Never Mud Wrestle with Pigs: White Fragility and the Deployment of Emotion as a Mechanism of White Domination

• In Event: 4120 - White Fragility, White Tears: Managing White Emotions in Critical Discussions of Race

Abstract

In January 2017 Dr. Joyce Bell and I published a manuscript which critically challenges the use of the First Amendment to protect white racist speech on college and university campuses. In the paper, we identified the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) as a key litigator in the fight to protect the First Amendment right to be racist on campuses. On the day that the paper was published online Ari Cohn, one of the Directors at FIRE, found the paper and took to twitter to malign our work with insults and sarcastic taunts. After several disparaging tweets about the paper, Cohn then tagged Dr. Bell and myself and claimed he wanted to ask some questions of clarification about the paper. In response, I informed him, via twitter, that I would not respond to his questions because his insults and sarcasm concerning our paper illustrated that he was being disingenuous in asking for civil discourse. After my response, Cohn and many of his twitter contacts engaged in a twitter firestorm of emotion—ranging from expressions of shock and pain at my suggestion they were less then civil, to expressions of remorse for the original insulting tweets with assertions that that remorse mandated that I respond, to expressions of overt anger at my refusal to engage and personal insults. This paper uses this and several similar interactions to scholarship on race critical perspectives concerning the use of the First Amendment to defend racist speech and expression to illustrate the ways in which whites deploy a range of emotions to protect and facilitate the boundaries of white domination and to manipulate discussions about racial inequality and racism to stall those who attempt to challenge such domination.

Author

• Wendy Leo Moore, Texas A&M University