The Audiobook of "Surfacing" Is Available!
I am listening to my own audiobook, realizing how much the subplot about right-wing radicals attacking an African American professor for her course on “Whiteness” fits our times.
In my novel, a new professor, Dr. Nia Zendaya Turner, has joined the Philosophy and Religion Department at Kristin Ginelli’s university. Dr. Turner is teaching a class called “Womanist Ethics and the Social Construction of Whiteness.” She is cyberbullied, and there are specific threats.
While the campus is an uproar, the university does nothing and the cyberabuse gets worse and worse. The fictional university policy on “free speech” is just useless, or worse than useless, for protecting the professor and her own right to teach freely without serious harassment.
I based this section of the novel on an actual policy at the University of Chicago and a huge controversy there about a lecturer offering a course on “The Problem of Whiteness.”
The instigator of the controversy at the U of C was Daniel Schmidt, a sophomore at the time and conservative activist with tens of thousands of social media followers. He tweeted, “Anti-white hatred is now mainstream academic inquiry,” along with the course description and the lecturer’s photo and university email address.
The lecturer’s inbox exploded, some with specific threats. (You will note I am not using her name.)
Mr. Schmidt, 19, denied encouraging anyone to harass her. And university officials dismissed her claims. As far as they knew, they said, Mr. Schmidt did not personally send her any abusive emails. And under the university’s longstanding, so-called commitment to academic freedom policy, speech was restricted only when it “constitutes a genuine threat or harassment.”
In my (and Kristin Ginelli’s opinion) this university policy on free speech is racist and classist and an invitation to the abuse of certain professors for raising the critical issues of our time.
The cyberenvironment has changed drastically. Just take a brief glance at X or TikToc today and see what the presidential candidacy of Vice-President Kamala Harris has evoked from the online trolls.
In my fiction, Kristin and her Department Chair, Dr. Adelaide Winter, support Dr. Turner and force the university to take action against the student cyberbullying Dr. Turner.
I really like that about writing fiction. You can change what you want!
But in the real world, the abuse of the concept of freedom ends up facilitating harassing, threatening, putting lives at risk and getting people killed from gun violence.