Prof. Vincent Lloyd on Anti-Blackness and Anti-Racism

MICHAEL HOLMES, HOST: Well, now to tackle complicated and controversial topics in class, we should all want to be doing that. Even more importantly, how do you have a conversation that could end in agreeing to disagree? Our next guest has been living that dilemma. And his story is unique because he is a black professor who wanted to challenge his students’ pre-conceptions about racism, and it did not end well. Professor Vincent Lloyd spoke with Michel Martin about his article, “A Black Professor Trapped an Anti-Racist Hell.”

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Professor Vincent. Lloyd, thanks so much for talking to us.

VINCENT LLOYD, PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR OF AFRICAN STUDIES, VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY: Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: So, you wrote a piece for — an essay for “Compact” magazine which “The Atlantic” later picked up, and you had a conversation with them about it. It was titled, “A Black Professor Trapped in the Anti-Racist Hell.” And you give your account of a really — I don’t know how to say it — bracing, disturbing experience that you had teaching a seminar, race in the limits of law in America. This was a class of high school students. It was part of a summer program at Telluride You taught there before, but not for some time. So, before we get into the — kind of the substance of your essay, just talk a little bit about why some people might be surprised that you are the person, you know,, writing an essay about the — you know, the anti-racist hell?

LLOYD: Thanks. Yes. So, I am a professor of Villanova. I am affiliated with the Africana Studies Program. I directed our black studies program here for a few years here. My research focuses on anti-blackness in religion and in philosophy. And I have been writing books and articles around this topic for a long time. The focus of this course that I was teaching for Telluride was based in the limits of law with — four of the six weeks focused on anti-blackness.

MARTIN: And tell me a little bit about the students. Like who were there in this seminar?

LLOYD: Yes. So, this is a highly selective program. These are the best of the best high school students from around the U.S. and from beyond the U.S. Students who are on the track to Ivy League colleges.

MARTIN: And you had taught that class or a similar class before, right? Tell me what the experience had been.

LLOYD: Yes. So, I taught — co-taught a version of this class in 2014 at Cornell. And then, again, in 2022 at the University of Michigan, through the Telluride Association Program. We read legal cases from Dred Scott and Brown v. Board of Education, to more recent cases on immigration and indigeneity and mass incarceration and informative action. We also read novels. We read memoirs. We read short stories. We also read critical theory and histories that could give us a three-dimensional view of problems of anti-blackness and related issues of oppression in the U.S. today.

MARTIN: And tell me about the seminal format. What had you hope to do? And then, we’ll talk about what actually happened.

LLOYD: Yes. So, unlike a lecture course where the professor is just conveying information to the students. A seminar is based on a belief that each of us can approach a text with our own experiences, our own critical reading skills, and through — pushing against each other through sharing our ideas and bouncing off in conversation our ideas against others’ ideas, new knowledge can be produced. And, you know, when I did this in 2014, it was a really fruitful and rewarding discussion. Each day, there was some awkwardness. These are 16- and 17-year-olds. Some people are saying things that were clearly off. But through the process of conversation, we could think for deeply together and move toward a deeper understanding of what we were reading, that didn’t happen again in 2022.

MARTIN: In your recounting, this went way off the rails. I mean, from your experience. I mean, and obviously, we are just getting your point of view on this, but when did you start to see things kind of go off the rails, at least in your estimation of it?

LLOYD: The first week of the seminar was planned to be on indigeneity, thinking about the genocide of Native Americans and the continuing effects of that on native communities in the U.S. At the end of the first week as a teaching assistant who has also a sort of camp counselor who is coordinating the 21 hours of the students’ lives outside of the seminar came to me and said, it seems like we are missing something really important in the seminar. We are not talking about anti-blackness. I tried to point to the syllabus that, you know, we have four weeks coming up an anti-blackness. But she kept insisting that something was off, you know, if we are spending a week on indigeneity and the injustices suffered by Native Americans. That was the first week. By the second, we were trying to do a mock court. You know, an exercise where students are divided into teams. Some of them are lawyers for one side, some of them are lawyers for another side. We were trying to see, you know, what is it like to be a lawyer? Does law really get to justice or is there something missing if you are adjudicating questions of justice in a court? By the end of that, the students were, again, complaining that they were forced to inhabit the position even just in this exercise of sides that they didn’t believe in. Even if it was just for the purpose of learning the logic of their opponents.

MARTIN: You really do describe, like the way you talk about it is like this anti-racist hell, like this kind of hothouse atmosphere of just accusations and on kindness. Let me just read a little bit. The allegations levy. I had used racist language. I had misgendered Brittney Griner. I had repeatedly confused the names of two black students. My body language harm to them. I hadn’t corrected facts that were harmful to hear when the now-purge students introduced them in class. In fact, you’re saying that they actually, what, kicked out or voted to kick out two students because they didn’t like what they had to say. I invited them to think about the reasoning of both sides of an argument, when only one side was correct. The students ended with the demand, in light of all the harms they had suffered, they could only continue in the class if I abandoned the seminar format and instead lectured each day abou anti-blackness, correcting any of them who questioned orthodoxy. Like, wow. OK. Wow. How did this — was this all presented like on one day?

LLOYD: Yes. On the very final day that we met together, the students all came in about 10 minutes after the class was about to start. They were all were carrying a piece of paper that had a very long statement written on it. Each of them read in sequence a paragraph from the statement and that was that.

MARTIN: So, how far into the seminar was this before the students kind of presented to you with this manifesto?

LLOYD: At the start of the fifth week of a sixth weeks —

MARTIN: The start of the fifth week. OK. So, what did you do?

LLOYD: Yes. So, I — my co-instructor and I said, you know, we need to think about this. And as soon as we left, we talked to the Telluride Association Leadership and said, this doesn’t seem sustainable. We need the Telluride Association Leadership to communicate to these students and to this teaching assistant that these two — this faculty team have been contracted to teach a college level seminar. This is what a college level seminar looks like, and we have faith in these instructors to teach this.

MARTIN: You didn’t go from week one, everybody showing up to the seminar, and then ending in, you know, week five. People are just not showing up or presenting you with this manifesto. What happened in between? Like what was going on before you were presented with this?

LLOYD: Yes. So, each week, there was some other incident that students would raise that they found concerning. For example, when we were discussing Brown v. The Board of Education, a famous Supreme Court case that ended school segregation in the U.S., one of the aspects of that case was a doll test where psychologists were asking students, you know, is this — do you see this doll as white, colored, or negro? And the students in my seminar claim that they were harmed by hearing the word negro, which, you know, I framed as, you know, at the beginning of the classes, saying, we will encounter controversial language. We can talk about that. If you feel uncomfortable, we can have conversations about why we might or might not use different language. But the reaction of hearing something and being harmed and needing to immediately stop everything and to name that harm as creating an unsafe space made it impossible to have a regular seminar.

MARTIN: What was going through your mind when all of this was going on?

LLOYD: I was thinking back to the — what I read about the ’60s and ’70s, when they were really powerful important civil rights movements, and movements against the Vietnam War and quickly turned into movements that had cult like characteristics, movements that we’re turning it on themselves. And we are no longer pursuing justice in the world but we’re sort of eating themselves with the language of the pursuit of justice.

MARTIN: How did the whole thing end up?

LLOYD: So, I told the Telluride Association Leadership, either you come and intervene and explain what the Telluride Association has asked me to do to the students or, you know, we can’t continue in these seminars. It is not a seminar anymore. The Telluride Association Leadership believing in radical democracy, believing that the students in their autonomous community should get to choose to do whatever they want. And, you know, even if it is a failure, they will learn from it for next year. The Telluride Association Leadership decided not to intervene. I understand in the last two weeks, this teaching assistant just basically lectured herself each day for the final two weeks.

MARTIN: OK. So, you know what, you can imagine that people hearing this have had quite a range of reactions to what has been you’ve just described. But I’m kind of just going back to the fact that these are 16 and 17-year- old kids and you are the adult. And I’m just wondering if you thought that this was going — becoming cult like, why didn’t you intervene? Why did you let it go on for so long?

LLOYD: Yes. So, I believe in the Telluride Association mission that, you know, having a democratic community with self-governing of students is really exciting. If I were 16 or 17, I would want to be in that kind of community. And that community — that kind of community brings risks and it is something that the organization, the Telluride Association, to manage those risks. And when things are starting to off the rails, to create bumpers so that things don’t become courtly (ph) cult like as they seemed to in this case. So, the idea, the spirit of the thing strikes me as really important. Like we should be empowering students to figure out — empowering young people to figure out how to live together. That is something that they will be doing throughout their lives, and to do it on their own and not to turn to outside authorities as ways — as guides to tell them how to live.

MARTIN: So, obviously, you wrote this please, not because you had a particularly disturbing and unpleasant experience, but because you feel it says something larger. What do you think this experience says?

LLOYD: I think as a nation and as universities and educators, we’re at a moment of a paradigm shift. We’ve been thinking about race in one way in terms of multiculturalism, in terms of many different races and communities all getting along and — or on the path to getting along. And then, you know, thankfully, black justice movement said, you’re missing something. Like there’s deep anti-blackness in this nation, in communities, in ourselves that we need to root out. And, you know, that’s — we’re at a moment of paradigm shift, and it’s not clear what’s coming next. It’s not clear what new structures and institutions or habits that center anti-blackness look like. We’re experimenting in different ways with what that could look like and we need to be critical about those experience, see what works and see what doesn’t. And I think this Telluride example is, you know, one experiment that didn’t work, but that just means that we should try harder, try new experience because we can’t go back to that old paradigm. But, you know, the kind of story that I recount is one that I hear over and over again form colleagues, particularly liberal arts college kids, particularly at some public institutions, it’s not just what happened in one extreme case that happened in extreme circumstances, although, the circumstances sort of intensified the dynamic. But it’s something that I do hear happening in various versions from colleagues across the country.

MARTIN: But one of the reasons I’m interested in how — what you draw from this is that you said at the outset of your essay that you really dismissed people like John McWhorter, the linguist and social commentator, who has become very impassioned about what he sees as a kind of an anti- intellectualism, an identity driven sort of systems of thinking that he thinks have just taken over to many educational institutions. And I got some from your essay that you were not very sympathetic to this argument at first but now, you are.

LLOYD: Right. So, I think the content is hugely important. Content of, you know, the sort of precepts of — the theories of anti-blackness are hugely important, right? There are — the afterlives of slavery still inform American society. We need to listen to black women. We need to empower black communities to have self-determination and so on, right? This is hugely important. The forum in which we pursue that is also really important, to be careful about, right? We can’t just say, here are a set of dogmas, now, you need to believe them. These are things that we need to reach overtime, right? Going back and forth in conversation. We each need to develop into these sorts of commitments that they can’t just be impounded on us, especially on young folks.

MARTIN: You said that this is something that you were initially not very sympathetic to. but then this happened to you. And now, you’re — it sounds to me like you’re sort of questioning some of the same things that the students are questioning. Just, what is this seminar? Like, what is it for? Should you be forced to read things that are upsetting to you that characterize your ethnicity in a light — in a certain light? I mean, is that accurate, that you’re sort of now in a third phase of thinking like, what did really happen here? Are the students write in some way?

LLOYD: I think we all ought to be interrogating ourselves and, you know, taking the experiences that we have to ask me questions about what we once believe. That’s exactly what the seminar was for, right? To invite students, to hear from others, to think about their own experiences, to re- text and to think more deeply about the beliefs that they once help and to develop new beliefs. You know, I’m still a believer in a seminar format. I think we do need to make changes to the seminar format, which some of the changes I try to make, as I was teaching 2022 as opposed to 2014, changes that involved, you know, doing small group activities, doing partner activities, doing things that could allow students to develop their own voice in a more private circumstance so they could feel empowered when we’re in a big group. And those who might feel less comfortable speaking or who are more shy, like I am, this position (ph), could feel more willing to speak in that big group. So, I — you know, I think the seminar needs to evolve. But reading great books together whether, there are Angela Davis and Frederick Douglas or Plato and Kant, you know, I think that’s important stuff that we need to do and we need to continue doing in smart ways.

MARTIN: But the reason you wrote the essay and I think the reason that people are reacting to it is that it speaks to a larger debate. And so, the question is, is there something in these institutions more broadly that needs to be addressed? And we’re not just talking about, obviously, colleges and universities, although they all can have that hothouse atmosphere you’ve described. But, you know, lots of institutions seem to feel that they are debating, like, how — what are the terms of our engagement? Who gets to decide with those terms are? And I guess that’s for the main question going forward for the rest of us, who were not part of this particular experiences. Is there something we need to learn from that? And what is it. I mean, how do you balance allowing new thoughts to be emerged without allowing a new form of smug self-righteousness and bullying to take over?

LLOYD: Yes. I think this is a difficult question that they were all grappling with in different ways. You know, we need strong institutions that are resilient, that have clear roles and clear duties assigned to those roles. But we also need to differentiate space, right? Spaces where we’re asking difficult questions and spaces where we can be vulnerable. Spaces where we can be frustrated. From spaces where we need work together, right, where we need to pursue one goal and, you know, get in line to get that goal done. And I think one of the challenges that we’re having right now culturally is that there’s a collapse of this differentiation of space, right, where we’re thinking, you know, everywhere like we need to either have open discussion or, you know, just get in line and be on the same page. And in fact, you know, these are both important things. They just have to operate in different sorts of domains.

MARTIN: Professor Vincent Lloyd, thanks so much for talking with us.

LLOYD: Thanks for having me.

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HOLMES: Now, in a statement from Telluride Association about Professor Lloyd’s claims, they say in part, and I’ll just read some of it for you, the students in the seminar asked Professor Lloyd and his co-faculty to “engage critically with points raised during the classroom discussion.” Adding, “Though harmful or erroneous comments need to be addressed, we want to leave the seminar having been challenged, learned things, and gained a new perspective.” As for professor Lloyd’s request for Telluride to intervene, they said this, “The board declined to do so, and instead asked Professor Lloyd to work with a teaching assistants and students to adjust his teaching to meet student’s needs. This process has worked successfully without other faculty, and with Professor in his past work with Telluride Association.” Telluride also says that the claim that two students were voted out of the seminar by classmates is simply not true.