How Would You Deal With Having an Open and Publicly Known White Supremacist Student in Your Classroom?

I didn't recognize his name at first. It was his writing that caught my attention. An autobiography in 100 words. That was the first assignment, and it was as much for me to get to know my students as to evaluate their writing skills. 

When I scrolled through the submissions, I saw that many of them were “fun-loving,” “ambitious” and “determined to succeed,” but only one was “living on a radical fringe” that put him at risk of being a “societal leper.” 

Only one spoke of being duty-bound to a “right wing resistance,” and asserted that if he didn’t stand up for “European folk” and advocate for his race, the “liberal sheep” would continue to erase his heritage. 

In an act of piousness, I did to him only what I would have had him do to me: I Googled his name. 

I was met with dozens of pictures: grinning in Confederate flag T-shirts, grinning in “Straight Pride” T-shirts, grinning in mid-interview stills excerpted from the evening news. 

He was the founder of the White Student Union. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he would be in my fiction writing class. 

Salon has a provocative piece about a college teacher having to deal with an open and public White Supremacist in his classroom. 

How would you deal with such a student? What are the boundaries and limits of respect? How should a teacher deal with a student who a priori has committed to a set of principles which have disdain for those who are not "white?"

On Twitter, I alluded to my go-to move as a lecturer who uses a Socratic approach to teaching in my seminars. 

As is necessary, I channel Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation in my seminars and try to explain how we/I must have a commitment to truth--be it empirical, philosophical, or moral. 

White Supremacy is based on a lie: "white" people by virtue of a connection to a social fiction known as "Whiteness" are not "superior" to other people who may happen to be arbitrarily categorized as members of a different "racial" group.

Students such as Ben Warner's can be "smart," "intelligent," or a welcome change of pace from those who just want to show up, get their gentleman "C's", and complain when they do not receive an "A."

Any basic questions about foundational assumptions and empirical reality would have destroyed Ben Warner's student's arguments and the mystical pull he (may have) had over others...the lecturer included.

Are such students a welcome presence in the classroom? I would suggest that they are not. But, they paid to put their butts in the seat. What to do?

I have no ready answer. However, I would not surrender to White Victimology--especially as channeled by White Supremacists--as Ben Warner does here:

One day, he came in a half-hour after class had started, and then stuck around to apologize. 

“Sorry I was late,” he told me. “I was dealing with the police.” 

“The police?” I said. 

“I might not be in class on Thursday. I got my first death threat.” He lifted his computer to show me his Facebook wall. 

“Usually, they just call me a motherfucker or tell me to suck a dick,” he said. “But this one says they’re going to kill me on Thursday.” 

“That’s terrible,” I said. “What are the police doing?” 

“They’re not doing anything.” 

“You shouldn’t have to deal with that,” I said, while at the same time knowing that — had he not been in my class, had I not seen him furrowing his brow over Carver or O’Connor, asking serious questions about characterization and voice — a more reprehensible me might have muttered he deserved it. 

He stood with his hands clutched in front of his waist, looking down at his chest, very much like a frightened child. 

“It’s been getting worse for you?” I asked. 

“These interviews keep getting it wrong. They take out all the good stuff I say.” 

“It’s a huge price to pay for this kind of celebrity.” 

“I guess I have to double down,” he said. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.” 

This was my moment. I thought maybe I could change something. There he was, after class, a scared kid … and me, in loco parentis. But I wasn’t sure what to say. 

“Or,” I tried, “you can just go silent.” 

He thought about that. “But then they just write whatever they want.” 

“For now,” I said, “and it might get worse before it gets better. But if you don’t feed it, it will eventually starve.” 

“That’s interesting,” he said, looking me in the eye. “I might try that.”

And speaking to a more significant point of personal safety and security, how does a possessive investment in White privilege and masculinity empower a white male college teacher the freedom to indulge a White Supremacist in their classroom?

 

The following class, he arrived wearing a shirt with a Confederate flag. The words “It Ain’t Over” were printed beneath it, but it was subtle — a dark green shirt, the flag a small one over the breast, with a larger version on the back, which was pressed against his chair. As I saw it, I thought, “What are his rights? Are they limited by the level of distraction he poses?” 

When he leaned forward, I thought I saw a student crane her neck suspiciously. But it was only a T-shirt. It was distracting, yes, but not much more so than his camouflaged backpack and crew cut...  

Or am I simply allowing myself to be fooled? Is it just that, as a middle-class white man, it doesn’t come up all that often? The difference between those people and whatever it was that my student was peddling was that with my student, I’d received the memo beforehand. It was out in the open and brazenly so (the Confederate flags on his shirts were getting larger, and he’d adhered a sticker to his laptop that read “The South WILL Rise Again”). 

It was a few weeks later that he stayed after class to alert me to an upcoming absence. He was going to CPAC as a member of the college Republicans. It was decent of him to tell me, but it also seemed like he was bracing for a fight. “It’s an excused absence because the SGA is paying for it,” he said. To my knowledge, there is no such arrangement between the student government and the university. Not that it mattered. I told him it was fine. 

Missing from Ben Warner's narrative is any mention of how those students who are despised and hated by a publicly open White bigot may be made to feel in this classroom. 

Yes, all parties present in the classroom paid the price of admission. 

But, what to do about openly disruptive voices who are committed to anti-intellectualism, in what ought to purportedly be a space of respectful intellectual inquiry, yet do not value such priors because of a path dependency beholden to White Supremacist hate?

Colleges and universities are supposed to be safe spaces full of liberal thought and indoctrination. Yeah right.