Some of her examples, like the Kundalini yoga movement, are religious in a restricted sense they involve their members in belief systems that make propositions about the spiritual world (religion, as the late anthropologist Melford E. Spiro put it in an influential though contested definition, is any institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings). How do we get from our world, full of anti-Black racism, full of interlocking systems of domination, to a world free of domination? They promised to investigate. executive.director@tellurideassociation.org. From the initial transformative-justice workshop, students learned to snap their fingers when they agreed with what a classmate was saying. Back then, he writes, the students had the evenings to themselves. Day by day, one intervention builds on another, as one student notices what another student overlooked, and as the professor guides the discussion toward the most important questions. I welcomed Keisha into the class, suggesting that we find some days when she could lead discussion or share her own research. Then another student would repeat a piece of anti-racist dogma, and the room would be filled with the click-clack of snapping fingers. Although he had always been dismissive of the Columbia University linguist John McWhorters assertion that antiracism is a new religion, that summer, Lloyd says: I found antiracism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult. We note that have not received any request from Dr. Lloyd, his articles publisher, or any other publishers who have picked up the story to fact-check or comment on the article at any point to date. Class ended. Furthermore, no matter our distance from a movement, no matter how closely we attend to it, we have to remind ourselves that were going to get some of its insights wrong. James, Charles Chesnutt, Harriet Jacobs, James and Grace Lee Boggsbelievers in democracy, fugitives from democracy. Read: Why not take a Black studies class? Keisha and I were supposed to meet weekly, but she told me she couldnt schedule in advance, and she would let me know when she had availability. To use the idiom du jour, my comment was triggering to Keisha. This past Friday, we learned of an article by Dr. Vincent Lloyd, a faculty member at one of our 2022 Telluride Association Summer Seminars, expressing his dissatisfaction with his teaching experience. I was guilty of countless microaggressions., Telluride continued a pattern of tracking liberal values as they evolved., The seminar form pulls against the form of the anti-racism workshop., Two of the Asian-American students would be expelled from the program., I had used racist language. Every seminar has two factotums, who serve as residential advisors and teaching assistants. The result was a redesign of the summer seminars: Telluride would now offer only Critical Black Studies and Anti-Oppressive Studies seminars. They alleged: I had used racist language. When I was an undergraduate two decades ago, we all sat around a table, the professor would say What did you think of the reading?, and there would be open discussion. In the context I write about, because the seminar is a space where the professor and the students are required to restrain themselves, the only figure who was unrestrained was the charismatic teaching assistant (who also, uniquely in this situation, managed the students lives for the 21 hours a day they were not in seminar). By refusing such tact by using the C-word Lloyd insists that the category cult has real analytic usefulness. I thought that those experiences could open public conversations about important dynamics. While we disagree with his characterization of the program and the values and principles guiding our educational work, we respect his perspective and acknowledge the challenging and sometimes uncomfortable nature of self-governing communities. John McWhorter and Vincent Lloyd - Domination and Anti-Blackness Telluride Association | LinkedIn Telluride Association is pleased to announce the launch of the Telluride Association Summer Seminars in the summer of 2022. There were workshops on white supremacy, on privilege, on African independence movements, on the thought and activism of Angela Davis, and more, all of which followed an initial, day-long workshop on transformative justice. Students described the workshops as emotionally draining, forcing the high schoolers to confront tough issues and to be challenged in ways they had never been challenged before. Lloyd: Social movements are messy, and this is especially true for those movements led by youth and those led by people who have suffered a great deal. They realized this summer was bumpy not just in our seminar, but across the program. No one sent written work. Faculty were paid for the full summer of work. Telluride Associations mission is to provide students with educational experiences in critical thinking and democratic community. Please see our follow-up post for answers to questions weve received about Dr. Lloyds article: FAQ on 2022 Summer Seminars. One factor contributing to toxicity on the left today is a failure to recognize that different modes of engagement are appropriate to different sorts of spaces. Cultishness, on this view, encompasses a suite of features that appear in all sorts of organizations, in variable configurations, and with variable levels of intensity. As such, faculty are also responsible for adapting their syllabi to engage students from a wide range of backgrounds. Everything Is White Supremacy: Inside America's New Maoist 'Struggle It was written by Vincent Lloyd, a professor of theology (what he has called "Black Theology" or "Political Theology") and the director of Africana Studies at Villanova University, a Roman Catholic institution just northwest of Philadelphia. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. Vincent Lloyd: In our lives, we all encounter a deeply human problem: domination. These were presented as optional and were not utilized by most students. They needed extra help, they were struggling to understand anything from the readings, and they couldnt even know what questions to ask unless they had guidancefirst Keisha said this, then the black students said it, then their allies repeated it in solidarity with them. We also need spaces where we analyze precisely what wrongs we can identify and respond to here and now, given our imperfect capacities. In 2022, however, I was told that the Critical Black Studies students would live and learn separately, creating a fully black space. My Anti-Oppressive Studies students were separated from them. It is certainly the most titillating. I dont think Telluride and other sorts of institutions know what to do with these claims; adding an extra staff person at the multicultural student office or a diversity manager in a seminar is not genuinely responsive. We find this in our families, with bosses at work, with politicians, and systemically: Patriarchy, racism, and colonialism are all systems of domination. 800 E. Lancaster Avenue, Villanova, PA 19085 . Today, we start with activities to prime the pump, as it were: For example, we have students talk to their neighbor about a question for a few minutes, or each share a question that sets the seminars agenda, or divide the seminar into groups of three for a while. After George Floyds murder, Tellurides summer seminars were redesigned; they would now be devoted exclusively to Critical Black Studies and Anti-Oppressive Studies. The topic of Lloyds course was Race and the Limits of Law in America.. Two college-age students called factotums (led by one I will call Keisha) were assigned to create anti-racism workshops to fill the afternoons. I saw their writing improve. When this practice is occasioned by carefully curated textsnot exclusively great books, but texts that challenge each other and us as they probe issues of essential importancea seminar succeeds. Summer 2014 & 2022, Instructor, Telluride Association Summer Program/Seminar . Students at 'Anti-Black Oppression' Seminar Stage Mutiny Against Each day, I try to insert the relevant background information and emphasize key points in short interventions so that the seminar can be guided by your questions. But all exploit three rhetorical features: us vs. them statements, loaded words, and thought-terminating clichs (the last concept was coined in 1961 by Robert J. Lifton, a psychiatrist). We will continue to review and improve our procedures, especially with regards to identifying potential faculty/factotum conflicts earlier so they can be addressed effectively and constructively. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.. While we encourage open communication among faculty, students, and factotums, decisions about the seminar are made by the faculty. Sometimes that management involves co-opting movements themselves, effectively getting activists to make demands that serve the interests of the status quo. In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, and especially since the murder of George Floyd, Blackness has floated so widely and loosely in our discourse that the diversity of Black experience and even the humanity of particular Black folks starts to be lost. Feb 10, 2023 12:33 PM There are many, many non-black people who recognize the Cult of Anti-Racism as something abusive and ugly, but who don't dare to speak out against it out of fear. He loved the experience. In the experience your essay recounts, I see evidence for some additional propositions. While spirited debate, discussion, and respectful disagreement are a central feature of Telluride summer programs, the degree and nature of this conflict, especially between faculty and factotums, was not typical of or appropriate for our summer programs. Then, as the six weeks went by, I could see the students forming bonds with each other and with me, and I could see their commitment to the course. Ibram X. Kendhi: The book that exposed anti-Black racism in the classroom. Telluride Association Summer Program - Wikipedia With those fond memoriesand with excitement at the prospect of revisiting thorny questions about race after the national conversation had changed so much because of Black Lives MatterI reached out to Telluride to explore teaching the seminar again. I heard them ask critical questions about difficult texts. That frustrates me because I firmly believe these movements are the key to our collective liberation. I had extricated myself from the abusive relationship, but nine students remained captive. Launching Summer Seminars 2022! - Telluride Association Behind the woke label are powerful new visions of justice, new ways of imagining a world free of domination. These seminar-based living-learning communities give students the chance to learn from each other and from expert college faculty in a close-knit, democratic environment. Silence. Telluride Association offers residential scholarships for university students and residential summer programs for high school students. When I tried to explain that we had four weeks focused on anti-blackness coming soon, as indicated on the syllabus, she said the harm was urgent; it needed to be addressed immediately. I hope we can drill down on what specifically went wrong and why. Enter Keisha. But how, exactly? The Telluride Association maintains a low profile, even in higher-education circles, but it has played an important role in shaping the US elite. We stand behind our staff team, who are asked to facilitate students self-governance. Keisha was frustrated that our week on incarceration began with George Jackson and not a black feminist, so she lectured on Angela Davis that afternoon. LLOYD: So, I told the Telluride Association Leadership, either you come . facilitate students self-governance, democratic, and community processes. Instead, she largely remained silent during class for the first three weeks, counter-programming the seminar in the afternoons. Launched by mining entrepreneur L.L. Ties to the outside world are severed. The students wanted freedom, for themselves and for all, but they started to say that the only route to freedom is indoctrination: having me tell them what to think. In the language of the anti-racism workshop, a harm becomes anything that makes you feel not quite right. Occasionally, in one-on-one meetings, I could still kid around with them, or hear them chat among themselves about the mundane details of teenage life. By the end of the seminar, the initial student, who seemed like he might have a wavering moral compass, expressed a newfound commitment to justice. (I would very much like to be a participant in a seminar that you lead.) Telluride Association - InfluenceWatch - InfluenceWatch On the sunny first day of seminar, I sat at the end of a pair of picnic tables with nervous, excited 17-year-olds. When Anti-Racism Comes for the Anti-Racists - Substack You reject their radicalism and lovingly defend the seminar format, where specific words, phrases, arguments, and images from a text offer essential friction for conversation, even as you grant that it is time-consuming and frustrating, and that participants inevitably get a lot wrong along the way. javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net. Its alumni are ideologically diverse: queer theorist Eve Sedgewick and postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak (its first female member), Georgia politician Stacey Abrams and journalist Walter Isaacson, neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Francis Fukuyama (who served on Tellurides board). Twelve high-school students had been chosen by the Telluride Association through a rigorous application processthe acceptance rate is reportedly around 3 percentto spend six weeks together taking a college-level course, all expenses paid. Belief in democracy had authorized abuse, and there was no way out. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, At its best, talk of the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism is pointing toward that tragic sensibility. Because of my background (I came to Princeton from a public high school in southern Minnesota) and race, I was not practiced in this format, and I rarely spoke. I trust the energy and creativity of young people leading social movements to imagine a more just future. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult. They work as a team to supervise and guide students in aspects of community life outside of the seminar. In the 2022 anti-racism workshops, the non-black students learned that they needed to center black voicesand to shut up. Did they tell their parents? Then another student would repeat a piece of antiracist dogma, and the room would be filled with the click-clack of snapping fingers. The jargon of the workshops draws heavily on loaded language like transformative justice and harms, words that are both evocative and vague. Delivered on Mondays. I worry that left political discourse today takes social movements, or even just an individual who has suffered, as conversation stoppers rather than conversation starters. How to Get Into TASS // Telluride Association Summer Seminar The seminar is a training ground. We deeply value learning environments that support open discussion, differing opinions, and productive debate. share student feedback and requests about the seminar with faculty. We feel confident that the experience will prepare them to lead and serve in their communities, as it has done for so many students before. We have all experienced anti-blackness within the association and through its programs, their open letter said. I invited them to think about the reasoning of both sides of an argument, when only one side was correct. As the weeks went by, fewer and fewer students turned in written reading responses, fewer and fewer students showed up on time. This might be just another lament about woke campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. A few days later, the Asian-American student was expelled from the program. A month into the six-week program saw open revolt: Each student read from a prepared statement about how the seminar perpetuated anti-Black violence in its content and form, how the Black students had been harmed, how I was guilty of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didnt feel safe. Tellurides leadership refused to intervene when Lloyd asked them to, so, feeling that the atmosphere was poisoned beyond repair, he cancelled the remainder of the seminar. In a recent book, John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. I saw them use complex concepts in thoughtful ways. One student would try out a controversial (or just unusual) view. Ten more minutes of waiting in silence. Tuesday morning, no one was in the seminar room. In Compact Magazine ( https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell), he writes dishonestly about a disastrous Telluride seminar that was hijacked by a TA named Keisha, who turned his students against him and accused him of being anti-black. I am no stranger to anti-racism workshops: I have participated in many of them, and I have facilitated them myself. I had misgendered Brittney Griner., Belief in democracy had authorized abuse., There is no hierarchy of oppressionsexcept for anti-black oppression, which is in a class of its own.. But the seminar topic was Race and the Limits of Law in America. Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). Then all nine remaining students entered, each carrying a piece of paper. As we prepare for our 2023 summer programs, we look forward to welcoming a new class of thoughtful, curious, self-motivated, and community-minded students to benefit from the programs rigorous academic and democratic education. Show Conversations With Coleman, Ep Debating Race and Incarceration with Vincent Lloyd - 5 May 2023. There is sleep deprivation. I decided that the only way to continue was if the Telluride leadership would intervene, reminding the students that the seminar was part of a larger organization with values and norms, and that I was contracted to teach a college-level seminar, understood in the ordinary sense of that term. Leftist autophagy, Telluride edition | The New Criterion By the second week of the seminar, the two white students were effectively silent. Now, their faces were cold, their eyes down. As your radical students saw it, their peers, their teacher, and the format of their seminar were infected with racism, thus the call to end the seminar and demand a new approach. Read Vincent Lloyds I Was a Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell.. As we do every year, we will examine and work to improve our programs over time. Then, as Lloyd later recounted in an essay for Compact Magazine, the remaining students read a prepared statement about how the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed, how I was guilty of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didnt feel safe because I didnt immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the worlds ills., Before, he had quickly rejected the linguist and social commentator John McWhorters argument that anti-racism is a new religion. But I witnessed them learning. Library Website FAQ on 2022 Summer Seminars - Telluride Association Still others are sites of storytelling and imagination. Is Vincent Lloyd of Villanova a hypocrite? That Must Change. In response to the recent article written by Dr. Vincent Lloyd, Telluride Association has received a number of questions about the 2022 Telluride Association Summer Seminar discussed in his article. I wanted to converse with him about his experience, the lessons he took from it, and ascendant social movements on the left, in the hopes that our very different perspectives might help solve problems that worry us both. It happened that on the last day of the anti-blackness week, I had invited the students over to my home, where we would talk for a couple hours about the reading (a selection from Frank Wildersons Afropessimism) and then share a meal. From Wild Wild Country to the Nxivm shows to Scientology exposs, the features of cults have become familiar in popular culture. Faculty are responsible for crafting syllabi that challenge our intellectually curious students. I had misgendered Brittney Griner. As Lloyd sees it, the workshops at Telluride cultivated cognitive habits directly opposed to those required for a college seminar. Vincent Lloyd is an associate professor at Villanova who has written a number of books including some on anti-blackness and prison abolition. We are committed to constructive dialogue about our programming, including different pedagogical approaches to anti-racism; we welcome discussion and feedback from our community, including our wider circle of associates and alumni. Out of their mouths came everything Keisha had said to me during the urgent meetings she had with me after classes when students had allegedly been harmed. But now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of ones comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. The topic of his course was Race and the Limits of Law in America.. Instead of matching crimes with punishments, abolitionists encourage us to think about harms and how they can be made right, often through inviting a broader community to discern the impact of harms, the reasons they came about, and paths forward. Friedersdorf: On a bunch of contested questions, youve sketched relatively radical positions: for example, that forms of anti-Blackness infect each of us; that anti-Black domination endures in the university; that those who seek justice are called not just to eschew dominating others but to root out domination; and that succeeding requires demanding new institutions, not just reforming old ones. Second, I think too many elite academic institutions treat Black students as if they are fragile, undifferentiated victims so lacking in resilience that even a small, unintentional slight from a white or Asian classmate will result in significant harm, acculturating many students to engage Black classmates not as peers but as pitiable others best patronized as allies while walking on eggshells.
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