why don't you both say
your questions and then we can do one final run-through
and get some answers. So go, please. AUDIENCE: Hello,
my name is Hans, and I'm a perspective
IR and economics major. So my question pertains to
the Asian-American community. Obviously, there is
a very diverse amount of ideas within this
community-- ranging from the most vocal progressive
to those who view themselves as honorary members of the
white nationalist movement. However, there's also a
very, very large segment of this community
I feel that is, more or less, apathetic
to the current happenings within the United States,
regarding racial issues. And I was just wondering
how, if they should, the Asian-American
community can become more involved in this national
discussion and take action. PRESIDENT PAXSON: Thank
you, and over here. AUDIENCE: Hi, so I
was interested in what Professor Tomasi was saying
about creating new monuments. And it sort of reminded me
of the title of this series Re-Affirming University Values. And as we're talking about,
it's not just fringe groups, but it's our friends
and it's our neighbors. And so I was wondering about-- because it's really easy to look
outward and criticize others, but it's a lot harder
to criticize oneself. And I was wondering
if as a panel, I think the fact
that we're having this panel is a testament
to what Brown can do. But I think it would be
really valuable if we could look internally as well
and think about ways that were built off of
slavery, yes, but the fact that at some point, you know
this land had indigenous ownership and ways in
which that's changed. On the day of my Convocation,
which was a few days ago, or I guess, yesterday,
there was a protest and it was acknowledged. But it would be really great if
that can be acknowledged here. Brown said that they've
been working with the tribe to come up with a resolution,
but look at the institution that this is, we have a
huge amount of privilege, a huge amount of
power, and that's something that lots of
marginalized communities-- especially people whose land
has been taken away from them-- have not been afforded. And so I was just
wondering, what are ways that as
we move forward, we can think about
our own community and how we move forward with
negotiations or anything related to that,
but acknowledging the position of power that
we do have as an institution? PRESIDENT PAXSON: Thank you. So two final questions and
happy to hear your responses. MAUD MANDEL: So I'm
just going to say, I think there's sort of a
similarity to your question about Asian-Americans and
the question that I was asked earlier about Jews, which
is there's an assumption-- assumption I wish
and hope is true-- which is that people who have
in the past at some point suffered their own
oppressions or indignities, by definition, should step
up and support other people even if they themselves are
not currently in that position. And the Asian
population is so diverse that even what I just said
is not factually accurate, because there's plenty of racism
directed at Asian-Americans and other Asian groups as well. But I still think
there's a core here, which is how do people step up
and support each other-- which is what both of you, in
some ways, were asking. There's sort of a very,
very obvious answer at some level, which
kind of goes back to, I think, something that
Professor Rose has really challenged the whole room to
keep thinking about, which is the ways in which our
everyday experiences, each one of us participate. Not the rioters in
Charlottesville, but every one of us every day. And it really speaks to
the other question too. Participate in structures,
and settings, and engagements with other people where we
are shaped by the structures we're in. So where we actually perpetuate
some of the very structures-- so Asian-Americans
experience this, Jewish-Americans experience
this, affluent students at Brown University
experience this, even if they come from
diverse backgrounds. We all participate in engaging
the structures in which we're in and in some cases, sustaining
problematic structures. So I mean, I'm going to
say something very dean of the college-y right now. But wearing that
hat, I would say, you have this tremendous
opportunity in front of you to learn and to think about how
your own choices as individuals help sustain and perpetuate
these structures. And my own very kind of
simplistic ideological view is we have to start with
ourselves, actually, and work to make
sure we do no harm. And then to work with
the people around us to make the world
a better place. And it's kind of a super
idealistic, simplistic way to end that comment. But ultimately, I
don't think one of us is going to go out and change
how Asian-Americans respond or how Jewish-Americans respond,
but we can do what we can in this world to make
that change happen. AUDIENCE: Thank you PRESIDENT PAXSON: Thank you. Anybody else want to respond? Why don't I just
say a few words. I think the question
about how Brown is dealing with the issue
with the Pokanokets right now is really important. And I mentioned it
in Convocation a bit, but I can say a little bit more. For those of you who are new,
I think it was one year ago, we started the Native and
Indigenous Studies initiative. And we've really been working
with faculty who are experts in this area-- native faculty-- to develop our ability to
teach and study and do research on issues that are important in
native and indigenous studies. And at the same time, create
better and stronger links to the native community in
Rhode Island, in New England. And we've made
some good progress. We still have a lot
more to do, but we have made some good progress. What we're doing
right now is working, and it's kind of quiet. It's a little behind-the-scenes,
but we really are trying to work very sincerely to
develop a response that works for the encamped group
that's there in Bristol-- but also that works
for the other groups for whom this land is
spiritually significant. And that's complicated--
it's nuanced, it's tricky, it's not a simple
good-and-bad story. And I think it's one
that we can work through. It's hard, but at
the end of the day, we really want to do
the right thing here. And we will, so I'm glad-- where did the woman
go who asked it? Yeah, thank you for
asking the question. I really appreciate that. That's good. So we are at the end now. I'm not going to
begin to sum up, and we're 10 minutes over
where we should have been. But I want to say a few things. One is, I love this idea about
transgressive refusals to know. And this is what we
need to reject here. We're at an university. We're here to learn. We're not here to
refuse to know. And the fact that
all of you came out on the first day
of classes to start to dig into this very
complicated set of issues, it's really important. So I want to thank all
of you for doing that. I think we're starting to have
the discussions about what kind of country do
we want to have here. And you can extend
this discussion to countries around the globe. Racism doesn't end at
the borders of America. But we're also starting to have
a discussion about what kind of campus do we want to be. And what kind of
community we want to be. And I look forward to
participating with all of you in that conversation. I want to thank Marisa
Quinn for organizing this, for Provost Rick
Locke for co-hosting, and especially all of the
panelists for speaking tonight, thank you. [APPLAUSE]
