“[A] brief drama that was also a metaphor… But… a metaphor for what?”

September 9, 2022 10:20 AM

Sarah Viren, who has previously written in the New York Times about an academic falsely claiming Cherokee ancestry (previously) and false sexual assault allegations against her wife to get an academic job has a new essay in the paper about the fallout after a video of a confrontation in an ASU multicultural space went viral: “The Safe Space That Became a Viral Nightmare”
(This is not an essay that reaches pat conclusions for its actors, but rather an exploration of ripples.)
(All links non-paywalled.)

The video of the confrontation

posted by Going To Maine (15 comments total)

From the NYT article:

For a year, students say they met weekly with faculty and staff members at A.S.U. to discuss, and at times debate, plans for that [multicultural] space, but when the room finally opened last year, just weeks before the video went viral, a sign out front still identified it as a tutoring center, and students say the university wouldn’t let them decorate the space or post rules for how to use it or provide them with dedicated staff members to help organize events, gather resources and ensure that the room itself was, in their words, “safe.”

All of which is to say that it seems clear to me now, watching and rewatching that video over the past year, that when Qureshi snaps, “But this is our space,” or when Tekola yells, “Do you understand what a multicultural space is?” the source of their anger was most likely not just Beckerman or Niles but also our university. It was A.S.U. that was on Tekola’s mind, too, when they pulled out their cellphone that day and hit record.

posted by spamandkimchi at 10:35 AM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

ASU = Arizona State University, for those who have not yet clicked.
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:57 PM on September 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

I read this article and thought it was interesting, nuanced, and thoughtful. One thing it touches on - but I think could emphasize more - is that the people of color why were part of this dispute experienced severe harassment from right-wingers, and were hung out to dry by the university. It's shameful.
posted by medusa at 2:02 PM on September 9, 2022 [12 favorites]

The comments on both the video and the article are absolutely terrifying to me. So many people side with the guys—it's basically a pile-on.
posted by matkline at 2:10 PM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Just...wow.

"...the Police Lives Matter sticker on his laptop is racist."

"White is not a culture."

Nazis and white supremacists.

"Can you please put your laptop in your backpack because you are making people in this space uncomfortable.”

“You’re offensive,” Tekola says from behind the lens.

This is unreal - it could literally be from The Onion or Babylon Bee.
posted by davidmsc at 2:22 PM on September 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

This is unreal - it could literally be from The Onion or Babylon Bee.

Let me lightly suggest here that MetaFilter has had the same sentiments (“white is not a culture”, “police lives matter is racist”) expressed in many of its own threads. Also, I agree with them! That said, I definitely meet people who don’t share those sentiments -or at least, wouldn’t state them as baldly- and inevitably find my self surprised. We are in different spots everywhere. Regardless - if you think the video is straight out of The Babylon Bee, you might want to squint at some of the threads that have come up here on race. The sentiments aren’t far out at all.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:15 PM on September 9, 2022 [15 favorites]

Viren’s constant reference to ASU as “our” university is really a nice tactic that I hadn’t thought about, one that folds all of the participants together into the place.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:22 PM on September 9, 2022

Viren seems to go out of her way to present a framing of the white men as working class(-adjacent?) political naifs, which I'm skeptical of. They were both displaying political slogans—"Police lives matter" and "I didn't vote for Biden"—of the kind designed to provoke and mock liberals and leftists, not just promote their own own ideas and candidates.

But I do put a lot of the blame on the university. ASU seems to have implied to activists the space would be one thing and basically just delivered a generic student lounge. I'm glad the article includes a picture of the space. If I were walking down the hall, I don't think I would even necessarily realize that room is specifically devoted to "multicultural communities of excellence" from those signs, and that that phrase isn't just some general ASU slogan.
posted by smelendez at 3:36 PM on September 9, 2022 [11 favorites]

Viren seems to go out of her way to present a framing of the white men as working class(-adjacent?) political naifs, which I’m skeptical of.

Garrett Niles didn’t participate in the article, and feels very much like a missing piece of the story. In both the account in the story and in the video itself he seems like the one most responsible for escalating the situation. It is of course a bit easy to point the finger at someone who has absented themself from the account, but that’s how I see it.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:55 PM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

(There’s also one more person in the video who seems to be involved at a later stage, but I’m not clear who they are and the article doesn’t mention them.)
posted by Going To Maine at 3:58 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

One of the best articles I've read on this broader issue, though based on the comments it seems most readers missed the author's goal of getting beyond the question of "who's right, and who's wrong?" Because the answer is almost always the university and the right-wing online rage machine (funded by Koch $$$).

The author gestures at this, but things have gotten particularly bad for those at public universities in deep red states. Of course, being a professor or graduate student in a blue state won't save you from online trolls and death threats, but it at least generally means you don't have to worry about losing your job too.

One thing the article touches on but I think could have dug deeper (though obviously only so much one can cover in one article) is that universities, on the whole, are pretty clueless when it comes to social media. Same goes for most professors and professional academic organizations. I just looked up the student conduct at my current institution, and the existence of the Internet/social media isn't mentioned.

The article points to two moments where the university failed all of these students - first when it failed to adequately advertise and mark the multicultural space, and make sure that the nature of the space was clear to everyone, and second when the administration failed to request the video get taken down before it went viral. I'd add that high schools and universities also need to better train all students in social media.

From the article: “Change only happens when we go live, when we do a news conference,” Tekola told me, “and that also informed our decision to say, ‘OK, let’s put this online.’”

The fact that going viral can and has been effective has given way, it seems to me, to many people (of all political stripes and levels of authority) jumping too quickly to that particular tactic. To be clear, I don't blame the students here - they clearly have been given little reason to trust the institution, and have reasons to be frustrated. And also, we clearly need to grapple more with the question of when a situation warrants "going public" vs. when it's more productive to go through more private/local channels, and when it warrants outing individuals vs. pointing out larger structural problems. Their point - that the multicultural center was, mere weeks after opening, already failing to provide a space for POC students to have as their own - could have been made just as well with the students' faces blurred. And posting it as a screen shot and not a video would have gotten the point across while protecting their own (i.e. the POC students) identities. Of course, that assumes the white student filming (the one with the "I didn't vote for Biden" t-shirt) didn't post his video. Which again, is why universities need some sort of social media policy.

On a related note, ASU is letting Jared Taylor come and speak, so yeah, it's clear where this institution's loyalties are.
posted by coffeecat at 4:10 PM on September 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

But I do put a lot of the blame on the university. ASU seems to have implied to activists the space would be one thing and basically just delivered a generic student lounge. I'm glad the article includes a picture of the space. If I were walking down the hall, I don't think I would even necessarily realize that room is specifically devoted to "multicultural communities of excellence" from those signs, and that that phrase isn't just some general ASU slogan.

The whole story is completely marked by its absolute absence of serious adults. I know that the students are all over 18 but surely there is still a formative role for universities to play (maybe kind of hard at a place as massive and diffuse as ASU). It just seems like they all could have used a wiser mentor who agreed with their respective broad political positions (i.e. not the same for all of them) and advise them that this wasn't going to work out the way they wanted it to.

Also, the university has been in ass covering, responsibility evading mode from the beginning.

They didn't deliver the kind of space they committed to, didn't set rules or guidelines or communicate what it was and wasn't, didn't act to defuse the conflict, didn't exercise any mentorship or guidance over the participants after, and then ran a kangaroo court disciplinary process when the whole thing spiralled out of control.

Garrett Niles didn’t participate in the article, and feels very much like a missing piece of the story. In both the account in the story and in the video itself he seems like the one most responsible for escalating the situation. It is of course a bit easy to point the finger at someone who has absented themself from the account, but that’s how I see it.

Indeed. I think it's easy to flatten this into "two white guys" but it doesn't really read like these two had a deeply shared political alignment.
posted by atrazine at 1:44 AM on September 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

One detail:

Our main campus is studded by palm trees and buildings the color of the desert, as well as the frequent reminder — from banners to brochures — that we are an innovative university, which is perhaps a way of saying that although dozens of colleges are now closing or consolidating every year, this one plans on surviving.

Actually, Arizona State University now has a widespread reputation for institutional innovation of all kinds. Michael Crow has driven a big shift to online classes, competency-based learning credits, dissolving academic departments, microcredentials, and more.

We can disagree about the nature of these changes, or if they do any good, or about how they were put in motion. Academics do. But ASU isn't just claiming the innovation label because they don't want to close.
posted by doctornemo at 11:01 AM on September 10, 2022

Indeed. I think it's easy to flatten this into "two white guys" but it doesn't really read like these two had a deeply shared political alignment.

Part of the problem here is we're dealing with Schrodinger's Douchebag. Freedom of speech says that yes, you can make provocative statements with your speech/attire/signage/etc., but what gets forgotten is that it also says that you have to own it. You don't get to provoke outrage in other people and then demand that they not respond to it, or as Adam Serwer put it, there is no right to monologue.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:13 PM on September 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'm legit becoming — as a white guy! — deeply frightened at the rise of what is increasingly apparent to me as coordinated white patriarchal ethnofascism in the US. (And elsewhere, but I'm in the US.)

I meant to post last week about New York's creepily regressive "Downtown" art scene — it's pretty alarming when the young art avant garde is fascist — and people like Curtis Yarvin, J. D. Vance, and the people and organizations associated with Thiel. The significance is that this fascist movement isn't only or even best exemplified by Trumpism, it's something that's happening across American society at multiple levels and is taking many forms. At the core is white male rage.

It's easy and tempting to speculate about what Beckerman and Niles were thinking and intending, but that's really beside the point. They're people swept up by and a part of this movement of grievance and hate that's organized and funded by people who know exactly what they're doing.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:36 PM on September 10, 2022 [6 favorites]