Academics often encounter something awkward: statistics on racial disparity which cut against received wisdom; testimony from members of a minority that is at odds with what recognized representatives say or contains disdainful or hateful sentiments towards other groups; or serious errors, even unattributed borrowing, in work by a scholar belonging to a disadvantaged group.
The conventional scholarly response to such errors and borrowing is to investigate and, where warranted, make the findings public. But other questions can intrude: Who is being criticized? What motives will be attributed to the critic? Will the criticism be said to give ammunition to the “far right”, damage an institution, or constitute racism, anti-Blackness, racial gaslighting or “epistemic violence”? If the critic then objects, will this demonstrate “fragility”? If the critic is themselves from a minority, will dissent be attributed to internalized racism or proximity to “whiteness”?
Self-censorship includes questions like: Will the criticism be said to give ammunition to the "far right”?
None of this requires formal censorship; what matters are anticipated social and professional sanctions—ostracism, exclusion, or blocked advancement. Office for Students polling carried out in Spring 2024 found that 21 per cent of academics in England did not feel free to discuss challenging or controversial subjects in teaching, 16 per cent said the same about their research, and 34 per cent in other contexts, such as external speaking and social media.
Among ethnic-minority academics the teaching figure rose to 34 per cent, though on a subsample of only 73. The topics most often named in all three contexts were sex and gender, followed by race, and restriction on these was reported consistently across the political spectrum. Amongst those who did not feel free in their teaching, 82 per cent cited fear of professional consequences and 60 per cent fear of social consequences, while 52 per cent cited pressure from senior staff. These findings do not establish the causes of particular disputes, but do show that self-censorship is a social fact worth explaining, and which operates through anticipated cost rather than formal instruction.
Self-censorship is a social fact worth explaining.
Academic self-censorship is often quiet: scholars tell themselves that someone else can deal with the issue, that it lies outside their primary area, that timing is bad, or that they should not give ammunition to bad-faith actors. This is a form of anticipatory conformity: once likely sanctions are tacitly understood, little explicit prohibition is required.
The Race Trap
Race, and often sex and gender, supply an unusually elaborate intellectual vocabulary which allows disagreement to be pathologized as moral or psychological deficiency.
The clearest example of this can be found in Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. In the introduction, DiAngelo explicitly includes “argumentation, silence, and withdrawal” in the list of responses to racial stress which she says restore “white equilibrium” and maintain white dominance. Later on, she describes arguing, explaining, minimizing, playing devil’s advocate, withdrawing and—especially for white women—crying, as forms of bullying emerging from white fragility. In a chapter on “rules of engagement” she concludes that only no feedback at all about racism could avoid triggering white people’s fragility.
Race and gender supply an unusually elaborate intellectual vocabulary which allows disagreement to be pathologized as moral or psychological deficiency.
DiAngelo includes “I disagree” and “You misunderstood me” among claims that “exempt the person from further engagement or accountability”. If such objections are interpreted as manifestations of white fragility, which grounds would allow a particular accusation of racism to be rejected? As Alan Sokal argues in a detailed epistemological critique, DiAngelo repeatedly makes what ought to be contestable conjectures mutate into “established truths”, by means of circular reasoning and the “Kafka trap”, in which resistance to an accusation becomes evidence for it. There is almost no response which is allowed to count as evidence that the accusation is wrong.
DiAngelo includes herself within what she calls “our unaware yet inevitable racism”, declaring in the manner of a religious confession: “I have a racist worldview, deep racial bias, racist patterns, and investments in the racist system that has elevated me”. She advocates a “messy, lifelong process” of change, while maintaining that “our racism would be reinforced all over again just by virtue of living in the culture”.
If objections are interpreted as manifestations of white fragility, which grounds would allow a particular accusation of racism to be rejected?
Ibram X. Kendi, in How to Be an Antiracist, is somewhat less absolutist: he explicitly distinguishes between changing conduct and permanent identities, claiming “racist and antiracist are not fixed identities” and also that “Black people can be racist toward White people”. The problems lie more with his definitions: a racist policy is one which produces or sustains racial inequity; an antiracist one produces or sustains racial equity. No such thing exists as a race-neutral policy. Kendi's programme is about linking racial inequity to the racist policies purportedly always causing it.
