"Woke" Side Story
The ‘Woke’ Side of Assembly Hall" opinions piece from The Exonian has not gone under the radar. For once, everyone—from the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Committee to the clumps of preps in Grill—was reading The Exonian. Although people were reading, not all was well: it seems like everyone from Ms. Carbonell, the co-chair of the MLK Committee, to Ms. Lazure, a faculty adviser for The Exonian, was asking to speak with Mai Hoang over her article. Mai’s article, while already controversial, does not directly deal with the most important issue about social justice at Exeter. It notes that only half of assembly snaps but doesn’t ask why the other half does not. In short, the lack of effective student-to-student activism has made social justice an issue forcibly prescribed by the school, rather than something enthusiastically taken up by the Exonian masses.
We, as activists, must adjust our course and find new, effective methods of social justice activism. It is not as if we have not made great progress already: just look at all the efforts social justice activists have put in with the creation of DEI and the implementation of parts of the Afro-Latinx Exonian Society (ALES) proposal. The question is now how best to continue this progress.
The reason why only part of assembly snaps for Dr. Bramlett, the representative of what should be a universally accepted movement, is that it is difficult to take social justice at Exeter seriously. Exeter’s social justice movement, taken as a collective bloc of people, has any number of legitimate battles to fight. We could talk about the illegal detention of immigrants just down the block at the Exeter Police Department. Bashar Awawdeh, a legal Jordanian immigrant, was imprisoned for 26 days despite a lack of both evidence and judicial authority. This should have been an outrage, and all social-justice activists should have been up in arms. Surely, many others at the Academy would see the justness in this cause and rally to the social-justice movement if they knew about the situation.
Instead, the most recent public campaign for social justice were posters in P.O. on “ableist language” and why calling something “lame” promotes the degradation of the physically disabled. While these posters may not be representative of the general social justice movement, the fact that they’re the most recent example of social justice on campus says something in itself: that there is currently little public outreach from social justice activists to the broader population. Considering that Awawdeh got hardly a peep in The Exonian or from the social-justice movement, it is no wonder that some Exonians might think of social justice as being detached from important struggles.
When these issues are lumped together by Exonians as “social justice” in general, it dilutes the potency of social justice in the minds of Exonians. Even if ableism is just as important as issues like arbitrary detainment, many Exonians certainly don’t perceive it that way. Justified or not, some Exonians find the posters’ condemnation of the terms “lame” and “crazy” amusing rather than a serious consideration when speaking.
This question of the image of social justice at Exeter is a common theme throughout the years. Just look at last year’s MLK Day blunders. There were any number of respectable keynote speakers that the MLK Committee could have invited. What could’ve been a thoughtful and powerful day for reflection on the state of modern race relations was instead a spectacle that reeked of overzealous intersectional progressivism. Social justice may be a just cause, but it made a caricature of itself when Lourdes Ashley Hunter was asked to leave campus.
But this is still only half the story. It seems like social justice activists cannot tolerate any criticism—or even observations that could be used for criticism—of their movement. Save for the use of the phrase “self-segregation,” which could’ve been addressed in a short postscript or not at all, Hoang essentially said nothing wrong. She did not and did not intend to marginalize minorities and special interest groups. She did not intend to undermine the efforts of DEI. Still, after coming under withering fire—which I fully anticipate for this article as well—Hoang, while still standing firm by the point of her article, has apologized profusely.
“My intention in writing the op-ed was to point out the divisions on this campus, and how concepts that PEA officially champions, namely equity and inclusion, do not illicit the same enthusiasm to some as they do to others. I was not trying to find fault or make fun of any group, either those who are engaged or disengaged.”
There should have been no need to clarify that the article was not intended to make fun of any group, as it never made fun of any minority groups in the first place. It requires some amount of mental gymnastics to stretch the innocuous observations in Hoang’s article into an attack on minority groups. The language was admittedly unnecessarily charged—but, as Hoang herself said, the point should not be muddied by such a slip-up.
In any case, when it comes to moving forwards with progressive social justice, Hoang suggests this:
“The danger lies in group think, or rather, “sub-group think,” when the individual becomes biased against larger community goals because of their groups’ differing beliefs, to the point where they not only disagree with these goals – again not inherently a bad thing – but refuse to consider them altogether … more proactive engagement from the part of DEI is absolutely a must.”
Relying on a new branch of the administration to fix a student problem is like relying on the new volunteer at the homeless shelter to fix poverty in the whole city. The only way attitudes can be substantially changed is through student-level organization and activism. Yes, it will be uncomfortable. But if we persist, real change can happen.
Other social justice groups have no excuse not to have boots on the ground, handing out flyers and explaining their views to the public. Somehow, I doubt that there are a significant number of shotgun-toting, cross-burning, women-hating, ultra-nationalist, hyper-conservative people on campus absolutely unwilling to listen to a speaker passionate about their cause. I would instead wager that most Exonians are just tired of hearing assertion after assertion about “cisgender white male privilege” without explanation from other students.
This is exactly the problem I think that Hoang alludes to, but does not name explicitly. By retiring into their comfortable niche, “woke” Exonians have distanced themselves from the rest of the Academy.
Hoang’s article shouldn’t be controversial, yet it still is. Activists claim to be open to differing views, but the collective Exeter social-justice movement has not worked to combat social injustice with in-depth, student-to-student methods. This only breeds fragility at a time when Exeter’s social justice movement must not be fragile. There are systemic problems within Exeter’s social justice movement, and we, as social justice activists, must do everything in our power to fix it.