Inbox scrap 116

C
HAPTER 1Microaggression and the Culture
of Victimhood

The term microaggression has become popular only recently, and this
was the first we had heard of it. As sociologists of morality we were imme-diately intrigued. We thought of Emile Durkheim, the nineteenth-century
French sociologist, who famously asked his readers to imagine what would
happen in a “society of saints.” The answer is that there would still be sin-ners because “faults which appear venial to the layman” would there create
scandal (Durkheim 1982:100). And it did seem that people were most
concerned about rooting out racism and bigotry in the very places where
there was the least of it. These so-called microaggressions, many of which
outsiders would see as no more than venial faults, were causing great scan-dal in our universities.

Even as campus activists and many others have embraced the concept of
microaggression, much of the broader public has fiercely resisted it. The
opposition arises because microaggression complaints violate many long-standing social norms, such as those encouraging people to have thick
skin, brush off slights, and charitably interpret the intentions of others.

Derald Wing Sue is probably more responsible
for the success of the microaggression program than anyone else. Sue,
who has been called the godfather of the concept of microaggression
(Schwartz 2016), defines microaggressions as “the brief and common-place daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether
intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or
negative racial, gender, and sexual orientation, and religious slights and
insults to the target person or group” (Sue 2010:

:
275). Sue does not claim the flight attendant was lying. In fact Sue and his colleagues say the power of microaggressions “lies in their invisi-bility to the perpetrator” (Sue et al. 2007:275). “In some respects,” they
go on to say, “people of color may find an overt and obvious racist act
easier to handle than microaggressions that seem vague or disguised” (Sue
et al. 2007:

But remember that microaggressions can be unintentional, even invis-ib

it does not refer to any clearly defined behavior (compare Lilienfeld 2017)
. If it did, it would make sense to ask whether any of the alleged microag-gressions mentioned above were really microaggressions. It would also be
possible for people to sincerely but wrongly claim to have experienced a
microaggression or to wrongly accuse others of microaggressing. In that
case Derald Wing Sue’s perception might be wrong and the flight atten-dant might be innocent. But Sue and others define the term in a way that
n

no intent is required. Nothing determines whether the behavior—asking
two passengers to move—is a microaggression other than Sue’s reaction.
Sociologically, a microaggression is not a kind of statement someone
m
akes or a kind of behavior someone engages in; it is a label that someone else attaches to a statement or behavior. The labeling of something as a
microaggression is thus a moralistic behavior, an act of defining right and
wrong,

Critics of the Microaggression Program

P
sychologist Kenneth Thomas concludes that Sue’s characterization of the incident “may speak more about Sue’s personal need to feel special or
privileged than about any prejudice on the part of the flight attendant.”

What the critics are objecting to is that someone’s interpretation of
another person’s action matters more than the intentions of the actor.
Some of the statements included in the UC document might be criticized
on these grounds as well. It is a microaggression, according to the docu-ment, to say “Where are you from?” or “Where were you born” to an
Asian American or Latino American, “Why are you so quiet?” to an Asian,
Latino, or Native American, or “Why do you have to be so loud/ani-mated?” to an African American. Note that what is required of people is
not that they treat minorities or women as they would anyone else. “Why
are you so quiet” might be asked of any quiet person of whatever race or
ethnicity, but asking it of an Asian, Latino, or Native American is a micro-aggression, according to the document, because it conveys “the notion
that the values and communication styles of the dominant/White culture
are ideal/‘normal’” (University of California 2014). Whether the person
asking the question actually means this or is even aware of any such cul-tural differences between the “dominant/White culture” and others seems
to have no bearing on whether the question is a microaggression. Similarly,
“Where are you from?” is a staple of small talk anywhere people do not
know one another well, but it becomes a microaggression when asked of
an Asian American or Latino American, according to the UC document,
because it conveys the message “You are not a true American.”

That this question might be asked of anyone was illustrated recently
during a panel discussion on microaggressions at the University of
California, Irvine. Members of the panel had already discussed various
examples of microaggressions when the moderator, radio talk show host
Larry Mantle, invited questions from the audience. After calling on the
first questioner, Mantle asked, “Where are you from?” The audience
laughed, and though Mantle did not realize why at first, the questioner
explained: “People are laughing because of the question. I don’t need to
take offense at that because I’m part of the privileged majority who don’t
constantly have to put up with questions of where I’m from” (quoted in
Barbash 2015)
. But she had been asked just that. The question is c

Furedi points out that for the microaggres-sion complainant, “neither the content of the words nor the intention
behind them is important,” and he urges readers to ignore such com-plaints. “We all should be free to decide the meanings of our words,” he
concludes.

One final issue in the microaggression debate stems from the fact that
most slights and insults, whether real or imagined, are never labeled
microaggressions. Recognizing only some of them as such privileges some
victims over others. Opponents of affirmative action might be as offended
as its supporters upon hearing someone disagree with them, but it is “I
b
elieve the most qualified person should get the job” and not “I believe e
mployers should make ethnic diversity a goal in hiring decisions” that the University of California (2014) calls a microaggression. Likewise the
e
xamples suggest that only women or various minorities, such as blacks, Asians, Latinos, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) per-sons, can be victims of microaggression, though it is surely possible for
m
en to experience slights based on their sex or for whites to experience slights based on their ethnicity. Even some minority groups, such as
Mormons or evangelical Christians, are notably absent from the lists of
p

Returning to Derald Wing Sue’s example, he was clearly angry, but so
was the flight attendant. If we are simply talking about perceived insults,
why is the flight attendant’s behavior a microaggression but Sue’s behav-ior toward her is not? Surely suddenly having to deal with angry passen-g
ers berating her and accusing her of racism might have been as unpleasant a
n experience for the flight attendant as being asked to change seats to redistribute the weight on the plane was for the two professors. It also
likely would not have happened if she were not white. And the perceived
slights and snubs of day-to-day life are unpleasant even when they clearly
have nothing to do with one’s group identities. According to those pro-moting the concept, though, these are not microaggressions. “There was
a white, male elementary school teacher doing a workshop,” Sue says,
“talking about microaggression he experienced as a white male elementary
teacher. That’s a misapplication of the concept” (quoted in Hampson
2016). Whether an act is a microaggression depends not only on how it is
perceived, but also on who perceives themselves as being wronged by
w

Many of the critics have noted this. “Deciding who is eligible to com-plain about microaggressions,” according to blogger and journalist Megan
McArdle, “is itself an act by which the majority imposes its will” (McArdle
2015). And the linguist and political commentator John McWhorter says
that the way those calling attention to racial microaggressions tend to
e
mploy the concept “seems fixed so that whites can’t do anything right.” He says this creates “endless conflict, under an idea that basically being
white is, in itself, a microaggression.” He sees this as a kind of “bullying
disguised as progressive thought” (McWhorter 2014)

Critics like McWhorter see the bullying behavior more closely tied to
the concept itself. The recent term crybully, an amalgam of crybaby
and bully,
points

Kimball, a longtime critic of the campus left, says crybullies are “a new
academic phenomenon, at once tender and vicious,” that arises from rhet-oric about microaggressions (Kimball 2015)
. The English writer Julie Burchill describes crybullies as “a hideous hybrid of victim and victor,
weeper and walloper.” She says the crybully “always explains to the point
of demanding that one agree with them and always complains to the point
of insisting that one is persecuting them” (Burchill 2015). Lukianoff and
Haidt’s (2015) concept of vindictive protectiveness
is similar in that it points not only to the protectiveness of the microaggression program, as
it seeks to shield people “from words and ideas that make some uncom-fortable,” but also to the vindictiveness, as it “seeks to punish anyone who
interferes with that aim, even accidentally.”

p. 10

Microaggression and Moral Polarization

The two sides of the debate over microaggressions seem to share little
common ground. One side argues that microaggressions are “the new face
of racism,” that they “lead to macroaggressions,” or that they harm “stu-dent performance, mental health, and worker productivity” (Watanabe
and Song 2015)

Microaggression complaints arise from a culture
of victimhood in which individuals and groups display a high sensitivity to
slight, have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to authori-ties and other third parties, and seek to cultivate an image of being victims
who deserve assistance.

A Culture of Dignity

Honor has not disappeared. It is still prevalent throughout the Arab world,
a
nd enclaves of honor exist in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western nations, including among street gangs and other groups
of poor young men. Still, the prevailing culture in the modern West is one
whose moral code is nearly the exact opposite of that of an honor culture.
Rather than honor, a status based primarily on public opinion, people are
said to have dignity, a kind of inherent worth that cannot be alienated by
others (Berger 1970; Leung and Cohen 2011; Rosen 2012)
. Dignity exists independently of what others think, so a culture of dignity is one in
which public reputation is less important. Insults might provoke offense,
b
ut they no longer have the same impact as a way of establishing or destroying a reputation for bravery. People from dignity culture are less
touchy (Cohen et al. 1996)
. It is even commendable to have thick skin that allows one to shrug off slights and insults, and in a dignity-based
society parents might teach children some version of “sticks and stones
may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”—an idea that would
be alien in a culture of honor (Leung and Cohen 2011:509). People are
t
o avoid insulting others, too, whether intentionally or not, and in general an ethic of self-restraint prevails (Elias 1982:230–286; see, e.g., Vidich
and Bensman 1958:38–39, 45–46).5

A Culture of Victimhood

P 15

The ideals of dignity are no longer settled morality. The microaggression
program rejects one of dignity culture’s main injunctions—to ignore
i
nsults and slights—and instead encourages at least some people to take notice of them and take action against them. The idea is that such offenses
do cause harm, just like violence. Law professor Catharine Wells says,
“The time has come to recognize the harm that microaggressions cause to
women and people of color. There is an old saying about sticks and stones
and words that never hurt, but these words are hurtful” (2013:
337). She sees the physical pain and injury from “sticks and stones” as equivalent to
the emotional hurt said to result from microaggressions.

In rejecting dignity culture’s distinction between violent offenses and
merely verbal ones, victimhood culture resembles honor culture.
Honorable people are sensitive to insult, so they might understand how
microaggressions could be severe offenses demanding a serious response.
But honor cultures value unilateral aggression and disparage appeals for
help. Public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one’s own vic-t
imization and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor, tantamount to showing that one had no honor at all.6
Complaints about microaggressions combine the sensitivity to slight that we see in
honor cultures with the willingness to appeal to authorities and other third
parties that we see in dignity cultures. And victimhood culture differs from
both honor and dignity cultures in highlighting rather than downplaying
t

Remember that in a victimhood culture, along with the sensitivity to
slight goes a tendency to handle conflicts through appeals to third parties.
Sometimes appeals to third parties may simply be a matter of seeking sup-port and validation from one’s social media network and other distant
s
ympathizers, but for campus activists the focus is often on compelling authoritative action from administrators. At the University of Missouri,
the president and chancellor both resigned in the face of student protests

accusing them of not taking sufficient action when African American stu-dents reported being the targets of racial slurs (Gaude 2015; Severn
2015). Among the protesters’ demands were that the president “acknowl-edge his white male privilege,” and as a result of the uproar, campus police
now urge students to call them in cases where someone uses racial slurs
(S. Nelson 2015b; Severn 2015). For the protesters, failing to take drastic
action in response to verbal offenses made campus officials oppressors in
t
heir own right, and the students appealed to still higher authorities and public opinion at large to pressure the authorities out of their jobs.
Notably, one protester resorted to a hunger strike, a method of winning
a
ttention and sympathy by victimizing oneself. And win attention and sympathy it did, as the conflict drew the attention of the governor of
Missouri and sparked protests at colleges across the United States
(Hartocollis and Bidgood 2015). It may have even inspired a student at
Claremont McKenna College in California to threaten a hunger strike
when offended by an email written by the school’s dean, who quickly
offered her resignation when accused of verbally victimizing the school’s
Latina population (Margolis 2015)

Professors Erika and Nicholas Christakis of Yale University became the
targets of protests when students accused them of creating an unsafe space
for questioning whether the university should be involved in regulating
potentially offensive Halloween costumes. The protesters were unsatisfied
when Nicholas Christakis responded by offering an apology in which he
said he had “disappointed” the students who took offense when he
attempted to engage them in dialogue about the issue (Stanley-Becker
2015; Worland 2015). Eventually the Christakises resigned their positions
as the headmasters of one of Yale’s residential colleges, and Erika Christakis
left Yale entirely.

The targets of such complaints often apologize in some manner, as
Nicholas Christakis did; others fully capitulate and may even endorse fur-ther regulation from above. One University of Chicago student who was
s
anctioned for wearing a culturally insensitive Halloween costume, for example, stated that he agreed the university should do more to regulate
what costumes students wear (Coyne 2015)

The Christakises’ comments about the debates over Halloween cos-tumes were narrowly focused and fairly nuanced. Others have been more
sweeping in their criticisms of various manifestations of victimhood cul-ture and have likewise elicited strong reactions from campus activists.
When individualist feminist Wendy McElroy appeared at Brown University

to debate the merits of the term rape culture, some students set up a s
afe space for people who needed to escape from or recuperate from McElroy’s
arguments. This was a room with “cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play- Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as
well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma” (Shulevitz
2015). Student Emma Hall tells of attending part of the talk but retreat-ing to the safe space after “feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that
really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs” (quoted in Shulevitz
2015)

The emerging vic-timhood culture appears to share dignity’s disdain for risk, but it condones
c
alling attention to oneself as long as one is calling attention to one’s own hardships—to weaknesses rather than strengths and to exploitation rather
than exploits. For example, students writing personal statements as part of
t
heir applications for colleges and graduate schools often write not of t
heir academic achievements but instead—with the encouragement of the universities—about overcoming adversity such as a parent’s job loss or having
to shop at thrift stores (Lieber 2014).9 And in a setting where people
increasingly eschew toleration and publicly air complaints to compel offi-cial action, personal discomfort looms large in official policy. Consider
recent calls for trigger warnings
in college classes or on course syllabuses to forewarn students that they are about to be exposed to topics that
might cause them distress, such as when a guide for faculty at Oberlin
C
ollege (later withdrawn after faculty complaints) suggested that the novel Things Fall Apart, which takes place in colonial Nigeria, could “trig-ger students who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecu-tion, violence, suicide, and more” (quoted in Medina 2014). Similarly, at
Rutgers University an article in the student newspaper suggested that an

-testing) and Jigglypuff, the name of a Pokemon character (Dillon 2016) .9 Gender studies scholar Hugo Schwyzer (2006)
, in an essay critical of this phenomenon, complains that “too many of my students insist on writing essays that I can only describe as
‘narratives of suffering.’” As he puts it, possibly exaggerating in describing the logic of the
students’ letters, “If your parents are immigrants, mention it. If one of your parents drinks,
or is in prison, don’t hide it—wallow in it! If you moved around a lot, if you grew up sur-rounded by drugs or violence—share, share, share!” (Schwyzer 2006)

appropriate trigger warning for The Great Gatsby
would notify students that it depicted suicide, domestic abuse, and graphic violence (Wythe
2014; see also Jarvie 2014)

victimhood is a kind of moral status,

Moral Status and Victimhood

When we think of differences in social status, inequalities of wealth or
authority come readily to mind. The rich are higher in status than the
poor, and bosses are higher in status than their subordinates. Perhaps it is
less obvious that morality engenders a form of inequality. It does so in part
because people adhere to moral codes to different degrees, and others
punish or reward them accordingly. Engaging in deviant acts lowers one’s
moral status, as does being punished, fairly or not, for such behavior.
Conversely, engaging in praiseworthy acts or being rewarded for doing so
raises one’s moral status (Black 1976:111–112; Cooney 2009:
110–111). Whether and to what extent various kinds of conduct are deviant or praise-worthy varies, though, so we can identify different types of moral status.

various kinds of moral status normally increase or
decrease as a result of deviant or praiseworthy behavior. Sometimes,
though, being the victim of an offense might elevate one’s status regard-less of whether one has done anything praiseworthy. It is easy to see how
this could come to be. Holding the victim of an offense in higher regard
can be a way of reversing the harmful effects of the offense, and even a way
of punishing the offender, since one is rewarding the person the offender
wanted to harm or punish. This is victimhood, a kind of moral status based
on suffering and neediness. And if victimhood is a virtue, privilege is a vice.

It has the same relationship to victimhood that cowardice does to honor,
and admonitions to “check your privilege” are analogous to the shaming
of cowards that we see in honor cultures.

Victimhood exists in a variety of contexts, but like honor and dignity it
plays a greater role in some than in others. Those enmeshed in a culture of
victimhood might also value dignity and perhaps even elements of honor,
but to a greater degree than elsewhere they emphasize the moral worth of
v
ictims and their allies, while condemning the vice of privilege and the evil of oppression.

Now picture the opposite extreme: a setting where there is a
high level of deference to and concern for those who have been hurt,
oppressed, or in any way disadvantaged. Surely any offense against them
would seem especially odious, as would any failure to fully take their side.
If we came to view certain ethnicities and other groups of people as espe-c
ially vulnerable, we might condemn any banter that might make them uncomfortable as a kind of microaggression. We would worry that expo-sure to any reminders of their oppression would trigger their trauma. We
certainly would not minimize their victimhood or contest their definition
of the situation by telling them to develop thick skin, to ignore slights, and
to interpret others’ actions in the best possible light. We might instead
demand that authorities do something to protect them from all these
threats and remedy their situation, perhaps by creating safe spaces.
And those who see themselves as oppressed might agree, urging others to be
conscious of their privilege and circumspect in their words.

Calling it this highlights our con-cept of victimhood as moral status,

It does not imply anything about the motives or psychol-ogy of those who claim to have been hurt by others.

Note: perhaps that’s where neitzsche can come into play

It is likewise difficult to admit that privilege can ever be a liability.
Earlier we discussed Lukianoff and Haidt’s concept of vindictive

AND THE

p 25

protectiveness, which involves the tendency to punish offenders in the
name of guarding the feelings of those thought to be weak and disadvan-taged. They say this “creates a culture in which everyone must think twice
before they speak up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or
worse” (Lukianoff and Haidt 2015). The term crybully points to the same
t
hing. But the advocates of this type of morality seldom acknowledge they are harming, much less bullying, anyone. Not everyone can be recognized
as a victim, though, and designating one group as protected implicitly
designates others as unprotected. While some advocates justify this
inequality as serving the purpose of counterbalancing other systemic ineq-uities, such as the continuing effects of historic oppression, it seems that
others have difficulty recognizing that the distinction creates any inequal-i
t

Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. 2015. The Coddling of the American Mind.
The Atlantic, September. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/
archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/.

That it does so is an inevitable consequence of the culture, but it is
such a challenge to the culture’s core ideals that victimhood adherents
have developed a specialized vocabulary defining offenses in a way that
prevents speaking of members of dominant groups as victims.

They
might define racism so that blacks by definition cannot ever be racists or
whites victims of racism (Neff 2015), sexism so that women cannot be
sexist or men victims of sexism (Davoran 2015), and even censorship so
that “the oppressed by definition cannot censor their oppressor”
(Dean- Johnson et al. 2015).

Note: to me this seems like an attempt to reverse the power dynamics from a place of resentment

Neff, Blake. 2015. University Officer: Minority Women Can’t Be Racist. T
he Daily Caller, May 12. http://dailycaller.com/2015/05/12/university-diversity- officer-minority-women-cant-be-racist/.

Nelson, Libby. 2015a. Obama on Liberal College Students Who Want to Be
‘Coddled’: ‘That’s Not the Way We Learn.’ Vox, September 14. http://www.
vox.com/2015/9/14/9326965/obama-political-correctness.

Nelson, Steven. 2015b. Missouri Police Solicit Reports on ‘Hurtful’ Speech,
Startling Scholars. US News and World Report, November 11. http://www.
usnews.com/news/articles/2015/11/11/missouri-police- solicit-reports-on-hurtful-speech-startling-scholars.

C
HAPTER 2Microaggression and the Structure
of Victimhood

First of all, they involve the
p
ublic airing of grievances—complaining to outsiders. In this way microaggression complaints belong to a larger class of conflict tactics in
which people who have grievances appeal to third parties. Second, micro-aggression complaints are attempts to demonstrate a pattern of injustice,
a
nd in this way they belong to a class of tactics by which people persuade reluctant third parties that their cause is just and they badly need help.
And third, microaggression complaints are complaints about the domina-tion and oppression of cultural minorities.

Much of the social control that occurs in day-to-day life involves only
the aggrieved and the offender.1 Microaggression complaints are usually
different, however. When people post accounts of microaggressions on
websites, or when they report them to campus administrators, they are
publicly airing their grievances to people who might otherwise be unaware
of them. In doing so they recruit other people to join the conflict. And
they sometimes do so with the stated purpose of compelling further
a
ction—motivating either the general public or the authorities to take action against wrongdoing. Like gossipers, protesters, litigants, and so
many others, they seek to attract the attention, sympathy, or intervention
of third parties.

When law is weak or absent, how do people handle wrongdoing? How
do they respond to theft, assault, and other offenses? In times and places
where people cannot count on the legal system to protect their persons
and property, they often rely on violent aggression to defend themselves
and punish offenders. Students of law and social control refer to this kind
of aggression as self-help because the aggrieved parties take matters into
their own hands rather than relying on a legal system (Black 1998:74).5
O
ne of the most dramatic manifestations of self-help is vengeance killing, which may spark a cycle of retaliatory killings in the form of a blood feud—
two different kinship groups exchanging killings over time, a life for a life

(Black 2004). Stateless societies have a great deal of vengeance and other
kinds of self-help, and thus high rates of violence.6

Baumgartner, M.P. 1984. Social Control from Below. In Toward a General Theory
of Social Control. Volume 1: Fundamentals,
ed. Donald Black, 303–345. Orlando: Academic Press.

Resorting to police and courts is only a special case of relying on a third
party to handle the conflict (Black and Baumgartner 1983). As noted
a
bove people bring their complaints to other kinds of authorities, such as children complaining to parents or employees reporting misconduct to
their supervisor (Baumgartner 1984; Black 1998:85–88). All these behav-iors share a major social condition: The people involved in the dispute
have access to a higher-status third party. The third party might be some-o
ne only slightly higher in status, such as people in a tribal village bringing their dispute before a respected elder, or the third party might have the
p
ower and authority of the state. And just as law can discourage people from handling conflicts on their own, so too can other kinds of authori-ties. Whether these authorities actively suppress other ways of handling
conflict or merely provide an easy and appealing alternative, their presence
can lead to a kind of moral dependency.

We can observe this on college and university campuses, where adminis-trators often handle conflicts among students and faculty. Educational insti-tutions not only police such academic misconduct as cheating and plagiarism,
but also increasingly enact codes forbidding interpersonal offenses, such as
Fordham University’s ban on using email to insult another person, or New
York University’s prohibition of mocking others (Lukianoff 2014:41). When
two students at Dartmouth College were insulted by a third student who
“verbally harassed them by speaking gibberish that was perceived to be mock
Chinese,” they reacted not by confronting the offender but instead by
reporting the incident to the College’s Office of Pluralism and Leadership,
leading both the school’s Department of Safety and Security and its Bias
Incident Response Team to launch an investigation into the identity of the
offender (Owens 2013). In other social settings the same offense might have
met with a direct response, whether a complaint to the offender, a retaliatory
insult, or physical violence. But in a setting where a powerful organization
metes out justice, the aggrieved relied on complaint rather than action.

In sum, the presence of people of higher social status—especially those
such as legal officials or private administrators who are part of an organi-zational hierarchy—is conducive to reliance on third parties. But remem-ber that relying on third parties can involve more than complaining to
authorities. People might also bring their grievances to the attention of the

general public. This can be a powerful sanction in and of itself, possibly
shaming an offender, but it can also be a tool for motivating the authori-ties to intervene. Politicians and campus administrators might be reluctant
to act unless public opinion demands it.7 The core of much modern activ-ism seems to be to draw attention to grievances and so convince either the
public or authorities to remedy the situation.

Why
do they use the term aggression to refer to remarks or behaviors that might
otherwise be described as merely rude, awkward, or ignorant? The term
h
as the connotation of intentional attack, something generally viewed as more severe than the often inadvertent slights condemned as microaggres-sions. Calling them aggressions is a way of pointing out that they are part
of a pattern of systematic oppression. But why do microaggression com-plainants conceptualize and present the offenses this way, as part of a pat-tern rather than as isolated offenses? It is a way of campaigning for support.
Remember that the second major feature of microaggression complaints is
that they are attempts to convince third parties that the offenses are actu-ally severe enough to concern them. But why do they need convincing?

those who started the first websites dedicated to
documenting microaggressions stated that their aim was to call attention to
numerous offenses in order to demonstrate the existence of a larger pattern
of inequality. The concept of microaggression gained currency as part of a
movement seeking to make the case that, collectively, these offenses were
more severe than any individual incident. Those who publicize microag-gressions hope to draw support for a moral crusade by showing that the
injustices are more severe than observers might realize—that people

complaining about microaggressions are not, as some critics charge, merely
being oversensitive, given that, as one microaggression website puts it, the
“slow accumulation” of such offenses “during a childhood and over a life-time is in part what defines a marginalized experience” (Microaggressions
P roject 2014). In this view the offenses in question contribute to the mar-ginalization of entire groups of people. Either side in a conflict might cre-ate a reality tailored to portraying its adversary in the worst possible light,
and itself in the best, with the aim of convincing others to take sides. Thus
the movement to document microaggressions resembles other campaigns
to convince reluctant third parties to take sides and take action, from the
propaganda of political parties to the evidence presented in courts of law
(Feeley 1979:168–74; Cooney 1994; Pizzi 1999:

Partisanship is taking sides in a conflict, and like any other conflict behav-ior we can explain it with the social features of the conflict. Black’s theory
of partisanship identifies two conditions that make support from third

parties more likely. First, third parties are more likely to act as partisans
when they are socially closer to one side of the conflict than to the other,
as they take the side of the socially closer disputant (Black 1998:
126). They may be relationally closer to, or more intimate with, one side, or they
may be culturally closer, meaning they share social characteristics such as
religion, ethnicity, or language. All else equal, any social tie or social simi-larity a third party shares with one disputant but not the other increases
the chance of partisanship. For example, among the Arusha of Tanzania,
people are “readily able to determine their allegiance, or their exclusion
from allegiance, in a situation of conflict and dispute” based on member-ship in patrilineal kin groups and genealogical segments within those
groups (Gulliver 1963:118, quoted in Black 1998:
128). The Bedouins of Arabia express this sociological law of partisanship in the proverb “myself
against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my cousin, my
brother, and I against the stranger” (Murphy and Kasdan 1959:

Tribal and traditional societies are typically organized around kinship,
and kinship groups often have a level of intimacy and solidarity difficult for
people in more individualistic societies to imagine, leading to extremes of
partisanship when kin are wronged by outsiders. As Jared Diamond
observes, it can be difficult for modern people to understand how these
dense networks of lifelong ties affect the handling of conflict: “To us
Westerners, it seems absurd that the damaging of a garden of a member of
o
ne clan by a pig belonging to a member of another clan could trigger a w
ar between the two clans; to New Guinea Highlanders, that outcome is unsurprising” (Diamond 2013:90). The quasi-religious intensity of kin-ship ties helps explain why conflicts between people from groups with no
common connection are prone to escalate into collective violence (Cooney
1998:79; Senechal de la Roche 2001). Members of modern street gangs
also tend to have unusually close bonds and uphold partisanship toward
fellow gang members against outsiders as a “sacred duty” (Decker and Van
Winkle 1996:180, quoted in Cooney 1998:79). But note that the stron-gest partisanship requires a combination of closeness and distance. When
third parties are equally close to or distant from both sides, they tend
toward neutrality (Black 1998, see also Cooney 1998:Chapter 4).8

Second, third parties are more likely to act as partisans when one side
of a conflict is higher in status than the other, as they take the side of the
higher-status disputant (Black 1998:126). Social elites throughout history
have been able to count on the support of their subordinates: “In ancient
Rome, upper-class men … could rally a ‘gang’ of followers to resist their
legal opponents and enemies. In medieval England, where servants were
widespread (even among wealthier peasants), masters had similar advan-tages” (Black 1998:127, citations omitted). In modern societies those
with wealth and fame also attract more support in their conflicts, including
people willing to testify on their behalf in court (Cooney 2009:
92). A poor and disreputable person, such as a street-level drug dealer or home-l
ess vagrant, is unlikely to attract such spontaneous help, especially when facing wealthy and powerful opponents.

This is not to say that no one ever expresses greater sympathy toward
or tries to help the weaker party in a conflict. The entire basis of claims of
victimhood is to generate exactly this kind of sympathy. But such sympa-thy for the underdog is likely only under particular conditions, and the
more general pattern is for low-status people to attract less support against
high-status people than vice versa. Someone who lacks wealth and educa-tion, who has a bad reputation or criminal record, and who belongs to a
cultural minority will find it extremely hard if not impossible to attract
strong and uncompromising support against an adversary who is very
wealthy and educated, reputable, and part of the cultural majority.

We propose that active campaigns to convince third parties to give their
support are most likely to arise under conditions conducive to slow and
weak partisanship. In other words, efforts to produce and shape evidence

operate most frequently and effectively where third parties might be will-ing to take a side but are not certain to do so.

Campaigns will tend to be aimed at those who are not so close to the
aggrieved or distant from the adversary that their support is automatic,
but also not so distant from the aggrieved and close to the adversary that
it is unthinkable. Campaigns will be most frequent in social settings where
many third parties occupy a neutral zone and usually either do not get
involved at all or else just express a weak preference for one side or the
other. Again, quick, strong, certain partisanship occurs most frequently in
settings where people are divided up into groups that are internally solidary
b
ut mutually alien—like feuding clans in tribal societies. The opposite condition—social atomization, where people act as autonomous individu-als with little involvement in stable and solidary groups—leads to a decline
in strong partisanship (Senechal de la Roche 2001)

Social atomization is typically greater in present-day industrial societies
than in past societies. Large, dense populations and a market economy
require constant dealings with non-kin. Wealth and technology result in
high levels of geographic and social mobility. Formal schooling displaces
parental socialization, and insurance companies and state welfare agencies
reduce the need to rely on family in hard times. The breakdown of strong
communal bonds began long ago in the West, and in modern America and
elsewhere this social atomization has continued throughout the twentieth
century. In his book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam doc-uments the decline of a variety of voluntary organizations that were once
a part of the fabric of American communities, including religious congre-gations, social clubs, fraternal organizations like the Masons or Elks, and
parent–teacher associations (Putnam 2000)
. Even bowling leagues have s
een their memberships plummet, and as the title of Putnam’s book hints, it is not because fewer people bowl; it is because they are less likely to do
so as part of an enduring and formally organized group.9

The decline of dense networks of strong, enduring, and overlapping
bonds has two major results. The first is to render an increasing amount of
conflict private.10 Marital arguments, family quarrels, and tensions between
friends and neighbors increasingly occur behind closed doors and without
the involvement of anyone else at all.11
The second is that when people do seek the support of third parties, they are less likely to rely on a core group
of die-hard supporters and more likely to find themselves campaigning to
attract the attention and sympathy of distant acquaintances and total
s

Consider also the role of social status. Here too we expect to see cam-paigns for support flourishing when the conditions are conducive to weak
or hesitant partisanship rather than automatic support or automatic oppo-sition. Thus campaigns for support should be more likely when a person
or group has grievances against someone of higher status, but not when
the status differences between the two are at their most extreme.
Microaggression complaints have just that kind of structure. They are
typically complaints on behalf of cultural minorities or other social groups
that have lower aggregate status, such as lower levels of wealth, education,
and authority. Many are concerned with discrimination by white Americans
against black Americans, who as a group were historically dominated by
whites and who continue to have drastically lower levels of aggregate
wealth and education (see, e.g., Conley 1999). Microaggression com-p
laints also commonly have to do with slights against gays and lesbians, who have often been treated as deviant or disreputable. But note that
while microaggression complaints tend to be upward—minority against

majority, stigmatized against socially accepted—neither the complaints
nor the campaigns to publicize them come from the lowest reaches of
society. The concept of microaggression did not first proliferate among
the chronically poor, such as among the unemployed coal miners of
Eastern Kentucky or among the impoverished African Americans of
Baltimore or New Orleans. It first proliferated among college and univer-sity students, a relatively affluent, educated, and respectable population.
And the microaggression program seems to have developed most quickly
at elite institutions, such as private liberal arts colleges and Ivy League
universities. A minority student at Oberlin College or Harvard University
may indeed be from a lower-status background than the average Oberlin
or Harvard student, but compared to the US population as a whole, or
even to students at other colleges and universities, students at elite educa-tional institutions are not particularly lowly.

The socially down and out are unlikely to campaign for public support,
just as they are unlikely to receive it. To what potentially sympathetic pub-lic could a slave turn to for support against an unusually brutal master?
Slaves in the antebellum South might run away, or they might express
grievances in various covert ways, but they did not post lists of accumu-lated grievances in the local newspaper.12 Campaigns for support emerge
not where the structure of partisanship favors only strong allies or strong
enemies, but somewhere in between, where third parties offer only weak
or potential support.

the third notable feature of microaggres-sion complaints: that the grievances focus on inequality and oppression—
especially inequality and oppression based on cultural characteristics such

as ethnicity or gender. Microaggressions are offensive to those aggrieved
by them because they believe they perpetuate or increase the domination
of some persons and groups by others.

those who promulgate microaggression com-plaints would surely view criticism of minorities as the very kind of
oppression they seek to expose and eradicate. The phenomenon thus illus-trates a particular type of morality that is especially concerned with equal-ity and diversity and sees any act that perpetuates inequality or decreases
d
iversity a

Settings with little diversity are likely to develop a morality that values
cultural purity and is hostile to differences (Black 2011:144). In such set-tings, virtue means adhering to the accepted beliefs and rituals or family,
n
e

microaggression complainants collect and publicize accounts of
minor intercollective offenses, making the case that they are part of a larger
pattern of injustice and that those who suffer them are socially marginal-ized and deserving of sympathy. The phenomenon is sociologically similar
to other forms of social control that involve airing grievances to authorities
or to the public as a whole, that actively manage social information in a
campaign to convince others to intervene in some way, and that emphasize
the dominance of the adversary and the victimization of the aggrieved.

Under these conditions individuals are likely to
express grievances about oppression, and aggrieved individuals are likely
to depend on the aid of third parties, to cast a wide net in their attempt to
find supporters, and to campaign for support by emphasizing their own
need against a bullying adversary.

Social atomization has increased, undermining the tight-knit networks that
once encouraged confrontational modes of social control and provided indi-viduals with strong partisans, while at the same time modern technology has
allowed for mass communication to a virtual sea of weak partisans.

This last trend has been especially dramatic during the past decade, with
the result that aggrieved individuals can potentially appeal to millions of
third parties. In our experience with media services such as Twitter and
Facebook, we have noticed that many use these forums to publicly vent
grievances and to solicit sympathetic responses not only from friends but
also from distant acquaintances and total strangers.

Such Twitter
campaigns—sometimes referred to as hashtag activism—are effectively epi-sodes of mass gossip in which hundreds, thousands, or perhaps millions of
third parties discuss deviant behavior and express support for one side
against another. Like gossip in the small town or village, such public com-plaining may be the sole way of handling the conflict, or it might eventually
lead to further action against the deviant, such as dismissal by supervisors or
investigation by legal authorities. As social media becomes ever more ubiq-uitous, the ready availability of the court of public opinion may make public
disclosure of offenses an increasingly likely course of action.

We have discussed how microaggression complaints illustrate a
morality that values diversity and is highly sensitive to intolerance of dif-ferences. But some manifestations of victimhood culture also display a
kind of intolerance to difference and disagreement. The same progressive
activists who campaign against microaggressions might also call for the
banning of conservative speakers, for the forbidding of displays of support
for certain political candidates, and for the creation of safe spaces where
progressive ideas can go unchallenged by opposing views. They might also
express extreme vitriol toward those holding views that are considered
fairly moderate elsewhere in society. So in addition to the morality of tol-erance, in which differences are celebrated, there also appears to be a
morality of purity, in which differences are offensive.

Note: they’re not just hostile towards viewpoints from anyone right to them on the political spectrum, they’re hostile towards any criticism even from there own side. The problem isn’t that there isn’t enough conservatives, it’s the demand for ideological uniformity

The morality of tolerance and the morality of purity are opposites, and
they arise from opposite conditions: Diversity breeds tolerance, and homo-geneity breeds purity. How then is it possible for both to arise in the same
setting? It is possible because there are multiple dimensions of diversity. A
social setting might have a lot of racial diversity, but not religious diversity,
a lot of political diversity, but no linguistic diversity, and so on. Because
different dimensions of diversity can vary independently, a social setting
might engender tolerance of one kind of diversity, such as ethnic diversity,
and intolerance of another, such as political diversity.

This appears to be the situation on many campuses. Only 12 percent
of US university faculty identify as politically conservative, and the
proportion is even smaller in the social sciences and humanities, where
many scholars openly identify as leftwing activists seeking to advance their
political views through scholarship and teaching (Haidt et al. n.d.). Yet
political and social conservatives are not a small minority in the larger
society, and they are not a historically disadvantaged group that attracts
sympathy and support in an egalitarian culture. Indeed, conservatives
often oppose the preferred policies of campus activists and are openly
critical of their views. The result is they are often treated not only as
political adversaries, but as heretics who pollute the ideological purity
of politically homogeneous environments. Microaggression complaints
do not deal with slights against these ideological minorities, and the
champions of victimhood culture on college campuses freely demonize

the enemies in their midst. Yet even as they do so, they do so in terms of
the framework of victimhood culture: Those who disagree are racist,
misogynist, ableist, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, and so
forth. They are bullies who attack those who are disadvantaged and dif-ferent. Blind to their power and privilege, they victimize entire classes of
vulnerable and sympathetic people. Their offense is severe, and must be
m
a

C
HAPTER 3Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces,
and the Language of Victimhood

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Sociologist Frank Furedi argues that for Western society as a
whole safety has become a moral value, such that “the term ‘safe’ signals
more than the absence of danger: It also conveys the connotation of a
virtue.

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C
HAPTER 5Opposition, Imitation, and the Spread
of Victimhood

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Any individual person can be classified in terms of multiple socially
meaningful categories. A person might be black or white, male or
female, gay or straight, Christian or Muslim, and so forth. This means
that many people will have memberships in some more disadvantaged
categories but also in some more advantaged ones. And those who com-bine many victim identities will claim and be accorded greater moral

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status than those with only a few. The result is that not even members
of marginalized groups are safe from accusations of being privileged and
insensitive to the suffering of the less fortunate. A gay man who cri-tiques heteronormativity, homophobia, and straightsplaining may in
turn be criticized for being a man (and thus more privileged than a
woman, especially a lesbian) as well as for identifying with his biological
sex (making him less oppressed than a transgender person).

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For exam-ple, in 2016 the UK’s National Union of Students’ LGBT Campaign
passed a motion for campus LGBT groups to exclude gay men because
they “don’t face oppression” (Duffy 2016). The author of an essay in
Jezebel begins with, “I am a white, cisgender gay guy … the queer
equivalent of ‘The Man’ … parties become less diverse when I walk in”
before asking, “Can a nontrans, white gay man ever truly leave the com-forts of his own identity without having to make frequent and loud
apologies for the crimes of his ilk?” (Rosen 2011, cited in Bovy
2017:35). In 2017 three Jewish participants in an annual Chicago
LGBT event called the “Dyke March” were asked to leave because they
carried a rainbow colored flag emblazoned with the Star of David, a
symbol of Judaism. They were told the flag, a symbol of LGBT Jewish
identity, “made people feel unsafe” because the Star of David is also on
the Israeli flag, and the march was “pro-Palestinian” and “anti-Zionist”
(Haaretz 2017). That same year, the black director of the Claremont
colleges’ LGBT center tweeted his preference to keep his distance from
“white gays and well- meaning white women” (Dordick 2017)

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Such infighting between activists and victim groups is sometimes
referred to as a purity spiral.
The idea is that members of ideological and religious movements might strive to outdo one another in displays of
zealotry, condemning and expelling members of their own movement for
smaller and smaller deviations from its core virtues. Perhaps only a minor-ity of the most aggressive members take the lead in this, but because fail-ing to condemn deviants opens one up to charges of being deviant oneself,
others tend to either join in or passively acquiesce.14 The result is an ever- increasing demand for moral purity, and ever-greater effort to meet the
standards of the group.

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14 For this reason people may even condemn others for failing to adhere to norms they
themselves privately reject (Willer et al. 2009).

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In a victimhood culture, purity spirals revolve around claims of vic-timhood, privilege, and oppression. They are led by those with the great-est victimhood status and those who have the greatest sensitivity to
slight. And their primary targets are not those fully outside of the cul-ture, and thus less sensitive to the opinions of its members. Instead it is
ideological sympathizers and allies who most fear being shamed. Writing
in The National Post, Jonathan Kay argues that aggressive leftist Twitter
users act as a “crowdsourced ideological autocracy” whose shaming tac-tics primarily victimize “public figures who … are creatures of the left …
since these are the same figures whose legitimacy as politicians, activists
and writers depends” on appeasing those who shame them.15 He notes
that “elected politicians and established mainstream media figures” are
especially likely to attract social media shaming because “the more actual
power one is perceived as having in a society suffused with sexism, het-eronormativity, white supremacism etc., the less moral capital is ascribed
to you” (Kay 2017). But even rank and file activists may live in fear of
being shunned. “There is an underlying current of fear in my activist
communities,” writes graduate student Frances Lee. “It is the fear of
appearing impure. Social death follows when being labeled a ‘bad’ activ-ist or simply ‘problematic’ enough times” (Lee 2017). Lee goes on to
e
laborate:I self-police what I say in activist spaces. I stopped commenting on social
m
edia with questions or pushback on leftist opinions for fear of being called out. I am always ready to apologize for anything I do that a community
member deems wrong, oppressive, or inappropriate—no questions asked.
The amount of energy I spend demonstrating purity in order to stay in the
good graces of a fast-moving activist community is enormous…. At times, I
have found myself performing activism more than doing activism. I’m
exhausted, and I’m not even doing the real work I am committed to do.
(Lee 2017)

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Given the activists’ goals, such attempts to vie for superior moral status
and purify their own ranks are likely counterproductive. Social move-ments succeed by growing and expanding their numbers and by winning
the support and patronage of the powerful and influential. Expelling
those who are insufficiently righteous hampers the growth of any reli-gious or ideological movement and may present a special challenge for a
movement that condemns privilege. Writing in The Guardian, Zoe
Williams argues, “If only the truly marginalised can speak as feminists,
that depletes our numbers…. And if people ‘with a platform’ are disquali-fied for being part of the power structure, that leaves us without a plat-form” (Williams 2013, quoted in Bovy 2017:174). Thus, among those
who have adopted victimhood culture, competitive victimhood can
simultaneously lead to an intensification of their morality as well as sow-ing divisions that slow its spread.

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C
HAPTER 7Victimhood, Academic Freedom,
and Free Speech

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Nicholas and Erika Christakis at Yale could likewise say that the activ-ists hounding them did not even pretend the professors had injured them
in any way. But again, the students of both periods have a higher sensitivity
to slight and different conceptions of injury. Only now it is the culture of
victimhood rather than the culture of honor that is causing tumult on
c
ampuses and leading to the intimidation of faculty and students as they s

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Across societies and across history, few moral cultures have valued free
speech much. Even societies that do value it still restrict some kinds of
speech. And voluntary associations of all kinds tend to restrict speech for-mally or informally.

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For several reasons, though, victimhood culture is
particularly hostile to free speech. It shares with honor culture a tendency
to perceive and to react to slights and a tendency to blur the distinction
between speech and violence. And even more so than honor culture its
strictures are potentially all encompassing. Small talk and course lectures,
jokes and hobbies, books and tweets, artistic expressions, and scientific
theories—just about anything might cause offense, with offended parties
demanding offenders be silenced, fired, assaulted, banished, or reedu-cated.

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Surely not all speech is of equal value. Why should we tolerate speech that
is boring, impertinent, hateful, or wrong? If ideas have consequences, why
should we allow people to spread ideas that will corrupt minds and disrupt
the social order?

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Are we really supposed to tolerate error? Free speech
advocates say yes. Nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart
Mill put it this way: “If all mankind minus one were of an opinion, man-kind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he
had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind” (2005:
42). In this view other people, no matter how numerous or powerful, simply have
no right to prevent you from thinking freely and expressing your thoughts.

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Mill went further. Silencing speech is an offense against those who are
prevented from speaking, but also against those prevented from hearing
them. On this point nineteenth-century abolitionist and former slave
Frederick Douglas was in agreement. “To suppress free speech is a double
wrong,” said Douglas. “It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those
of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to hear and
speak as it would be to rob him of his money” (quoted in Smith 2017)
. Mill likened speech suppression to robbery as well: “The peculiar evil of
silencing an expression of opinion,” he said, “is that it is robbing the
human race, posterity as well as the existing generation—those who dis-sent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is
right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth;
if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception
and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error” (Mill
2005:42). In other words, whatever speech we would wish to silence
might be correct, or partly correct. And calling “any proposition certain,
while there is anyone who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who
is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with
us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side”
(Mill 2005:47–48). But suppose we do know for certain an idea is wrong.
Even so, it benefits us to be exposed to wrong ideas. Otherwise we become
unable to defend and ultimately unable to understand the correct ideas we
hold. We come to hold them “in the manner of a prejudice,” and their
meaning is “in danger of becoming lost, or enfeebled” (Mill 2005:
83). “
He who knows only his own side of the case,” Mill said, “knows little of that” (2005:

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Where the culture is generally hospita-ble to free speech, those restrictions tend to be narrow. Most groups do
not expect conformity on all matters, and in any case there is plenty of
interaction with outsiders and exposure to other views. But if tolerance for

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diverse ideas is not the norm, and if informal speech restrictions become
so extreme and commonplace that people are reluctant to express themselves
and rarely come into contact with unconventional ideas, then the dominant
beliefs will go untested. A society where expressing unpopular ideas means
you will be fired from any job, exposed in the media, and shunned by the
community is not the kind of free speech society Mill described, even if you
will not be burned at the stake. Still, government repression—burning her-etics, sending dissidents to the Gulag—has historically been a major obstacle
to free speech, and drawing from Enlightenment ideals, liberal democracies
have typically allowed government regulation of speech only within strict
limits. This has been especially true of the United States.

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Still, the US Supreme Court has allowed for a number of exceptions—
that is, expression the government may restrict. Generally, what are known
as content-neutral “time, place, and manner” restrictions on expression
are more acceptable than content-based restrictions. Banning loudspeakers
i
n a neighborhood after 10:00 p.m. would be content neutral, while banning speech about abortion would be content based (Weinstein
2009:82). Acceptable content-based restrictions fall into a number of spe-cific categories—for example, obscenity, child pornography, indecency,
defamation, harassment, fighting words, true threats, incitement, copy-right and trademark violations, speech that endangers national security,
and the disclosure of certain kinds of personal information (Melkonian
2012:8; Silvergate et al. 2012; Weinstein 2009:82). Governments can
regulate some of these and other exceptions only minimally, while they

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can ban others completely, but they can almost never regulate expression
based on the opinion that it conveys. This is known as viewpoint discrimi-nation, which the twentieth- century Supreme Court Justice William
Brennan once called “censorship in its purest form” (quoted in Silvergate
et al. 2012:83). Thus, unlike in many liberal democracies, there is no
exception for what is sometimes called hate speech. A number of other lib-eral democracies do have hate speech bans, but as James Weinstein points
out, this is an example of a “speech regulation that would be summarily
invalidated under contemporary American free speech jurisprudence”
(2009:84). In general, whereas other countries “tend to employ soft, flex-ible standards that balance the free speech interest at issue in a particular
case against the government’s interest in suppressing the speech, American
doctrine is determined by hard-edged, determinative rules” (Weinstein
2009:90). This is deliberate. The idea is that clear rules should protect free
speech by constraining the discretion of governments, and they should
enable people to know “with adequate certainty what they can safely say”
(Weinstein 2009:

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The Court has defined each free speech exception very narrowly so that
governments cannot simply prohibit unpopular speech by labeling it
obscenity, incitement, harassment, defamation, or whatever. Consider def-amation. Legal scholar Harry Melkonian describes “the right to reputa-tion protected by privacy and defamation laws” as “one of the countervailing
values to freedom of expression” (2012:xxvii).

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Sociologist Peter Berger pointed out that in American
l
aw “insult itself is not actionable,” and the fact that it is not, he said, is an indicator of “the obsolescence of the concept of honor” (1970:
339). Defamation is not mere insult; it usually must involve material damage or
at least psychic harm, “a far cry from a notion of offence against honor”
(Berger 1970:339). It also must be false, so true statements or opinions
cannot be defamation no matter how much they harm someone’s reputa-tion. Defamation law means free speech is not absolute, but its narrowness
points to the weight that dignity cultures give to free speech over other
ideals, particularly in the United States, where “the preference for free-dom of speech found in modern U.S. Supreme Court interpretations of

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the First Amendment” contrasts sharply with, say, “the extremely strict
common law libel regime in Australia” (Melkonian 2012:

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When people talk about universities pursuing truth, what they usually have in
mind, Williams notes, is “not a search for an ultimate truth for all time, but a
contestable truth … [to] be countered and superseded when new and better
knowledge” comes along (2016:15).

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Campus activists, though, may believe
they possess the full truth already. Unlike others they are aware, conscious, or
in the know—or to use a more recent term, woke (Hess 2016). Or they may
see all truth claims as exercises of power. In any case, for them the university’s
mission is social justice rather than truth. The university is not to be a place
where people hash out ideas and where even error is tolerated because others
are free to contest it. It is to be set apart from the larger society not as a haven
of free expression, but instead as a safe space where students are protected
from oppression. As they see it, those defending the permissibility of speech
that causes harm are defending oppression. Some activists even mock free
speech advocates as defenders of what they call freeze peach (Lee 2013).3

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Obviously censorship is not new, but the rationale for it now tends to
arise from the ideals of victimhood culture. Political scientist April Kelly- Woessner (2015) finds that today’s young people are actually less politically

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tolerant than the previous generation, a reversal of a 60-year-old trend.
And among the younger generation (those under 40), those who are most
concerned about social justice are the most intolerant.

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campus activists have come
to believe they may “limit the rights of their political opponents, so long as
they frame their intolerance in terms of protecting others from hate”
(Kelly-Woessner 2015)

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The offensiveness of speech is often less about what people say than about
wh

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A speaker’s social position matters in other kinds of status systems,
too, such as in the Jim Crow South, where blacks could not say certain
things to or about whites. Free speech thrives more easily in a culture of
dignity because the egalitarian idea of everyone’s equal worth leads to the
i

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Victimhood culture again makes social identity central to the moral
analysis of speech. The speech of the oppressed is different from that of
the oppressors and the privileged. This is why some people are told to
check their privilege when speaking about certain topics (e.g., Dang
2017). This is why, as we saw in Chap. 1, Derald Wing Sue says a white
male elementary school teacher cannot be the victim of microaggressions
(Hampson 2016). It is why, as we also saw previously, some activists
argue that censorship on behalf of the oppressed should not even be
called censorship (“The oppressed by definition cannot censor their
oppressor”) (Dean-Johnson et al. 2015). It is why, according to journal-ism professor Jelani Cobb, “the arguments about the freedom of speech
become most tone deaf” when they fail to take into account that “the

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freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully
the relatively disempowered” (2015). And it is why Ulrich Baer, Vice
Provost for Faculty, Arts, Humanity, and Diversity at New York University,
says, “Some topics, such as claims that some human beings are by defini-tion inferior to others, or illegal or unworthy of legal standing, are not
open to debate because such people cannot debate them on their own
terms.” An “absolute notion of free speech” thus places “under severe
attack” the legal and cultural rights “of minorities to participate in public
discourse” (Baer 2017)

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If people experience speech differently based on their victimhood status,
censorship of the speech of the powerful might be needed to protect the
powerless. Some campus activists have even begun to argue that speech
that harms the powerless is actually violence, or something akin to it, and
that if administrators and other authorities will not protect students from
this violence, the students have the right to protect themselves.

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For exam-ple, after rioters at UC Berkeley forced the cancellation of an event featur-ing right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, the student run newspaper
The Daily Californian published “Violence as Self Defense,” a collection
of articles defending “the use of violence in protests” (Senju 2017)
. The contributors view Yiannopoulos’s presence as an act of violence against the
campus community, which means the protesters were only defending
themselves when they used violence to prevent him from speaking. In this
view the defenders of free speech who wanted the talk to go on were as
complicit in the “violence” as Yiannopoulos and the student group that
was hosting him. According to Berkeley alumna Nisa Dang, “asking peo-p
le to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who literally do not think their lives matter is a violent act.” And to Yiannopoulos she has this to say:
“Here’s a big fuck you from the descendants of people who survived
genocides by killing Nazis and people just like them” (Dang 2017)
. B
erkeley student Juan Prieto chides the university for not being “bold e
nough to stand against hate and cancel the speech,” and he praises those who used violence to do so: “A peaceful protest was not going to cancel
that event, just like numerous letters from staff, faculty, Free Speech
Movement veterans and even donors did not cancel the event. Only the
destruction of glass and shooting of fireworks did that…. Everything else
w

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place on our campus” (Prieto 2017). Neil Lawrence, himself one of the
masked protesters, has a similar argument for those who think the tactics
were too extreme: “I understand…. But when you consider everything
that activists already tried—when mass call-ins, faculty and student objec-tions, letter writing campaigns, numerous op-eds (including mine), union
g
rievances and peaceful demonstrations don’t work, when the nonviolent tactics have been exhausted—what is left?” He says the acts of violence
were actually “acts of self defense” and ends with a warning to Yiannopoulos
and those who invited him: “Our shields are raised against you. No one
will protect us? We will protect ourselves” (Lawrence 2017). Another pro-tester, Desmond Meagley, writes, “I put my safety and freedom on the line
because letting Yiannopoulos speak was more terrifying to me than poten-tial injury or arrest.” To anyone who condemns “the actions that shut
down Yiannopoulos’ literal hate speech,” he says, “you condone his pres-ence, his actions and his ideas; you care more about broken windows than
broken bodies” (Meagley 2017)

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The idea of speech as violence might seem like a fringe view, but soci-ologist Laura Beth Nielsen (2017), writing in the Los Angeles Times
in favor of hate speech restrictions, makes a similar argument. She says that if
we think of speech restrictions as efforts to avoid hurt feelings, we will
rightly prefer to have free speech. But the idea that we are only talking
about hurt feelings, she says, “demonstrates a profound misunderstanding
of how hate speech affects its targets.” Racist hate speech is much more
like violence in the harm it does, given that research has linked it to “ciga-rette smoking, high blood pressure, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic
stress disorder.” Nielsen does not call such speech violence, exactly, but
she says it is not “just speech” because it results in “tangible harms that are
serious in and of themselves and that collectively amount to the harm of
subordination” (Nielsen 2017)

Note: if such stress comes from bring offended, then it’s self imposed harm

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Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) is another prominent propo-nent of this view. She writes in the New York Times
that speech can have powerful and negative physical effects, including illness and aging. It can
do so by causing stress, but merely offensive speech that causes only short
bouts of stress is not harmful and can even be beneficial. Abusive
speech, however, causes “long stretches of simmering stress.” Barrett says this dis-tinction can guide us deciding whether or not to ban speakers from cam-pus. In her view students at Middlebury College were wrong to try to
prevent political scientist Charles Murray from speaking there. She says
that Murray’s arguments about racial differences in IQ scores—the impe-

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tus behind the desire to ban him—might be offensive but are not abusive.
She says Milo Yiannopoulos should be banned from campuses, though,
because he engages in abusive speech. Speech like Yiannopoulos’s “bullies
and torments” people, and “from the perspective of our brain cells … is
literally a form of violence” (Barrett 2017)

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2
30 free speech to as small a space as possible” (2014:
Chapter 3). Another decades-old threat is the speech codes on many campuses that prevent
students from using racial epithets and other kinds of slurs.
For as long as these speech restrictions have been around, they have
been subject to criticism, legal challenges, and mockery. As we noted in
Chap. 5, critics in the 1980s and 1990s began describing efforts to reform
and police language as political correctness. Examples include efforts to
classify as offensive previously unoffensive words like “fireman” (to be
replaced with “firefighter”) or “wife” (to be replaced with “partner”).
Political correctness might also refer to efforts to classify as racial slurs
words that had never had any racial connotation. One notorious case of
this occurred in 1993 when the University of Pennsylvania charged a
Jewish student with racial harassment for yelling, “Shut up, you water buf-falo!” out of his window when his study was disturbed by noise from
members of a black sorority. The idea behind the charge was that w
ater buffalo was an anti-black slur no one had heard before. It was in fact a
translation of a Hebrew colloquialism applied to rowdy or thoughtless
p
eople, and the negative media attention eventually led the university to drop its case against the student (Lukianoff 2014:
Chapter 2). In another case, this one from the late 1990s, a supporter of the University of
Wisconsin’s speech code attempted to provide an example of why it was
needed by reporting to the Faculty Senate that a professor had used the
word niggardly while teaching about Chaucer (who used the word in his
work). Niggardly means miserly, and it has no relation to the racial epithet
nigger,
but the student described herself as “in tears, shaking” even after the professor explained it. “It’s not up to the rest of the class to decide
whether my feelings are valid,” she said (quoted in Kors 1999)
. This complaint ended up turning opinion against the speech code—the oppo-site of what the complainant intended. An editorial in the Wisconsin State
Journal even thanked the complainant “for clarifying precisely why the
UW-Madison does not need an academic speech code” (quoted in Kors
1999)

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Then as now, most speech restrictions were attempts to protect mem-bers of historically disadvantaged groups. Still, despite excesses like these,
speech restrictions were supposed to be about intentional racial and ethnic
slurs and the like. More recently, though, with the ascendance of a full- blown campus victimhood culture, activists and administrators have
dropped the pretense that they only want to interfere with the most offen-sive speech. The entire microaggression program is rooted in the notion

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that when members of victim groups interact with outgroups they are
constantly wounded by inadvertent slights. This is not just a matter of
activists trying to raise awareness about microaggressions, either. We have
seen that universities themselves address microaggressions in documents
and training programs, with the University of California and universities
throughout the country encouraging faculty to avoid microaggressions
like “Why are you so quiet?” and “America is a melting pot.” Remember
too that the lists of microaggressions are not exhaustive; anything could
be a microaggression, including, presumably, saying water buffalo or nig-gardly, since the microaggressor’s intentions do not matter. The Wisconsin
student’s insistence that it was not up to others to decide whether her
feelings were valid is now in line with many universities’ official policies.
Universities trying to involve themselves in preventing or punishing
microaggressions are claiming jurisdiction over every word spoken on
campus, over every glance or expression. Under any conception of free
speech the exceptions are rare while most speech is protected, but this is
far from that. The logic of victimhood culture means no speech is clearly
protected.

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In Chap. 1 we discussed the many efforts (sometimes successful) to prevent
Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro from speaking on campuses whenever
a university student group invites one of them. DePaul University has
banned them both, and at public universities, which are not free to engage
in viewpoint discrimination, activist students and faculty mobilize against
their presence. At Berkeley university officials cancelled a Yiannopoulos
event out of safety concerns after a riot by students and others opposed to
the event resulted in $100,000 worth of damage to the university. Ann
Coulter is another conservative speaker who attracts controversy, and not
long after the anti-Yiannopoulos riots, two student groups who were spon-soring a talk Coulter was to give at Berkeley cancelled it due to threats of
violence (Peters and Fuller 2017)

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In early 2017 Murray was to
give a talk based on this book at Middlebury College, but some students
wanted to prevent this based in part on their belief that Murray was a
white supremacist.

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Charles Murray is a libertarian political scientist with
the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank,

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Yet when it came time for Murray to speak at Middlebury, dozens of
students stood up and turned their backs to him while chanting things like
“Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray go away!” (quoted in Seelye
2017).5 As this went on, Middlebury professor Allison Stanger, a liberal
who had been invited to debate Murray after his talk, implored, “Can you
just listen for one minute,” noting that she had spent time preparing dif-ficult questions. “No,” the students replied (quoted in Beinart 2017)
. With Murray unable to give the talk, the organizers moved the partici-pants to a secret location where it would be broadcast for those who
wanted to hear it. The protesters discovered the location, though, and
when the talk was finished surrounded the participants as they tried to
leave. They assaulted Stanger, who later went to the hospital and received
a neck brace, and when Murray, Stanger, and others got into a car, the
protesters jumped on the hood and made the car rock back and forth.
Once Murray and Stanger got away, they ended up leaving town after
learning the students also planned to disrupt their planned dinner at a
local restaurant (Beinart 2017; Seelye 2017)

258

Similar treatment awaited another conservative scholar when she came
to speak at Claremont McKenna College. Heather Mac Donald, who is
affiliated with the Manhattan Institute think tank, is a critic of the Black
L
ives

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A number of students at Claremont McKenna and the other nearby
Claremont colleges, though, did not believe Mac Donald’s arguments
were worth reckoning with. They characterized her views as denying that
blacks have a right to exist, and they called her a “fascist, a white suprema-c
ist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, [and] a classist … [who is] ignorant of interlocking systems of domination” (quoted in Friedersdorf

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2017).6 When it came time for her talk, 250 protesters blocked the
entrance of the building where she was supposed to speak. Out of safety
concerns she then spoke in a secret location to small number of people
while the talk was live-streamed to a larger audience. Protesters found the
new location and were waiting outside, but as Mac Donald explains, “An
escape plan through the kitchen into an unmarked police van was devised.
I was surrounded by about four cops. Protesters were sitting on the stoop
outside the door … but we had taken them by surprise and we got through
them” (quoted in Blume 2017)

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A
t this point it might still be tempting to think this kind of thing only affects certain kinds of speech or certain kinds of people. If it is not just
right-wing provocateurs, maybe it is just conservatives, or just invited
speakers, who are the targets. But remember from previous chapters that
Yale students vilified Erika and Nicholas Christakis over an email Erika
sent about Halloween costume policies. The Christakises were neither
outsiders nor conservatives. Neither was Evergreen State College biology
professor Bret Weinstein. Since the 1970s Evergreen had observed a tradi-tion called the “Day of Absence,” where nonwhite faculty and students
would leave the campus and meet elsewhere as a symbolic act to show how
valuable nonwhites are in the life of the college. In 2017, though, the
organizers reversed this and asked white faculty and students to leave
instead. Weinstein objected. “There is a huge difference,” he wrote,
“between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves
from a shared space to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles
and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away.” The lat-ter, he said, “is an act of oppression in and of itself” (quoted in Weiss
2017). About 50 student protesters confronted him and demanded he
“stop supporting white supremacy” (quoted in Weiss 2017)
, that he “stop telling people of color they’re fucking useless,” and that he “get the fuck
out of here” (quoted in Dreher 2017b). When students asked Weinstein

260

for an explanation of his remarks, he asked, “May I answer that question,”
only to receive an emphatic “No!” from the crowd (quoted in Dreher
2017b). Weinstein left campus and held class elsewhere when police told
him they could not ensure his safety, and the activists then put “Fire Bret”
graffiti around campus and put the names and pictures of his students
online (Weiss 2017). Shortly after all of that, Evergreen’s president,
George Bridges, held a town hall meeting where he said he was “grateful
to the courageous students who expressed their concerns” and for “this
catalyst to expedite the work to which we are jointly committed” (quoted
in Haller 2017; Weiss 2017).7

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Note that what seems most dangerous is criticism of any of the mani-festations of victimhood culture or challenges to its core ideology.

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This is
perhaps the only thing Milo Yiannopoulos, Brett Weinstein, and the oth-ers we have talked about have in common with each other. It is also what
they have in common with theologian Paul Griffiths of Duke Divinity
School. When Professor Anathea Portier-Young sent out an email on
behalf of the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Standing Committee encour-aging faculty to attend the Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training, which
she described as a first step in ensuring that Duke Divinity School becomes
“an institution that is both equitable and anti-racist in its practices and
culture,” Griffiths responded, describing the training as “a waste” and
encouraging others not to attend: “It’ll be, I predict with confidence,
intellectually flaccid: there’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen corner
rah- rahs in plenty. When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and
totalitarian tendencies will show.” Griffiths encouraged faculty to focus
instead on their mission as faculty of the Divinity School: “to think, read,
write, and teach about the triune Lord of Christian confession” (quoted in
Dreher 2017a)

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Elaine Heath, Dean of the Duke Divinity School, responded with a
mass email chastising Griffiths for making “disparaging statements—
including arguments ad hominem—in order to humiliate or undermine
individual colleagues or groups of colleagues” he disagreed with. “The use
of mass emails,” she added, “to express racism, sexism, or other forms of

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bigotry is offensive and unacceptable, especially in a Christian institution.”
Another professor responded to defend Griffiths, noting that Griffiths was
only saying publicly what others were saying privately and disputing
Heath’s claim that Griffiths had expressed “racism, sexism, or other forms
of bigotry.” “To suggest anything of the sort,” he said, “strikes me as
either gravely imperceptive or as intellectually dishonest” (quoted in
Dreher 2017a). Heath did not retract her claims, though, and instead
summoned Griffiths to a meeting so that she could talk with him about
professional conduct. When they were unable to agree on the terms of the
meeting, Heath banned Griffiths from faculty meetings and from access to
travel funds (Dreher 2017a). Meanwhile Portier-Young, the professor
w
ho had sent out the email about the training session, filed a complaint against Griffiths with the university’s Office of Institutional Equity on the
basis that he had engaged in racist and sexist speech that created a hostile
work environment. Soon afterward Griffiths resigned from his position
with Duke (Beyer 2017)

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T
hough speech that challenges the ideals and practices of victimhood culture provokes activists the most, they may punish professors for other
kinds of speech as well. Even those who identify with the activists are not
immune. Certainly Mary Spellman, Dean of Students at Claremont
McKenna, had no idea she would cause offense when she wrote to thank
a student for sharing her article. The student, Lissette Espinosa, had writ-ten an op-ed about her struggles as a working-class Mexican–American
s
tudent. When Espinosa emailed the op-ed to Spellman, Spellman responded by asking if Espinosa would like to meet with her some time.
“We have a lot to do as a college and a community,” Spellman wrote, add-ing that the issues the student raised were important to her and to her
staff, and that they were “working on how we can better serve students,
especially those who do not fit our CMC [Claremont McKenna College]
mold” (quoted in Shire 2015). That she was agreeing with Espinosa was
clear, but student activists treated the part about fitting the mold not as
clumsy phrasing but as if Spellman were declaring Espinosa did not belong
at the college. Soon there were protests and hunger strikes, and Dean
Spellman eventually resigned.

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Some students had
begun writing the latter phrase on each other’s white boards, and the resi-dential advisors warned, “Any negative remarks regarding ‘Harambe’ will
be seen as a direct attack to our campus’s African American community.”
They went on to say that phrases or hashtags that “encourage the exposi-tion of body parts runs the risk of being reported as a Title IX incident”
(quoted in Soave 2016). One reason for their concern was that Harambe,
a Swahili word, was also the name of the university’s African and African–
American residential community, but Harambe jokes also worried admin-istrators at Clemson University, where this was not a factor. There an
administrator sent a message to resident advisors saying, “Due to an inci-dent that happened earlier this week, we are no longer allowing any refer-ence to Harambe … to be displayed on doors, halls, billboards, or
windows.”

Note: literally racist. You’re the only one’s here comparing black people to monkeys lol

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That nothing is ever safe does not mean that everything results in pun-i
shment. It should be clear by now that a defining characteristic of campus censorship is its arbitrariness.

Note: ah yes allow Cora select few authority figures to decide what is and isn’t hate speech. That surely won’t be abused

264

universities are making it
easier for students to report not just their professors, but also their fellow
students whenever they say anything that offends them.

Note: take this is to account with injustice collecting

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In addition to the
Title IX bureaucracy, which as we discussed in Chap. 4, is partly a response
to guidance from the US government, universities have begun setting up
various kinds of bias response teams. More than 200 colleges and universi-t
ies now have them, and usually they allow anyone on campus to make a report about anyone else (FIRE 2017). At the University of California,
Santa Cruz, for example, a single poster advertising a “mafia” game was
removed after a student filed a bias incident claim. The student said the
poster was offensive to her as an Italian American and “could result in the
h
arassment of Italian American students on campus.” At the University of Michigan, someone reported a “phallic snow object” (quoted in Snyder
and Khalid 2016). At Colby College the bias response team investigated a
c
omplaint about someone having a luau, and another about someone who used the phrase “on the other hand,” which the complainant character-ized as “ableist” (Owens 2017). At the University of Oregon the bias
response team received complaints about a newspaper not giving enough
c
overage to ethnic minorities and transgender students, about students “expressing anger about oppression,” about a faculty member giving
“relationship advice that was sexist and heterosexist,” about a professor
belittling a student’s request for trigger warnings, and about an email mar-keting “a program by praising Columbus and Lewis & Clark as role
models” (quoted in Steinbaugh 2016).

Note: this is what happens when you rely on subjective criteria for censorship. It always devolves into some censorship frenzy

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And at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville someone reported three students for dressing up as the Three
Blind Mice, since people might have thought the costumes were mocking
people with disabilities (FIRE 2017)

Note: key word thought as in interpret

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Most of the bias incidents are the usual fare: complaints about words and
behaviors seen by the complainant as offensive in some way to one or more
victim groups. These arise from the victimhood culture embraced by campus
radicals, but some complaints come from the right. These are complaints

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that the campus activists are the ones who are offensive. At Cornell University
someone reported a professor for comparing police to terrorists, and some-one else reported the student government for its attempts to make Cornell
a sanctuary campus. At Appalachian State University someone reported a
student activist for, among other offenses, hating white men and for express-ing disregard for the lives of police officers. And at John Carroll University
someone reported the African American Alliance because their protest made
white students uncomfortable (FIRE 2017)

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The more serious threats from the right, though, come from outside
the university. Jonathan Haidt describes the basic pattern. First, a “left- wing professor says something provocative (and sometimes truly inflam-matory),” then “right-wing media sites … pick up the story and report it
in a way designed to cause maximum outrage,” then many readers and
viewers “demand the university fire the professor,” with some of them
writing “racist and sexist social media posts” or even “rape threats and
death threats,” and then the university’s administration, “paralyzed by the
public relations crisis,” condemns the professor, and if the professor is not
tenured, puts “him or her ‘on leave’ in order to begin the termination
process” (Haidt 2017). Thus, when Katherine Dettwyler, an anthropology
lecturer at the University of Delaware, gained attention after writing that
American college student Otto Warmbier, who had recently died from his
imprisonment and abuse by the North Korean government, “got exactly
what he deserved,” the university put out a statement saying her opinions
did not reflect their values and that she would not be teaching there in the
future (Quintana 2017; Spada 2017). And when Johnny Eric Williams, a
sociology professor at Trinity College, shared an article called “Let Them
Fucking Die,” which argued that the white congressmen injured by a
shooter in June 2017 should have been left to die, and followed it up with
Facebook posts saying things such as, “The time is now to confront these
inhuman assholes and end this now,” Trinity’s president quickly announced
that Williams would be put on leave (Gockowski 2017; Quintana 2017).
Here the statements drawing public ire and university censorship are state-ments that campus activists would certainly call hate speech if they were
directed toward members of victim groups. Campus victimhood culture
accepts such speech when directed at oppressors, and sometimes praises it,
b

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I
n the spring of 2016 the appearance of messages in chalk on the sidewalks of Emory University caused alarm. Emory’s president met with a group of
concerned students and emailed the university community about it after-ward. He assured the students he would review security footage to deter-mine the identity of the chalkers, and “if they’re students,” he said, “they
will go through the conduct violation process.” He also said that because
of the chalkings the university would refine its “bias incident and response
process.” And what were the chalked messages that led to all of this?
“Trump” and “Trump 2016” (Snyder and Khalid 2016)
. The attention the Emory incident received then led conservative students throughout
the country to put pro-Trump messages in chalk on their campuses. They
called it The Chalkening (LaChance 2016). The response was as expected.
The Hate Response Team at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, for
example, called the messages “discriminatory” and “hostile” (quoted in
Owens 2017)

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Most people
have wanted to ban speech that offends them and allow speech that does
not. This is what the adherents of victimhood culture want, and increas-ingly, it may be what many of their opponents want too. The attacks on
speech emanating from campus victimhood culture might increasingly be
met with counterattacks from ideological enemies rather than defenders of
free speech. Here again, opposition leads to imitation. We have seen that
conservative students make reports of their own to the bias response teams
and that members of the public often demand the firing of left-wing pro-fessors over offensive comments.

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Outside of the univer-sity we have seen Trump supporters behaving much like the anti- Yiannapolous rioters in storming the stage during a performance of the
Shakespeare play Julius Caesar that depicted a Trump-like Caesar being
assassinated (Jenkins 2017).

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The only opponents of victimhood in
the larger society may end up being right-wingers who eschew dignity and
are just as thin skinned and intolerant as the campus left.

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