The American Spectator | USA News and Politics And terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” come to resemble their opposites.
n The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies, Robert Boyers notes that “fanatics incensed by what they take to be the unpardonable crime of appropriation [demanded] in a public letter signed by dozens of artists that the painting Open Casket by Dana Schutz be not only taken from the walls of the Whitney Museum but ‘destroyed.’ ” Schutz’s crime: exercising white privilege to appropriate the death of Emmett Till, “a subject that can be fairly represented only by a black person.” The letter declared, “It is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun.”
In April 2017, Rebecca Tuvel, a white, untenured assistant professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, made headlines for publishing a peer-reviewed article in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia titled “In Defense of Transracialism.” The article was occasioned by the outing of a white woman, Rachel Dolezal, for attempting to “pass” as black.
Tuvel’s argument was simple and straightforward. She said the logical structure of arguments that support transgender identities is identical to those supporting transracialism, so if we accept people’s claims to have changed sexes, we should also accept claims such as Dolezal’s of having changed races. “In any case,” she said, “it is not clear how one can affirm that it is possible to feel like a member of another sex but deny it is possible to feel like a member of another race.” Tuvel’s article analyzed the logical structure of both arguments. She did not question the validity of transgender claims or say that being transracial is identical in all respects to being transgender. She simply argued in support of the possibility of transracial identities.
Despite Tuvel’s restricted focus, Hypatia was inundated with hostile comments by outraged academics. In an open letter, they ignored Tuvel’s thesis in order to press mousey complaints, such as that she was “deadnaming a trans woman.” Other “scholars” were nastier, alternately charging her with “epistemic violence” and racism, and labeling her “transphobic,” a “TERF,” a “disgusting person,” and a “Becky” or “Rebecky Tuvel.” Her article was panned for not having been screened by the appropriate critical race and trans theory “scholars” — who likely would have burned it, if not her, were they permitted. Given its obvious “flaws,” they said, it should never have been accepted for publication. Finally, they insisted that because its circulation would inflict an additional harm on those already marginalized, it should be withdrawn forthwith — which, to accommodate the noble fictions of “diversity and inclusion” as well as the worn-out traditions of academic moral cowardice, the journal promptly did.