Whiteness, repressive victimhood, and the foil of the intolerant left

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that recent controversies over conservative speakers on college campuses are an opaque vehicle for White supremacy. Revisiting Herbert Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance through the lens of Critical Race Theory, this essay sketches the features of repressive victimhood: the advancement of categorical minority status orchestrated to shield white people from charges of intolerance while reframing counterspeech as commensurate with overt bigotry.

KEYWORDS:

• Repressive tolerance
• white supremacy
• victimhood
• college campuses
• Milo Yiannopoulos

Notes

1. Dan Mogulof quoted in Tiffany Wilson, “Milo Yiannopoulos Appearance May Have Been ‘Most Expensive Photo Op’.”

2. Gray, “How Milo Yiannopoulos’s Berkeley ‘Free Speech Week’ Fell Apart.”

3. Yiannopoulos quoted in Gray, “Free Speech Week.”

4. See Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education.

5. Perlman, “Bill O’Reilly and the Snowflakes.”

6. Lawrence et al., eds., Words That Wound, 14.

7. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1707–91.

8. Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 3.

9. Bell, “Racial Realism,” 363; Bell, Faces At The Bottom Of The Well; and Crenshaw et al., Critical Race Theory.

10. Valdes, “Legal Reform and Social Justice,” 148–73.

11. Delgado, “The Inward Turn in Outsider Jurisprudence,” 731–60.

12. Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 81–123.

13. Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 82.

14. See Medeiros, “The Ideological Significance of ‘Institutional Neutrality’ Mandates,” 22–40.

15. Crenshaw et al., “Introduction,” xiii.

16. See Towns, “‘What Do We Wanna Be?’ Black Radical Imagination and the Ends of the World,” 75–80.

17. Applebaum, “Critical Whiteness Studies,”; and Delgado and Stefancic, Critical White Studies.

18. Dyer, White, 47.

19. Nakayama and Krizek, “Whiteness,” 291.

20. Nakayama and Krizek, 299.

21. Delgado and Stefancic, Must We Defend Nazis? 65.

22. R.A.V. v. St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992).

23. Charles, “Colored Speech.”

24. See Curry, The Man-Not; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Weheliye, Habeas Viscus; Warren, Ontological Terror; and Watts, “Postracial Fantasies, Blackness, and Zombies,” 317–33.

25. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.

26. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1715.

27. Corrigan, “On Rhetorical Criticism, Performativity, and White Fragility,” 86–8; DiAngelo, White Fragility; and Vats, “Affecting White Accountability,” 88–94.

28. See Anderson, White Rage; and Mack and McCann, “Recalling Persky,” 372–93.

29. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood.

30. Kelly, Apocalypse Man; Johnson, “The Art of Masculine Victimhood,” 229–50; and Edgar and Holladay, “‘Everybody’s Hard Times Are Different’,” 122–39.

31. O’Hara, “Yiannopoulos Quits Breitbart, Apologizes for Uproar.”

32. See Christian, “A Global Critical Race and Racism Framework,” 169–85; and Shome, Diana and Beyond.

33. Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927).

34. Bollinger, The Tolerant Society.

35. Peters, Courting the Abyss, 6.

36. Delgado and Stefancic, Must We Defend Nazis?

37. See Matsuda, “Public Response to Racist Speech,” 2320–81.

38. Matsuda, “Public Response,” 2323.

39. See note 36 above.

40. Cloud, “Foiling the Intellectuals,” 457–79.

41. Cloud, “Foiling the Intellectuals,” 458.

42. McCann, “Therapeutic and Material <Victim>Hood,” 382–401.

43. Ashcraft and Flores, “‘Slaves with White Collars’,” 1–29.

44. See Dyer, White; Griffin, “Problematic Representations of Strategic Whiteness and ‘Post-Racial’ Pedagogy,” 147–66; Moon, “‘Be/Coming’ White and the Myth of White Ignorance,” 282–303; Nakayama and Martin, Whiteness; Kennedy, Middleton, and Ratcliffe, Rhetorics of Whiteness; Lacy, “Exposing the Spectrum of Whiteness,” 277–311; Lipsitz, Possessive Investment In Whiteness; and Rowe and Malhotra, “(Un)Hinging Whiteness,” 166–92.

45. Nakayama and Krizek, “Whiteness,” 302.

46. See Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs.

47. Woolf, “The Rise and Fall of Breitbart.”

48. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 14.

49. “Interview with Milo Yiannopoulos,” Justice with Judge Jeanine.

50. Milo Yiannopoulos quoted on The Chad Hasty Show.”

51. Milo Yiannopoulos, Dangerous.

52. Milo Yiannopoulos interviewed by Jamali Maddux on Hate Thy Neighbor, “The Fight Over Free Speech.”

53. Yiannopoulos, “Free Speech.”

54. Yiannopoulos, “Interview.”

55. Wilson, “Crisis Actors, Deep State, False Flag.”

56. Yiannopoulos, “Milo Yiannopoulos Discusses ‘Free Speech Week’.”

57. Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching.

58. Nolan, “The B*tch Is Back.”

59. Pollak, “Don’t Know Much About History.”

60. Ciccotta, “The Night Berkeley Betrayed The Free Speech Movement.”

61. See Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man.

62. Pollak, “Politico.”

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid.

65. Ciccotta, “Betrayed.”

66. Desanctis, “Berkeley Mayor Wants to Shut Down a Milo Event to Pacify Antifa.”

67. Nash, “MILO.”

68. Flores and Sims, “The Zero-Sum Game,” 206–22.

69. Marlow, “There Was Never Free Speech at Berkeley.”

70. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 581.

71. Woods and Hahner, Make America Meme Again; and Hartzell, “Whiteness Feels Good Here,” 129–48.

72. See Kelly, “Donald J. Trump and the Rhetoric of White Ambivalence,” 195–223; and Schaefer, “Whiteness and Civilization,” 1–18.

73. Cloud, “‘Civility’ as a Threat to Academic Freedom,” 13–7.