Social Justice Ideology and the End of Civility
Expressing hatred for Queen Elizabeth II is, according to academics and activists, a laudable act of postcolonial resistance
The recent outpouring of rancor and bilious accusation at the death of Queen Elizabeth II has, right on cue, brought out the predictable justifications for incivility in the name of social justice: “It’s okay when WE do it; if you criticize us, YOU’RE an oppressor too.”
Last Thursday, a Nigerian-born university professor at Carnegie Mellon tweeted her hope that Queen Elizabeth’s pain on her deathbed would be “excruciating,” excusing her crudity by referring to the Queen as the “chief monarch [sic] of a thieving, raping, and genocidal empire.” Professor Uju Anya is not a historian—she has a PhD in the academically unserious discipline of second-language theory—and it is highly unlikely that she could go toe-to-toe with any genuine historian on the facts of the British empire’s alleged atrocities. But such throw-away denunciations (not of the Mongol Empire, of course, or the Ottoman, only the British) are common currency on Twitter, and indeed in most university classrooms today. Nobody would have cared if Anya had denounced the British Empire; what raised eyebrows was the gratuitous nastiness of her wish for the Queen to die an agonizing death.
When her tweet provoked criticism (and was ultimately deleted by Twitter), Anya played up her victim credentials as a suffering colonial, alleging that the Queen had “supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family” (in reference to Britain’s alleged role in supplying arms to the Nigerian government during the country’s three-year civil war in the late 1960s) and engaged in oft-obscene exchanges with her detractors. She told NBC News in interview that “I take deep offense at the notion that the oppressed and survivors of violence have to somehow be deferential or respectful when their oppressors die.”
No one ever said that Anya had to be deferential.
But a reasonable person might have expected Anya to be somewhat constrained in her vindictiveness by the fact that Nigerians themselves, both during the civil war and generally in the more than 60 years since the country was granted independence, have done a good job of massacring, displacing, and reducing the life possibilities of Nigerians. As a result, there has been a mass exodus from Nigeria by individuals like Anya, many of whom have fled to Great Britain as well as to other English-speaking countries where they have been able to live in security and plenty unimaginable to the vast majority of their former countrymen. If the English-speaking empire is so evil, why choose to continue living in it?
More to the point, a thinking person might have hoped that as a teacher at a prestigious American university, Anya would have been embarrassed to trumpet to the taxpaying public such useless incivility, which will not, despite its approval by some journalists for “staking out a position on politics and history,” bring justice or improve life by one jot for any Nigerian or oppressed person, and will merely telegraph to hundreds of actual or potential students her striking crudeness of thought and abysmal lack of self- control.
But that would be expecting too much of the professor, whose teaching specialization focuses on (you guessed it) “race, gender, sexual, and social class identities in new language learning.” What that means, judging from Professor Anya’s book, articles, and videos, is that she has made a comfortable career for herself by being a black woman from Nigeria, teaching at a university that allows her to vent spleen in the guise of social engagement, and for which she is paid a high salary to defend stupid tweets that cost her nothing. Her “research” explores the alleged significance of blackness and femaleness in language learning, positioning people like herself as heroic victims of oppression, and blaming English countries for their alleged racism. In one of her videos, she finds nefarious intent in the insistence by school administrators in Arizona that ESL teachers should have proper pronunciation.
The professor was not without defenders. MSNBC opinion columnist Zeeshan Aleem defended her statements as “undeniably,” (really?) “stemming from a place of personal hurt and political opposition to the imperial history and legacy of the British monarchy.” Oni Blackstock, whose Twitter bio identifies her as an MD, seems to have wilfully misconstrued opposition to Anya’s outbrust, tweeting “‘Speak no ill of the dead’ is a weapon that’s leveled against the oppressed to silence them, to lionize oppressors, and to sanitize their history,” and called Anya “A truth teller. And we know what happens when people speak truth to power.”
Well, nothing is happening in retribution for Anya’s claimed “truth-telling.” She still has her privileged job and will not be in any manner disciplined by Carnegie Mellon University (nor should she be). Carnegie Mellon, in fact, has come under fire by progressive journalists for distancing itself from her vulgar statement.
Moreover, no one is preventing criticism of the dead or the living. No one is suggesting that a postcolonial critic cannot make arguments about the alleged harm done by the British empire. Anya is perfectly free, if she is capable (which I doubt), of analyzing the perfidy of the British in Nigeria’s past or critically evaluating Queen Elizabeth’s role in Nigerian decolonization. The objection is specifically to the juvenile rebarbativeness of Anya’s expressed hatred.
But such rudeness itself, according to our university-trained and approved cultural influencers, is more than acceptable. “Rosie” tweeted that “To understand why people are reacting to the queen’s death in a way that seems [sic] ugly and violent, it might help to pick up a copy of @monaeltahawy’s necessary sins for women and girls.”
Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American radical feminist who supports violence against men and boys in order to “defeat patriarchy” alleged that rudeness is a political strategy by which formerly colonized and oppressed peoples resist the “white, Christian values” that have allegedly been violently imposed in order to pacify them. Practicing “radical rudeness,” according to the notoriously vulgar-mouthed (and celebrated) Eltahawy is a liberatory strategy of anti-imperialism. Pursuing the same theme, Valeska Griswold tweeted that “The notion of radical rudeness is an excellent framework to analyze the complaints of alt-right movements against POC and ‘the libs.’ It helps to have a name for the things that form organically in subaltern and oppressed communities to deal with their marginalization.”
Such puerile theorizing has a long and depressing history in academic thought, but anyone interested in a concise statement of one of its points of origin should read political theorist Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance.
In his exposition in favor of intolerance and aggression by the oppressed, Marcuse, pre-eminent intellectual and godfather of the New Left, alleges that the oppressed can and must live by rules different from those that bind others. In fact, he asserted, it was inhumane to remain calm when confronting the actions and discourse of alleged oppressors. Tolerant speech, according to Marcuse, “offends against humanity and truth by being calm where one should be enraged, by refraining from accusation where accusation is in the facts themselves” (p. 98).
The statement is on its face nonsensical. If “accusation is in the facts themselves,” then why would more accusation be necessary? Is it not more useful to be calm in one’s rage, if rage is called for, than to be uncontrolled and frenzied? Like Anya and her trendy defenders, Marcuse believed that to maintain self-control was in some way to allow oppressors to get away with their evil and to enforce cognitive and psycho-social bondage on the oppressed: “The tolerance expressed in such impartiality serves to minimize or even absolve prevailing intolerance and suppression” (98).
As the inheritor of a long tradition that celebrated righteous rage, Marcuse suggested that a calm, fact-based approach to civic engagement was itself a form of capitulation to one’s enemy and a betrayal of victims. A true champion of the oppressed, Marcuse suggested, would not hesitate to dehumanize the oppressor. There are striking parallels between Marcuse’s crazed claims and those of Anya and her supporters who advocate “radical rudeness.”
Only those who wish to encourage unreasoning hatred and its potential for violence would make such claims. In Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse did, in fact, condone violence, distinguishing between what he called “revolutionary violence,” which he cautiously approved as a necessary measure by the oppressed to end injustice, and “reactionary violence,” which he condemned as a means to maintain oppression (see p. 103). Marcuse believed in violence and in the (righteous) incivility that would help to bring it into being.
That’s why Professor Anya’s tweet, and especially the Marcuse-influenced justifications it has inspired, is not insignificant despite the evident mediocrity of Anya’s intellect. English-speaking countries have been relatively good places to live for a long time precisely because, amongst other reasons, “white, Christian” culture emphasized non-violence and placed a high value on civility, self-restraint, and calm rationality. It did so not only out of Christian conviction but also in the recognition that visionary violence always exceeds its aim, harming the innocent and the powerless. People like Anya and her many fellow travellers, schooled in little other than post-colonial resentment and lavishly rewarded for toxic ranting, evidently do not care about the civil order they threaten. Their glib, destructive posturing exposes the rot at the heart of academic social justice ideology.
Janice, I am sorry the comments on your excellent piece about our beloved queen have been hijacked by am embittered and incoherent member of the 'I hate everything about the monarchy and Britain' coterie. If he/she is actually a resident in Britain they might like to swap places with the many thousands of people longing to live here for the multiple benefits which living here gives them, one of them being a subject of a benign monarchy.
The Queen has been a wonderful figurehead for Britain for seventy years providing stability and comfort to her people at troubled times. The vast majority of Brits are deeply saddened by her death, as are many millions of those in former colonies across the world. The vicious comments made by a certain section of social media and on this page are wholly unjustified but merely serve to demonstrate the deluded and muddled thinking of so called social justice warriors who will not be satisfied until society descends into anarchic chaos. They are despicable.