At the inaugural meeting of the New University Conference, an organization of New Left academics, radical historian Staughton Lynd called academics to live in solidarity with their subjects. As he put it, “to hope that upper-middle class white professors can have much illumination to shed upon black power is intellectual hubris. Lynd favored something called “guerilla history”–an approach to studying the past in which the marginalized would speak on their own behalf and tell their own stories. The radical historian would then serve as little more than an embedded transcriber of these stories. His or her authenticity as a historian came not from a critical analysis of such narratives, but through what Lynd called “accompaniment,” the experience of living among the oppressed. Ronald Radosh, a Marxist historian of American labor, writing at The Nation, did not recognize Lynd’s approach to the past as “history,” suggesting that Lynd was no longer interested in the essential difference between one who chronicles history, and being a historian” (italics mine). In the process, Radosh argued, “Lynd seemed to mirror the worst anti-intellectualism within the New Left.”
I discussed this story in the my April 2022 Conference on Faith and History presidential address, but I was reminded of it again when I read Rafael Walker‘s Chronicle of Higher Education essay, “Who Gets to Write About Whom?. The subtitle is “Rejecting cross-cultural representation is simplistic and dangerous.” Here is a taste (I realize the piece is behind the paywall):
Understandably concerned about the problem of cultural appropriation and the pitfalls of deviating from one’s “lane,” many today — politicians, academics, artists, teenagers — have been contemplating whether it’s viable for people to write or talk about others outside their own demographics. Some worry that such a practice enables exploiters to profit from the exploited. (I myself addressed this problem during the fad of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, when a white woman occupied center stage in conversations about the oppression of black people and reaped a fortune capitalizing on that very oppression.) Others express impatience at the condescending cluelessness of those who, holding court on issues laughably far from their jurisdiction, suck all the oxygen from the room — offending by being not only apart from the afflicted group about whom they opine but also part of the group responsible for the afflictions in the first place.
These complaints are two halves of the same thought, both stemming from the conviction that taking unearned liberties in dealing with other communities causes harm, even exacerbating the issues in need of redress. There is no question that this is a real threat or that such injuries have recurred throughout history, persisting even now.
But is the solution to this predicament, as more and more are suggesting, to forbid people from examining communities to which they don’t belong? To pursue this route would be to play what I am calling “body politics,” the idea that the body that you inhabit determines what you should and shouldn’t say.
I am convinced that playing body politics is deeply wrongheaded — a simplistic, dangerous expedient for a complex problem. To be clear, I’m not offering yet another tired defense of free speech or more centrist handwringing over “cancel culture.” My concern is that blanket edicts about who can and should say what may pose a greater hazard than the ills that they were designed to fix.
In a recent controversy, the theology professor Jennifer M. Buck found her book, Bad and Boujee: Toward a Trap Feminist Theology, removed from distribution “after,” as the Los Angeles Times reports, “critics raised concerns about the white author’s qualifications to write on the book’s stated topics of the ‘Black experience, hip-hop music, ethics, and feminism.’” About the only thing that this explanation makes clear is that it remains unclear why, exactly, Buck’s book got pulled. Was Buck’s expertise the problem, or was it her identity? The apology issued by the publisher, Wipf and Stock, suggests that it was at least partly the latter: “We should have seen numerous red flags, including but not limited to the inappropriateness of a White theologian writing about the experience of Black women.”
The ascendancy of body politics has never before now been the goal of marginalized activists and scholars. Far from it. In literary studies, for example, female academics and academics of color felt alienated by the omission of people of their demographics from curricula and scholarship. They sought recognition — to be “seen,” as it were — and, given their small numbers within the academy, knew that that would be difficult if their concerns remained important to them alone. A famous example from second-wave feminism illustrates this point vividly. Seeking to justify the fact that her book on “women’s” literature excluded nonwhite women, Patricia Meyer Spacks, an eminent white Victorianist, argued that she could write only within her ambit of experience. In response to this specious defense — one rooted in body politics — Alice Walker gamely taunted, “Spacks never lived in 19th-century Yorkshire, so why theorize about the Brontës?”
And this:
Body politics, unfortunately, has infiltrated the academy, which should serve — and hitherto has — as society’s bulwark against such thinking. Today, scholars in the social sciences and humanities are increasingly discouraged from writing about communities not their own. Men are told that they should let women speak about issues related to women, white scholars that they should keep quiet about communities of color. This is a trend that I resent personally, as a male scholar who has spent his entire career writing about women writers and feminism. I never will be a woman, but does that fact unfit me to conduct research on and teach about women writers? I certainly hope not.
Contrary to the argument of many champions of body politics, confining scholars to specialties mirroring their identities risks thwarting, instead of advancing, our attempts at diversity and inclusion. As I have shown elsewhere, failing to encourage minority students to specialize in areas that do not reflect their identity will limit the positions in higher education for which they are qualified and will therefore maintain a structural impediment to diversifying college and university faculties. Widening the pipeline means widening the pool of applicants from underrepresented groups able to fill all positions — not just, say, positions in African American or Latinx literature but in medieval and Victorian literature as well.
Beyond these practical considerations, Alice Walker’s rejoinder helps to expose body politics for the losing game that it is. It blocks the bridges of empathy we so desperately need. The problems we face compel us to turn not away from but toward one another — with interest, care, and respect. As black epidemiologist Nina Harawa suggests, there is more at risk than simply hurt feelings. Condemning body politics in her own field, she issues this admonition to her white colleagues: “If you are not willing to take this risk, you are not allies. You are not serving the communities you study. … Well-intentioned or not, you are complicit.”
Read the entire piece here.
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