Anne-Marie Slaughter - Former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School commenting on the issues. November 22·

On Ta-Nehisi Coates, Campus Protests, and Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School

Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award this week for Between the World and Me. Had he not, I would have doubted the process of selection forevermore. When I read the book earlier this year, I had no doubt that it was one of the most important and powerful books I would ever read in my lifetime, for both literary and political reasons. Indeed, it sent me to James Baldwin, whom I realized to my shame I had never actually read. I am halfway through The Fire Next Time now, which also contains a letter to a younger black man – the device that structures all of Between the World and Me. Both books focus on the daily degradations black men and women, boys and girls experience in the United States. Both focus on the superiority that white Americans – or, as Coates point out, Americans who "think they are white,” since we are all actually of mixed race, presume is their birthright. We do not question that equality means creating the opportunity for others to be equal to us, never accepting even the possibility, as Coates puts it, that we, the "dreamers” of the American dream, "will have to learn to struggle [ourselves],” "to understand that [our] Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, that sees [black] bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.”

Both books also focus on fear, the physical fear that is the lot of almost all African-Americans at some point in their lives – no matter how wealthy and well-educated they are. Coates writes over and over again about the body, the different relationship that African-Americans have with their bodies, knowing that their bodies are still, constantly, at risk. That fear, of course, is not limited to the boys or men actually confronting the police or security guards or anyone, meaning virtually everyone, with a gun. It permeates their entire families. I have written about my elder son’s encounters with the Princeton police and the turmoil that caused my husband and me. But at no point did we ever worry about our son’s physical safety. I have tried to put myself back in those years and to imagine what it would have been like to feel the strangling fear every time he was out that I might get a call from the police telling me not that they had picked him up but that he was dead. It paralyzes me even to think about it. Yet that is the reality that African-American parents, siblings, and spouses live with, as we now actually see on video after video.

But do we see it? Really see it? I gave a set of lectures at Yale this week on strategy, power, and leadership in a networked world. In talking about the power of connecting people, a very different power than that of commanding them, I spoke about the basic human drive for recognition, identified by philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, and evolutionary biologists as a fundamental part of what it means to be human. What each of us seeks, from the moment we can first identify ourselves in relation to other children to our twilight years when we resist renewed infantilization, is to be acknowledged by our fellow human beings as a person of equal dignity and value, even in the face of undeniable differences of talent, money, and luck. It is an emotional drive that must be satisfied before reason can kick in.
That is where the campus protests taking place over the past few weeks come in. The student screaming at Professor Nicholas Christakis, Head of Silliman College, was insisting on her right to be heard, really heard, as someone whose pain and anger are real and yet invisible even to an extremely liberal-minded and well-intentioned white man (a man, by the way, whose scholarship I admire). A powerful set of essays by three African-American Yale seniors published in The New Journal this week describe a Yale that their fellow white students simply do not see. The term "micro-aggressions” may sound hopelessly PC, but they are the many small moments that pile up – the interruptions, the different treatment, the turning first to a white person (or, from a woman’s perspective, a man), the slips of speech – to let someone know, constantly, that he or she is still an outsider. After all, New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote earlier this year about his son, a third-year student at Yale, who was accosted at gunpoint by a white campus police officer who thought he was a robbery suspect. That simply does not happen to white students, no matter what they are wearing. White police officers see white kids on a college campus and assume they are students.

Which brings me to Princeton. I was the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton for seven years. I became dean roughly thirty years after I graduated from Princeton as a Woodrow Wilson School major and fifty years after my father did the same – both of us deeply attracted by the ability to put together a multi-disciplinary set of courses and to work intensively on a set of important public problems through our junior and senior independent work. As dean I had plenty of occasion to think and talk about Woodrow Wilson’s racist past and what that meant for students of color in the school. We held panel discussions with historians and looked the ugly side of Wilson’s record as President – his appointment of racist cabinet members and re-segregation of the Federal civil service – full in the face. We talked about it at Students and Alumni of Color weekends.

My view then, as now, was that erasing Woodrow Wilson’s name and presence from the School that he first conceived of – long before "policy schools” existed – and from a University dedicated to an informal motto that he coined – Princeton in the Nation’s Service – would be a grave mistake. In my view, the good that Woodrow Wilson did, even fully recognizing his racism, his sexism, and indeed the overall rigidity and self-righteousness make him simply unlikable in so many ways, greatly outweighs the bad. As Princeton’s president, he perhaps did more than anyone else to transform the school from a preppie gentlemen’s preserve into a great research university. As the nation’s President, he was responsible for implementing a remarkable agenda of progressive reforms, securing a massive overhaul of the nation’s banking, tax, and trade laws, passing child labor and labor rights laws, taking on monopoly power, and appointing the great progressive Justice Louis Brandeis, also the first Jewish Justice, to the Supreme Court. And as a foreign policy leader, he established the Wilsonian tradition of a values-based foreign policy, standing for the self-determination of peoples and "equal covenants openly arrived at.” Yes, he believed in equality only for white nations, just as our founding fathers believed in equality only for white, propertied men, a position that was radical for their time. Once established, their principles proved impossible to limit in the way they had intended.

Moreover, the entire point of a liberal education is to teach students to move beyond black and white, in every sense of the word. It is to complicate simple narratives of good and evil, to teach skepticism and critical thinking, to insist on universal narratives of the human condition from ancient times to the present in all cultures and countries. From the Greek myths to African folk-tales, those stories all depict our complex and often deeply inconsistent characters, showing us the dark sides and struggles of gods and humans alike. We should strive for what is slowly being achieved at Monticello, in my home-town of Charlottesville, Virginia – a presentation of Thomas Jefferson fully in the round. Visitors no longer see only the idealized Mr. Jefferson of my youth – the author of the Declaration of Independence and founder of the University of Virginia – but also the man who fathered children with an enslaved woman, did not free his slaves even on his death, and wrote about the inferiority of blacks to whites in both beauty and intelligence. He was a racist, certainly, by today’s standards. But he was also a man, for all his faults, who could see a different future for all mankind and took a giant step toward it.

Yet what we also learn, or should learn, in the halls of Princeton, Yale, or any other great university, is that genuine debate cannot take place unless both sides seek not only to persuade but are actually willing to be persuaded. If one side knows that the other simply rules out the possibility that he or she might be wrong or mistaken, what is the point of arguing? That is precisely where the only alternative is to scream, or occupy, or turn to force of some kind. When Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber announced this past week that he was launching a process to consider demands by protesting Princeton students to remove Wilson’s name from the Wilson School, I initially thought it was a crazy decision. But on reflection, it is the only decision that is consistent with Princeton’s values. Princeton’s administration, faculty, alumni and current students should welcome this debate on open and honest terms, without a predetermined outcome. If they, or should I say we, cannot make a compelling case based on tradition, the balance of Wilson’s contributions, the need to evaluate historical figures in their own time, and the value of complexity rather than erasure, then we should not impose our views by majority right. And who knows? I started reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article The Case for Reparations firmly convinced that I was opposed to reparations, no matter what he might say; I finished it convinced that he was right.

In any event, these debates will not go away. We European-Americans who assume that we are white because of our skin color, even though our genetic lineage is likely to tell a very different story, must be prepared to question some of our most deeply cherished beliefs. James Baldwin reflected in 1962 on our ethnocentrism. "White Americans, he wrote, "have supposed ‘Europe’ and ‘civilization’ to be synonyms, which they are not, and have been distrustful of other standards and other sources of vitality, especially those produced in America themselves.” Today the time is rapidly approaching when we will have no choice about whether, how, and when to engage. As Eric Liu wrote in the Journal of Democracy earlier this year, "Americanness and whiteness are fitfully, achingly, but finally becoming delinked—and like it or not, over the course of this generation, we’re all going to have to learn a new way to be American.” In twenty or thirty years it will be white students who will be in a minority even on Ivy League campuses. And who will feel silenced then?