Beginnings

Teaching race and racism at Princeton University brought home to me the truism that the U.S. conversation about race and racism is, if anything, different than in Europe. I arrived at Princeton, New Jersey, in late August 2022. I had been asked to develop and to teach an undergraduate course in anthropology, entitled “Current Issues in Anthropology: Liberalism, Racism & Free Speech,” over a period of ten weeks from September to December. The idea that I, as a white European, would teach race and racism to U.S. students had initially come across as preposterous. I had developed the course syllabus in Norway whilst trying my best to deal with all the red tape that my move across the Atlantic entailed, and so I did not really know what to expect. Though I had given many lectures on racism to all kinds of Norwegian audiences since I first started researching and publishing in this field in Norway, I had never been invited to give an entire course on the topic. I had come to regard the invitation to Princeton as a unique and exhilarating opportunity in all respects. I knew as a matter of course that all kinds of teaching about racism had long since become part of the U.S. cultural wars and that there was a burgeoning conservative industry of systematic targeting of scholars teaching about racism and related topics and of the institutions in which they worked across the United States.

I had innocently assumed that a university course for a small number of students given at a liberal Ivy League university in a Democratic, eastern state would pass under the radar of U.S. right-wing cultural warriors. I would soon realize that I was wrong. A few days after a short description of my Fall 2022 course on racism had been published on the Department of Anthropology’s website, I received an e-mail from a young man who introduced himself as a journalist. He worked for an outfit that I had never even heard of, namely the liberal-sounding Campus Reform, and he wanted to “clarify” two matters relating to my course. The first of which was whether he could have access to my as-yet unpublished syllabus, and the second was whether I had, in fact, drafted the text with the course description myself. These were questions which heightened my suspicion, and which led me to contact the department to consult with senior colleagues about whether I should respond or not. I was advised not to engage with Campus Reform. What I would only learn later was that this was by no means the first time Campus Reform, a conservative activist group whose deep pockets were provided by the conservative Leadership Institute in Arlington, Virginia, had targeted courses offered by the department and has played a role in numerous Title VI complaints with many U.S. universities. Campus Reform employs young, right-wing leaning undergraduate students on campuses across the United States as “reporters” and had previously targeted courses given at the department in which reference to racism or Black Lives Matter appeared on course descriptions. On its website, Campus Reform self-describes as a “conservative watchdog to the nation’s higher education sector” that “exposes liberal bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses.”

David Theo Goldberg argues that groups like Campus Reform “weaponize criticisms” of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in order to “spy on faculty and students they take to be too liberal for the national good” (2021). The group's website appeared to suggest that it was particularly exercised by any campus activity in support of rights to abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and the renaming of buildings or removals of statues dedicated to U.S. white supremacists or slave owners. Campus Reform made several attempts to solicit a response from me, and then proceeded to publish an online item about my course on August 12, with an irate headline suggesting that the course “accused far right activists” of abusing free speech to “justify” hate speech. A further offence appeared to be that I had included the media scholar Gavan Titley’s 2020 monograph, Is Free Speech Racist?, on my syllabus.

Fox News followed suit one day later, on August 13, with an online item which was nothing more than a reworking of the initial Campus Reform item. “Welcome to America!”, I thought, and braced myself for a torrent of hate mail and abuse in my inbox. For in my native Norway, which with its five million citizens is a much smaller place, such right-wing media targeting would have resulted in both hate mail and direct threats. But there was in fact nothing of the sort forthcoming as a result of these online items by Campus Reform and Fox News. The advice from colleagues was to keep my head down, focus on my work and avoid any temptation to respond. The background to my targeting was clear to me. This had to do with the relentless and systematic right-wing attacks on any teaching about racism and white supremacy in general (Rana 2019).

Discerning the Optics of Race and Racism

The optics and the experiences that we bring to bear on contested topics like race and racism vary greatly not only between societies but also between individuals. In debates about the rise of right-wing populism at the Annual Meeting of the AAA in 2017, I had learned that whereas my U.S. colleagues often brought the optics of race to the analyses of this phenomenon, my European colleagues generally preferred to talk about class when analyzing the same phenomenon. This is also a reflection of the fact that the term race has a much more taken-for-granted status in U.S. than in European academe. It refers to a social construction rather than biological facts.

My aim with the “ANTH 306: Current Issues in Anthropology: Liberalism, Racism & Free Speech” course was to provide my students with tools with which to think about race, racism, and free speech in a global context. That also meant introducing students to theories about race and racism drawn from outside the United States, as well as empirical examples ranging from Norway, South Africa, Brazil, India, and China. My class was designed as a reading seminar, anchored in a pedagogical style which emphasized the value of close and attentive readings, open and frank exchanges of ideas in the classroom, and student reflection of their own experiences in thinking through race and racism. But could these highly variegated theories and experiences bridge the epistemic divisions pertaining to race and racism between the United States and other parts of the world? After all, bringing these divisions out in the open is different from persuading U.S. students that these divisions have something to teach them.

I started out with six students and ended up with nine. My students had diverse backgrounds, and included self-identified Asian-Americans, African-Americans, Latinx, and Native Americans, in addition to white Americans. But they were all U.S. or Canadian citizens. None had come to argue with me about the course that I taught: they all turned out to be committed and diligent students. But what did learning about race and racism from a white European anthropologist at an historically white space mean to them? More than my whiteness, it was my Europeaness which stood in the way of convergences with my students’ framing of race and racism.

Teaching Race and Racism in a White Space

Princeton is still saturated with symbols of historically white privilege. Princeton University was established as the New Jersey College in 1746, on lands which historically formed part of the territory of the Lenape (Watterson 2017). It was historically a university for the sons of white Southern elites, with some forty percent of the student population coming from the U.S. South until the 1950s. Woodrow Wilson, Princeton’s president in 1909, famously responded to a query from a black minister asking to be admitted to Princeton that “it would be altogether inadvisable for a colored man to enter” the university. In response to black Princeton students’ activism, Woodrow Wilson’s name was removed from the Princeton School of International Affairs and from one of Princeton’s residential colleges in 2018. The first eight presidents of the New Jersey College were all Presbyterian slaveholders: a small plaque in front of the President’s House on Nassau Street now commemorates the domestic slaves held there (see Wilder 2013 for more information).

The “afterlife of slavery” is never far from the surface on the Princeton campus or in Princeton itself (Hartman 2008, 13). Whether in the form of a statue of the slaveowner and president of New Jersey College, John Witherspoon, in front of Pyne Hall, or the house in which the civil right activist Paul Robeson grew up, or the impressive Firestone Library, named after a company which made its fortunes from slave-like rubber plantations in Liberia.

I knew little about the history of Princeton and Princeton University before my arrival. But it was somewhat surprising to learn that my students, who had spent at least two years there, professed to know so little about this part of Princeton’s history. Sure, some did have personal experiences with racism, but being students at Princeton would appear to signal that they themselves had overcome the burdens of whatever racism they had experienced. The stereotypical Princeton student is of course a child of inherited wealth and privilege, but several of my students were there on Pell grants and lived frugally. But for all of them, the past did indeed appear to be past, and though they could voice strong opinions about the still predominantly white and male faculty at Princeton, the professor at the Arts Faculty who had used the N-word in class and saw his black students walk out en masse, or the need for black sport managers, none of my students appeared to be involved in any form of campus activism related to anti-racism. And so in my teaching, I tried to incorporate references to the history of racism at Princeton.

Since the primary reference in thinking about race and racism for many students was bound to be the United States, and the African-American experience in particular, I decided to include texts on the syllabus from a wide range of societal and historical contexts, including texts about the Native American experience with settler colonialism, and racism and white supremacist ideas. I also invited one of Princeton’s very few graduate students of Native American background to address my class and to talk about his own background on a reservation in Oklahoma. It was not as if my students were not knowledgeable about this part of the United States, but to discuss this in the context of a course on race and racism did seem to introduce a new angle.

As part of the course, my students also read non-anthropological scholarly contributions to the field of race and racism, and the study of the nexus between race and racism by the likes of Stuart Hall (2017) and Paul Gilroy (2019).

Whilst Hall argued that race is so embedded in popular modes of thinking about human difference that it is resistant to human attempts at dismantling the term, Gilroy is a proponent of the view that the term itself needs to be dismantled. It would be fair to say that Gilroy’s arguments did not resonate with the students in my class. Where, they asked, was an understanding of race as a mode of positive communal identification between people of similar backgrounds? And so Hall’s intuition proved correct. Towards the end of my course, a chasm between the perspective of my students and my own when it came to race and racism appeared to remain. There was little I could do about a knowledge born out of their experiences, experiences that I did not share. An assigned class debate in which my students debated whether the concept of race should in accordance with Gilroy’s suggestions be abandoned or not led both debating teams to converge on the proposition that the concept of race should be retained for the purpose of self-identification.

But from an anthropological and pedagogical point of view, this would seem to be as it should be. For anthropology should, if anything, teach us that the modes of understanding we bring to bear on the world which surrounds us are highly variegated, and pedagogy that the role of a teacher is to open up for critical questions and conversations.

But maybe there was a crack in the edifice after all, and my students less given to understand race “as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world” in the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015, 7). In a course essay submitted late in the course, one of my students introduced the only short story the late Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate and Princeton professor Toni Morrison ever published (2022). Written in 1980 and entitled “Recitatif,” this is a story about a world in which racial identifiers have been completely removed from the narrative, and in which the readers consequently find themselves at loss in trying to identify which of the two female protagonists are black and white. Morrison’s point in this short story is as I read it not about an illusionary “colorblindness” or “racelessness” but a gesturing towards the very possibility that race can be made to matter less.

At a time in which sixty U.S. universities—including Princeton—have been threatened with significant federal funding cuts based on Title VI complaints relating to alleged antisemitism under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, I have come to think a great deal about what Princeton offered me back then. This was more than anything a level of academic freedom and a space in which to think critically that was unlike anything I had ever experienced and considered possible in Norwegian academia, where strictures on the academic freedom to teach, research, and publish as one wishes are largely unspoken and related to the idea that one’s own society and one’s disciplinary peers are not to be criticized. Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber has to his and his university’s great credit taken a lead and indicated that it is willing to put up a fight for the very principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech which are so fundamental to the modern research university.

The online doxing groups like Campus Reform that, during my time at Princeton University, seemed relatively marginal and a minor nuisance that I and my colleagues could ignore have all of a sudden become very central to the Republican assault on academic freedom and freedom of speech in the United States. Teachers now have to contend with a White House that seems to believe that race is biologically real, and which wants to do away with teaching young Americans about the role of racism and white supremacism in U.S. history.

My students contended that it was socially and experientially real, which I cannot in hindsight fault them for thinking. Teaching race and racism at U.S. universities, with the inclusion of comparative prisms of understanding race and racism and examples drawn from U.S. history, seem to have become much more challenging as a result.