On Anti-Racism Part Two: Validation

Or: The Ballad of Jodi Shaw

I never ran into Jodi Shaw on campus. Which isn’t surprising, I mostly stayed around my office (when going to the office was still a thing), and my department didn’t have much cause to interact with the Residential Life staff who counted Jodi as a member. Jodi recently publicly resigned her position at Smith College with an open letter that was immediately signal-boosted by former NYT columnist Bari Weiss. The reason for her resignation?

The emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of the college's anti-racism efforts. 

By now you might have heard of Jodi Shaw. For a while her story was confined to a niche corner of the culture wars. Her battle was a mostly one-sided affair. With reactionary luminaries like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and the aforementioned Bari Weiss giving her a platform while the left has largely remained unaware of her existence. I would likely not have been aware of Jodi before now if I did not also work at Smith and thus had not seen the initial flurry around her first YouTube video condemning  the college. All throughout her first video and the social media posts that followed, Jodi repeatedly called for dialogue. She claimed that she was interested in discussion, a safe and free exchange of ideas and the opportunity to express her emotional distress. She felt the college’s commitment to anti-racist efforts was interfering with this discussion. And so, being the friendly lefty that I am, I attempted to reach out to Jodi and find some solidarity. I had already soured on the corporate Robin DiAngelo anti-racist training model. I thought a little empathy might get her to separate her discomfort with the managerial and punitive nature of anti-racist training from the real need to address systemic racism. I thought maybe through the dialogue that Jodi was asking for, she might come to realize that anti-racism wasn’t an attack on her but a project that could benefit her as well as marginalized people. 

I was very wrong.

What I came to understand after exchanging a few social media posts with Jodi was that a conversation was not what she was after. She wanted validation. She felt wronged and she wanted people to tell her that she was wronged and that the college was to blame for making her feel that way. She wanted to feel like she was a victim of broader insidious forces. That the emotional distress she experienced due to anti-racist efforts was not a consequence of personal misunderstandings and communication failures on both sides, but part of a grander plot to divide Americans along racial lines for some yet-to-be articulated purpose. Fortunately for Jodi (and unfortunately for the discourse around racism in America), there was a well-funded and enthusiastic reactionary media apparatus more than willing to give her the validation she wanted. 

This all started about two years before Jodi made her first video. In 2018 a student made an accusation of racial bias when a staff member called campus security on her for resting in a building that was closed to students. In the middle of a fresh slate of “doing X while Black” stories, tempers flared around this incident. An independent investigation was done and found no evidence of racial animus. No one was fired, but the staff members involved with the incident were effectively canceled. They were harassed and denied job opportunities. It’s important to note that Jodi was not involved in this situation in any way. 

The college decided to commit itself to an active anti-racist project. This commitment and it’s inciting incident put Smith in the crosshairs of the culture warrior right. The specter of effete liberal academia has long been a boogieman for reactionaries. The image of radical leftist and liberal professors brainwashing impressionable youth with a destructive hatred for the foundational norms and principles on which our shiny city rests fills conservatives with anger and dread. Smith provided a useful target (along with other institutions adopting active anti-racist initiatives) and Jodi provided a useful rallying point for their rhetorical attacks. Jodi has been referred to as a brave whistleblower, a courageous truth-teller, a political victim of a dangerous and regressive culture of spite. 

Now might be a good time to mention that the core of her complaint is that she was told she couldn’t do a rap as part of a library orientation.

Against my better judgement, I’m going to link to her resignation letter here. I’m loath to give clicks to Bari Weiss but I think it’s fair for you to read Jodi’s explanation of events in her own words. If you do read it, pay special attention to the level of emotion in her letter. She’s not really making a substantive case against the project of anti-racism or Critical Race Theory. She’s relying on her emotional experience to make the case that what happened to her was morally wrong. Because by her own admission, she didn’t really suffer any material consequences for her opinions or point of view. She mentions losing out on a job opportunity but she admits herself that the college didn’t deny her that opportunity; rather, she took herself out of the running because she did not want to try to put together a new presentation sans the rap song she had worked so hard to create. She was not harassed or bullied for wanting to rap. She was just told that she shouldn’t do it because it might come across as insensitive. Just for the record, Black people have been enduring white people rapping in professional and educational settings for decades. It’s not a hate crime or anything but let's just say whoever stopped her did her a favor. 

She alleges that the college tried to buy her silence, but this accusation is pretty ludicrous considering by the time she had resigned she had made numerous media appearances stating her case, published a bunch of videos on her YouTube channel dedicated to “exposing” Smith, and had been publicly trying to get alumnae to stop donating to the college. According to Smith’s president, Jodi demanded an exorbitant sum of money in return for not seeking legal action against the college. Smith never fired her. They did suspend her pending an investigation, which was pretty fair considering she was spending most of her free time disparaging Smith. And truth be told, she is much better off financially now than when she started her crusade, with her Patreon page raising over $220,000 at the time of this piece. 

If only Black people could be treated so unfairly.

This is white privilege. This is white fragility. As much as I don’t think those terms are particularly useful in trying to build a successful anti-racist coalition, I’m still a Black person in America, and listening to Jodi’s conception of oppression engenders a strong negative emotional response. Lately, Jodi has taken to appropriating quotes from Martin Luther King. She doesn’t use any of the quotes about the harm that capitalism has done to Black people as well as other Americans. She doesn’t use the quotes describing the processes of systemic racism outlined in King’s “Three evils” speech. She doesn’t use the quotes describing the apathy of the white liberal moderate to the cause of Black liberation or the quotes expressing his disappointment with the gains made by the Civil Rights Act. No, Jodi only seems to be aware of the MLK quotes about not judging one by their race. 

You know these quotes. They’re the only MLK quotes most of us get exposed to in grade school history classes. They are quotes that comport with the supposed color blindness of the modern reactionary right. Focusing on that tiny fraction of King’s overall ideology allows them to paper over what their intellectual forebears actually thought of King while he was alive. I’ve written before about how I feel about conservatives and moderate liberals cherry-picking parts of King’s work to use as a rhetorical bludgeon against his radical legacy. 

TL:DR, I fucking hate it. 

Trying to engage Jodi through her social media was, unsurprisingly, an exercise in futility. Despite her constant pleas for a real conversation, she wasn’t interested in engaging with the other side of this debate. I had plenty of good-faith questions about her position, but as I mentioned earlier, her only goal was validation. 

I did however, end up having many lengthy conversations with the dozens of fans who showed up on her social media to lend support. My goals shifted. I gave up trying to find synthesis with Jodi and instead endeavored to just present a polite counter-argument to the things she was saying and the opinions she was platforming, so that someone without a firm position either way would know that a reasonable response to Jodi Shaw exists. 

As frustrating as I find Jodi’s entitlement and projected victimhood, that is not the important thing here. Entitlement and projected victimhood has always been the stock reactionary response to Black liberation politics. There is nothing new or remarkable about Jodi Shaw. She is merely demonstrating attitudes that have been a core part of white hegemony since the beginning. The reason why it’s important to talk about Jodi is because her reaction is pretty much a feature and not a bug of liberal anti-racist training and discourse. 

In her letter she describes her experience in an anti-racism retreat. She was put on the spot to give her thoughts about race and what it meant to be white. When she refused to do so, she was called out for her silence. She felt mildly threatened when a Black woman became animated and shouted about “rich white women.” She doesn’t provide much context for that last part. I think we are just supposed to perceive animated Black women as inherently scary.

I can't stress enough how much I do not feel sorry for Jodi. Maybe, at the beginning of all of this, I felt like there were some genuine yet misguided emotions worth appealing to, but now apathy is the most positive feeling I can manage. She has gotten everything that she wanted out of this situation. She won. 

But we need to be honest about something. There is just the tiniest bit of truth in Jodi’s message. Just hear me out. 

Liberal anti-racism training is easy. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about watching white people like Jodi implode is that compared to what marginalized people have had to endure in terms of social conditioning and alienation, being a woke white person is a piece of cake. There is pretty much a script for it: things you should say and things you can’t say. And as long as you follow that script and appear properly repentant when you mess up (and you will mess up), you’ll be fine. Uncancelled and accepted in proper liberal circles. Remember, all you have to do is acknowledge your privilege. No one is asking you to give it up. The standard liberal measure of anti-racism is a cultural aesthetic. If you are well-versed in this aesthetic you can put it on and slip it off at your own leisure. That isn’t a secret either. Whenever an Obama-voting business owner who sells CBD to dogs calls the cops on a Black guy in her doorway, no one is surprised, least of all Black people. And yet we demand white people don the public persona of wokeness as a form of empty penance. A hollow replacement for the material security that we are so violently denied. 

It’s the fucking least you can do.

But not every white person is well-versed in this aesthetic. Wokeness is a wholly owned subsidiary of progressive wealthy liberal industries. For white people who are culturally or economically outside of progressive wealthy liberal spaces, anti-racism can seem like being forced to wear someone else's clothes and being berated for continuing to wear the clothes you came in. Even for a self-proclaimed life-long liberal like Jodi, trying to learn a new cultural language is hard. And some people just don’t like doing hard things. So they make up reasons why they shouldn’t have to do them. This is not an excuse, it’s just an explanation. I don’t find culture shock to be a particularly compelling reason to dismiss systemic suffering and oppression. But the natural liberal inclination to be managers isn’t helping. 

Anti-racist training as we know it now became popular with viral videos featuring extremely woke (mostly white) academics absolutely owning flustered and fragile white students and workers in diversity seminars over their ignorance of white supremacy. These videos were shared and celebrated not because they represented some tangible victory in the fight for equality but because they made us feel good to see ignorant white people cry. We drank their tears. 

What neither we nor those woke academics seemed to be concerned with was what happened to those white people post verbal excoriation. Where do the cancelled go? To whose arms do they flock for comfort after being confronted with the upsetting truth of their social position? Where does the search for validation take them? Those are very important questions that liberal America just doesn’t seem that concerned with. 

Jodi Shaw herself is not important to the conversation around anti-racism and my critique of how liberals implement it. Her story, however, is representative of how white people become radicalized by a white supremacist theory of society. I’m not justifying how white people like her turn into bad-faith white grievance hustlers who make a living denying the reality of marginalized people. But it’s important that we understand the process and the arguments being made here. And that is what we will do in part three.

Solidarity forever.