Lida E. Maxwell is Associate Professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and is the author of Public Trials: Burke, Zola, Arendt, and the Politics of Lost Causes.
As protests
against racism on campus have rocked the
University of Missouri and Yale
University—and spread to places like Claremont
McKenna and Amherst—student protesters have come under fire for their call for “safe space.” In particular, writers
like Connor Friedersdorf have argued that their demand for safe spaces has
created a new kind of intolerance, where all dissenting views are excluded and
condemned. This critique of the demand
for safety finds allies in leftists who see student activists’ demands for safe
spaces as
an attempt to avoid rather than address the complexities and realities of
the world. In contrast, writers
like Roxane Gay have drawn attention to the fact that critics of students
demanding safe spaces at Yale, Mizzou, and elsewhere tend to be those who have
never feared for their safety, who experience safety as an “inalienable” right. For Gay, the call for safety is not a
call to be “coddled” or not to hear opposing perspectives, but rather for the
freedom for all students to voice experiences and views in
a setting where they do not feel in danger of being mocked, derided, or
physically threatened. While some
(white, male, cisgender) students might take the privilege of safety for
granted—and, in turn, their ability to speak their views however and whenever
they like—others (notably, black, female, and queer students) may have to demand
it.
I agree
with Gay that critics of the student protesters fail to acknowledge the
privilege of safety that most of them inhabit. However, I think that Gay’s claim that some people “have” safety while
others have to ask for it may keep us from seeing a different and perhaps more
insidious problem: namely, that some people’s demands for safety are
taken more seriously than others. That
is, the issue is not that some people simply feel safe while others do
not, but rather that some people’s demands for safety are backed up by state
violence and law, while others are left at the mercy of that violence. Put differently, the “feeling” of safety that
Gay rightly says is a privilege is one that is created through social,
political, and legal institutions that frame some people’s demands for safety
as legitimate and urgent—and in need of violent enforcement—while framing
others’ demands for safety as a desire for “coddling.”
For example, while black
students and their supporters at Mizzou and Yale are often mocked when they ask
for a safe space, Donald Trump is taken seriously by Republican voters when he
argues that we must erect a United States’ southern border to keep Americans
safe from Mexican rapists and criminals. In fact, Trump’s demand that we keep (white) Americans safe from
Mexicans has him atop the Republic primary poll
in New Hampshire. Similarly, when Darren Wilson says that he felt so threatened by Michael
Brown that he had to shoot him, or when George Zimmerman claimed that he felt
threatened by Travyon Martin (and thus had to shoot him), or when the Cleveland
police officer who killed 12 year old Tamir Rice claimed that he felt so threatened
by this little boy that he had to shoot him, these men are taken seriously and
their demands for safety are affirmed legally and sometimes politically.
Some people
might say that the kind of safety that police officers and Donald Trump and
George Zimmerman demand is an entirely different kind of safety than the kind
called for by the college students at Yale and Mizzou—that they are talking
about physical rather than psychological safety. But can we separate out these two kinds of
safety? The safety from racist comments,
threats, and (yes) even costumes that these students demand is not just a
demand to be kept safe from the violence of speech, but also from the always
present risk that hateful speech will turn into hateful violence—a risk that
many of us have felt when having homophobic or racist comments shouted at us,
or when we have been sexually harassed or intimidated. On the other hand, Trump’s, Wilson’s, and
Zimmerman’s claims that they felt or feel physically threatened are not at all
self-evident; their demands for safety are demands that we see certain kinds of
individuals (Mexicans, African-Americans who possess no weapons but who look,
in Wilson’s words, “like a demon”) as greater threats than others (i.e. the
armed white men who kill or threaten to kill black and Latino
individuals).
Surely what the students at
Yale and Mizzou are protesting is not simply racism, but precisely this kind of
racist view of safety: that is, a view of safety that allows certain lives
to count more than others, and that allows some people’s demands for safety
to come at the expense of the lives of others.
The logic
of safety expressed in the violent acts of Wilson and Zimmerman (among others)—that in order for some to be safe, others need to be disciplined, threatened,
or killed—is entirely familiar. It is
evident not only in the police violence against (and racial profiling of) black
men and women, and in violence against queers and trans people. It is also evident in the cycle of violence
that we see re-perpetuated in response to the Paris attacks, where some French
and American leaders claim that in order to be safe, Syrian refugees must be
kept out, and cities in Syria must be bombed.
In the
context of these racist and Islamophobic demands for safety—backed up by
state violence and law—it seems more important than ever to support and stand
in solidarity with college students’ demand for safe spaces. While their demand for safety could certainly
re-enact (on a limited scale) the exclusivity of the violent logic of safety I
sketched above, their demand for an ideal of safety as a space of inclusion and
equality stands as an important counterpoint to the racist idea that safety
depends on the violent exclusion of difference. In this ideal, safety is not contingent upon the exclusion and
disciplining of (minority) others, but rather upon the shared commitment to
affirm, acknowledge, and find space for the diverse experiences of
everyone. Here, safety is not a feeling
of knowing that threats to you have been killed or quarantined, but rather in a
feeling of knowing that the risk of being who you are—expressing your views,
presenting yourself freely to others—will be borne not only by you, but also
by others, who will create a space of safety around you.
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| Student protest at the University of Missouri |
One thing—among others—that these student protestors have done is reminded us of an
insight of the feminist and gay rights movements: that safety is not a purely
physical condition, having to do with whether you are physically threatened,
but also a political and social condition. In other words, political and social structures—such as racism,
sexism, transphobia, and homophobia—turn certain people (usually marginalized
groups) into supposed “threats,” and in turn license violent behavior toward
them. The move to create “safe spaces”
for women and gays and lesbians was a way to try to create spaces where
individuals could feel the freedom and equality that they wanted to create on a
broader social scale. In our current political
moment—where demands for safety have been used to license increasingly
violent acts—standing with students’ demands for an ideal of safety premised
on equality, freedom, and shared risk holds out one of the few hopes of
challenging this violent logic for safety on behalf of creating (even if only
in microcosm, as an ideal) the conditions of a safe world for everyone.
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| Student protests at the University of Missouri |
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