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[Essay]

Nonconforming
By Laurent Dubreuil

Against the erosion of

academic freedom by
identity politics
From the
Buttons from Button Power: 125 Years of Saying It with Buttons, by September 2020 issue
Christen Carter and Ted Hake, which will be published in
Download PDF
October by Princeton Architectural Press. Courtesy the Busy
Beaver Button Museum, Chicago, and Hake’s Auctions, York,
Pennsylvania

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I n August 2017, a few weeks before the fall

semester began at Cornell University, I received
an email inviting me to participate in a campaign
called “I’m First!” The idea was to encourage
“faculty and staff on campus to identify themselves,
via T-shirt or button, as the first in their family to
graduate from a four-year institution.” The
rationale for this themed costume party was the
following: “This visual campaign will allow first-
generation students to clearly identify (and connect
with) faculty and professional staff that have had
similar experiences as them!” Though I have been a
tenured professor at Cornell for eleven years,
neither of my parents, who are French, pursued
post-secondary education. My father finished high
school; my mother learned stenography at a
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and even artworks that look like them.” I by Taboola

wondered: Do I look first-gen enough? Is it okay if I From the Archive

Timeless stories from our
wear a bow tie or a skirt? Should I speak loudly or 170-year archive
handpicked to speak to the
be shy? More seriously, what if art or education are, news of the day.
in my view, valuable precisely as a way of becoming
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other? If I defy expectations, am I untrue to myself,
or to the manufactured self that others think I
should reclaim? The collection of presumed tastes,
behaviors, desires, aspirations, and appearances
that come with an externally defined identity
rejects in advance anyone who doesn’t conform.
“Intersectionality”—or bearing several identities
simultaneously—does not change this conundrum;
it simply adds additional prescriptions.

It goes without saying that what happens on my

campus* is in no way unique and that being a first-
gen is only one relatively novel option in a
continuously growing list of what every one of us is
supposed to be. American academia is a hotbed of
proliferating identities supported and largely
shaped by the higher ranks of administrators,
faculty, student groups, alumni, and trustees. Not
all identities are equal in dignity, history, or weight.
Race, gender, and sexual orientation were the three
main dimensions of what in the 1970s began to be
called identity politics. These traits continue to be
key today. But affirmed identities are
mushrooming. The slightest shared characteristic,
once anchored in a narrative of pain, can give rise
to a new group. There is now a rural identity, a
peanut-allergic identity, a fat identity, an ADHD
identity, and so on. Each comes with stories of
humiliation or of life-threatening experiences, with
demands for official recognition, with products
specifically targeted to the group, and with the sort
of people the writer Touré called, in Who’s Afraid of
Post-Blackness?, “the self-appointed identity cops.”
Whereas identity politics, as theorized four decades
ago, aimed to liberate the oppressed and to oppose
American capitalism, its main form today is more
invested in changing the direction of domination
and in multiplying restrictions. It is the social order
of the day, its rhetoric ubiquitous in the neurotic
centers of the American economy (universities, the
media, the tech sector).

Under this regime, identities, once affirmed, are

indisputable. If I say, “As an x, I think. . . ,” I am no
longer voicing an opinion that can be evaluated or
critiqued within a shared space of discourse; I am
merely saying what I am. If you disagree with me,
you may trace everything I say back to my identity
before availing yourself of corresponding
counterarguments: you say a because you are an x,
but I am a y and I therefore believe in b. Such
identities, I insist, are not emancipatory, neither at
the psychological nor at the political level. We all
should have the right to evade identification,
individually and collectively. What’s more, identity
politics as now practiced does not put an end to
racism, sexism, or other sorts of exclusion or
exploitation. Ready-made identities imprison us in
stereotyped narratives of trauma. In short, identity
determinism has become an additional layer of
oppression, one that fails to address the problems it
clumsily articulates.

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T he driving force behind the new rise of

identity determinism is trivial: social media.
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Our willing accommodation of the flattening logic

that makes complex social life tractable to computer
algorithms, the constant mental reshaping to which
we subject ourselves through instant
communication and individualized mass media,
and the profitability of selling data generated by
internet users have all contributed to the success of
[Fiction]
identity politics. Rigid, constantly reenacted
identities have become a new law of the market, Time to
one whose grip extends offline. The most powerful Destination
From the novel The
digital platforms are made for monologues or rants
Silence
that elicit mechanical expressions of approval or By Don DeLillo

disapproval. This type of electronic elocution is

fundamentally self-centered, but the I seeking to
grab attention must connect to a we in order to
survive and thrive. This we is formed of the crudest
commonalities, and it is, so to speak, automatic:
sustained by knee-jerk reactions, memes, and viral
behaviors driven by the basest stimuli. These [Letter from Minneapolis]
responses are personal in the way one The
“personalizes” a phone or a computer, by selecting Sanctuary
one of the few options that engineers have allowed Life in a cop-free zone
By Wes Enzinna
you. The most powerful instrument of social
prescription is in the hands of every soliloquist who
posts on Facebook or Twitter a demand for
silencing some other we. The ability for each
mechanized soul to exert a miniature tyranny is
daunting enough online. Offline, it has
undermined institutions and given us President
Donald Trump. More and more, the political realm
transcribes social media’s logic of identity. This
[Letter from Saipan]
goes for the white supremacy at the core of
Perfect Storm
Trumpism as well as for the identity-based When is it time to
clientelism of mainstream Democrats. abandon a place to
climate change?
With their official emphasis on open-ended By Sierra Crane Murdoch

scholarly discussion, universities should offer a

counterpoint. But American academia tends to
align itself with the business world, and
corporations cater to the perceived needs of their
customers. In colleges, such accommodations may
begin with the exclusion of dissenting voices under
the pretext of protecting certain identity groups—
such as by passing over works that run counter to
their supposed interests. The next step is to prevent
dialogue in the classroom by forbidding students to
talk (this is the traditional, magisterial approach) or
avoiding all conflicts and contradictions among
participants, thereby confusing a college seminar
with an AA meeting. (The move toward online
instruction during the pandemic has encouraged
professorial monologues, since the technology isn’t
conducive to spontaneous discussion.) The last
stage involves censoring the name of censorship.
When an NYU graduate launched a petition in
2017 titled “Metropolitan Museum of Art: Remove
Balthus’ Suggestive Painting of a Pubescent Girl,
Thérèse Dreaming,” she insisted she was not
demanding censorship (as if the latter were only a
synonym for physical destruction). During the
Q&A after a talk I gave last November, a university
lecturer told me that “there is no cancel culture,”
thereby attempting to cancel “cancel.”

I t is hard to determine whether most professors,

students, and administrators sincerely subscribe
to current identity politics. It varies by campus,
discipline, and professional role (administrators
certainly tend to express their support for the new
order of things). But I do know that, at Cornell and
elsewhere, only a negligible minority dares to
dissent publicly. This stands in sharp contrast with
the initial wave of political correctness, in the mid
to late 1990s, when dozens of books written by
academics critiqued identity politics from Marxist,
conservative, liberal, and queer perspectives. When
four Columbia undergraduates wrote an op-ed in
2015 titled our identities matter in core classrooms,
they were simply spelling out the majority opinion
on campus. Identities matter in the classroom, and
to many they are what should matter most. The
students made the case for trigger warnings by
pointing out that “transgressions concerning
student identities are common” in the core
curriculum. The Metamorphoses, they explained,
 like so many texts in the Western canon . . . contains
triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student
identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with
histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can
be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of
color, or a student from a low-income background.

There are three interlinked ideas here. The first is

that, depending on one’s own identity, one should
be coddled when encountering texts (or more
generally, artworks or experiences) that could be
harmful. (I particularly appreciate the absolutely
condescending suggestion that a low-income
student is going to be hurt by classical literature.)
The logical culmination of trigger warnings is a
right to opt out before having any contact with the
work, which undermines the whole project of
education. Second, the students seem to suppose
that they are asked to “read and discuss as”
members of a group. This might unfortunately be
the case in more and more classes, but it is
incompatible with the task of interpretation in the
humanities, where we should always remain capable
of being touched, challenged, and above all
changed by the object of study. A cardinal error
when dealing with works of art or thought is to
suppose that they are monolithic and in one
(ideological) piece. Some are, but they’re usually the
uninteresting ones, relics often of a tradition force-
fed to students in the name of some correctness.
For a long time, the goal was the fostering of
national identities; our era is more attuned to social
engineering and moral piety, with a touch of old-
fashioned puritanism. Third, the students assert
that “so many texts in the Western canon” are
“offensive.” This is a baffling claim. In all the
textual traditions I know, violence is expressed and
emotions are triggered, one way or the other. A
little more intellectual humility might be useful for
a small group of Ivy League students in the twenty-
first century presuming to determine what is
acceptable in an ancient Greek tragedy, a Tang
poem, or a traditional izibongo. It’s striking also
that, of all the “Western” authors studied in
Columbia’s core curriculum, Ovid was the center
of such attacks. The Metamorphoses unfolds a
theoretical argument alongside its mythological
content: it insists on the crucial role of
transformation. This was not exactly a majority
opinion in an empire obsessed with fostering
stability and what would later be named Romanitas
(or “Roman identity,” if you like). Appearing as a
character in Ovid’s poem, the philosopher
Pythagoras asserts that “all things change.” Ovid’s
point is precisely that this principle of
metamorphosis shatters any rule of identity, which
makes his writings incompatible with the current
reverence for reified quiddities.

In 2016, English majors at Yale asked that a course

on “major poets” such as Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot,
and Louise Glück no longer be mandatory. Their
petition stated that

a year spent around a seminar table where the literary

contributions of women, people of color and queer folks
are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their
identity, [but is] especially hostile to students of color.

Beyond the dubious equation of bodies of texts

with the bodies of their authors and what they did
with them, Shakespeare’s sonnets are anything but
a promotion of male heteronormativity, T. S. Eliot’s
abstinence looks quite close to the asexual label
included in the acronym LGBTQIA+, and Louise
Glück is a woman. This January, a revamping of
survey classes in art history was presented by the
Yale Daily News as
 the latest response to student uneasiness over an idealized
Western ‘canon’—a product of an overwhelmingly white,
straight, European and male cadre of artists.

(The department’s faculty later disputed this

characterization.)

In a comic mode, you may remember the 2015

banh mi affair, when there was a brief controversy
over whether a version of the Vietnamese sandwich
served at Oberlin College was a symptom of
cultural appropriation and a dire blow to the
integrity of Asian identities on campus. (Like
virtually every other national food staple, such as
“Japanese” sushi, “American” hamburgers, or
“Italian” pasta in tomato sauce, the banh mi, whose
name derives from the French pain de mie, is itself
the result of culinary and cultural mixing.) A less
laughable incident was the formal complaint filed
against Laurie Sheck in 2019 by some of her
students at the New School, after she focused in
class on the discrepancy between the title I Am Not
Your Negro, used by Raoul Peck for his documentary
about James Baldwin, and Baldwin’s original
wording of the sentence. That Sheck would herself
read the so-called N-word aloud—that she would
justify it as pedagogically useful—was enough to
prompt an inquiry that could have led to her
dismissal. (The New School cleared her of
wrongdoing.)

Less prominent cases abound. In a literature class

at Stanford, a colleague who wished to devote a
session to Toni Morrison was challenged by several
undergraduates who argued that a white faculty
member should refrain from teaching work by an
African-American writer. Having noticed a few
years ago that most students in my classes stopped
participating when we covered the history of slavery
in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue and the
origins of the Haitian Revolution, I was told in
private by white students that they felt they
shouldn’t speak on such issues in front of black
students. I pointed out to them that it was no more
moral to remain silent and let the black students
bear the burden of discussion. A Cornell colleague
used the word “blow job” in a guest lecture he gave
for a seminar on the subject of pleasure last spring;
he learned in January that a now-dismissed
complaint had been lodged against him by a
student who considered the term derogatory to
women (who, by the way, are not the only people
who perform fellatio).

Formal complaints of this sort rarely have

spectacular consequences, though the anxiety of
being called out, the stress of public shaming, even
over frivolous grievances, at best wastes one’s time
and at worst leaves a permanent stain on one’s
reputation. But I don’t believe that the goal is
actually the removal of professors. The objective is
to reach a system of self-censorship that would bind
everyone in the room, eroding academic freedom.
If the choice of our words, ideas, positions, and
texts is conditioned by volatile mobs, if entire sets
of questions are now off-limits in our classrooms,
books, or labs, then we will no longer have the
capacity to create or contest.

I n many of these cases, naturally, the villain is a

dead or old white, straight, cisgender male. Yet,
a few months after the Ovid affair, a freshman at
Duke University explained that he would not read
Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home, which
had been assigned to all first-year students, because
he considered its depictions of same-sex relations
“pornography” and contradictory to his Christian
“beliefs and identity.” He quoted a thank-you note
from a Muslim sophomore who told him, “I’ve seen
a lot of people who just throw away their identity in
college in the name of secularism, open-
mindedness, or liberalism.” Modern partisans of
subaltern identities might be upset to see their
favorite maneuver deployed by a white male
Christian student in the South. Such turnabout
should not come as a surprise. Stormfront, the
largest English-language online forum for neo-Nazis
and white supremacists, promotes “true diversity”
and the interests of the “new, embattled, White
minority.” White straight males are already a
minority in the United States (though one that
enjoys disproportionate representation in power).
For many voters, Trump’s affirmation of a wounded
white identity is central to his appeal, and,
unfortunately, to that of his likely successors.

It should be obvious that identity determinism is by

no means a prerogative of the left, for two main
reasons. First, a truly leftist position cannot
subordinate the goal of collective and individual
emancipation to the unconditional affirmation of a
set commonality. The identities on offer often
resemble varieties of what Marxists used to call
“alienation,” in which individuals internalize
premade representations of themselves that limit
their freedom. Second, many pleas for the
protection and promotion of harmed identities
now emanate from the right. The two camps may
be opposed on policy, but, more and more, they
agree that identities should anchor politics. In her
book Uncivil Agreement, the political scientist
Lilliana Mason argues that Democrat and
Republican are no longer ideological positions but
rather identities. This is hardly democratic
progress. Coupled with ubiquitous surveillance,
heightened censorship, digital conformism, and
educational failure, the monomania of political
identity leaves the people powerless by making
cooperation impossible. In such a regime, the
shredding of the social fabric is inevitable.

It is worth noting that the manifesto signed in 1977

by the Combahee River Collective—the text that
launched the initial theory and practice of identity
politics—warned against both “separatism” and
“fractionalization.” This year, Barbara Smith, one
of the members of the collective, reflected on her
early years of activism, saying: “We absolutely did
not mean that we would work with people who
were only identical to ourselves. We did not mean
that.” She added that, in this respect, the way
identity politics has “been used in the last couple of
decades is very different than what we intended.”
Back in 1989, Shane Phelan wrote the first book
with the phrase “identity politics” in its title. The
book ended with the following:

Identity politics must be based not only on identity, but

on the appreciation of politics as the art of living
together. Politics that ignores our identities, that makes
them “private,” is useless, but non-negotiable identities
will enslave us whether they are imposed from within
or without.

Are such warnings still audible? Or do we prefer the

compartmentalized world of identity mongers
preaching to their own crowds and censoring their
“natural” adversaries?

T here is a tired objection to what I’ve written

so far: that only people enjoying a dominant
position could imagine escaping identity—that only
they have that luxury, not the powerless people who
endure daily suffering and microaggressions,
especially at the hands of heteronormative,
cisgender, structurally racist, and ableist men. Not
quite. Let us remember, for instance, how Ralph
Ellison, in Invisible Man (1952), Percival Everett, in
Erasure (2001), or Reginald Shepherd, in a 2003
essay satirizing “identity poetics,” are critical, in
different ways, of identity determinism without ever
trying to efface their social, racial, political, or
sexual inscriptions. At the end of Ellison’s novel,
the narrator comes to understand “the beautiful
absurdity of . . . American identity,” which leaves
few other options to members of this society
beyond being “blind” (as virtually all characters are
portrayed, whatever their race or sex might be) or
being “invisible” (like the protagonist). Erasure
centers on a writer who, throughout his life, has
been considered “not black enough” and rejects the
very expressions “my people” and “your people.”
Shepherd writes that “the impulse to explain poetry
as a symptom of its author” is “a form of self-
imprisonment.”

We are now so used to the association of identity

claims with descriptions of harm that any
questioning of the reigning ideology is assumed to
come from a place of immense privilege. Yet if I
wished to portray myself as disadvantaged by
current standards, I could do so on at least five
counts. But don’t expect me to play the scripted
role of the victim. Those of us who have suffered
socially for conditions we had no control over—that
is, the majority of us—should not be entrapped a
second time and forced to think of ourselves as
defined by harm. I have been ridiculed, derided,
insulted, injured, and beaten, and all that forms
part of my life history. But I also have, much as any
of us has, the choice of being neither defined nor
contained by idiotic brutality. Have I, since
childhood, been insulted with epithets such as
faggot, cocksucker, and girl? Yes—though French
vocabulary is even more colorful. Have I been
ridiculed for being too white, owing to the paleness
caused by my chronic asthma? Yes, and incidentally
this abuse always came from white people,
including far-right extremists. Was I bullied in
elementary and middle school by other kids for
being fat? Yes, I gained weight after recovering from
a near-fatal case of hepatitis at age eight, and the
hassle lasted for five years. Have I been bullied for
other reasons? Oh yes, many: because I sucked at
sports, because my parents were poor, because I did
well in school, and so on. In my fifteen years in the
United States, I have never gone a week without
someone frowning when reading my name or
asking me to repeat what I just said, as if I were
unable to order a single-shot espresso in English. I
have lost track of the number of times colleagues
have complained that I am a weirdo, decidedly not
American, not visible enough as an LGBT person. I
am fine with all these statements (I am weird, I
don’t hold U.S. citizenship, I don’t want to look a
certain way), but they weren’t intended as words of
praise. Such aggressions were real, and they were
tied to a whole array of political oppressions based
on gender, class, sexual orientation, skin color,
mental and physical ability. None of them were
fortuitous or unrelated to social circumstances. But
even in elementary school, I understood that I did
not have to swallow the venom or waste my life
spitting it back in the face of others. My reactions
have varied, but my line is simple: I am not looking
for external validation. I simply refuse to identify. I
am not going to dispute wrongful characterizations,
and I will not apologize either. This method
protects more against microaggressions than
separatism or celebrations of identity ever could.

Nothing programmed me to become who I am. In

fact, nothing is programming any of us. True, many
things constrain us. All systems of political
inequality narrow the choices of those who lie at
the bottom. We should work tirelessly to overcome
such limitations. But as soon as we believe that
social circumstances are absolute determinations—
or, worse, “what we are”—we condemn ourselves to
the endless repetition of the past and to the
methodical destruction of new possibilities. While
emancipation cannot be achieved only through
education, the latter is, quite clearly, indispensable.
The free pursuit of knowledge cannot be an
 afterthought: neither teaching nor research should
be defined a priori by the twenty-first-century
catechism of political identities. Freeing oneself
from the given is an unending process that lies at
the core of higher education. This task concerns
students and professors alike, who should
constantly allow themselves to be altered by
different concepts, poems, people, and events. In
contrast, today’s identity politics is a false promise
that is imposed on us, often in spaces of relative
intellectual freedom. No university worthy of that
name, and indeed no democracy worthy of that
name, should urge people to retreat within the
brackets of their identities. Living, thinking,
dreaming, and creating are not about what we are,
but who we might become.

Laurent Dubreuil is a professor of comparative literature, Romance studies,

and cognitive science at Cornell University.

TAGS
Academic freedom Cornell University First-generation college students Identity politics

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