Teaching is a Political Act: The Brave Adjunct Lecturer Who Invited the Murderous White Nationalist Frazier Glenn Miller to Speak to His Students

White Nationalist Frazier Glenn Miller shot and murdered 3 people at two Jewish community centers outside of Kansas City.

While the KKK tries to remake itself as a "respectable" organization that is not in fact one of the largest terrorist organizations in the United States, Miller offered no apologies for his hate and violence. Other White Nationalists have disavowed him--of course--as a man whose actions and rhetoric was "embarrassing" and "misrepresented" the movement.

For example, there is a beautiful ugliness in the following comments from a prominent White Supremacist:

Of all the people and organizations decrying the shootings Sunday that killed three people at two Jewish centers outside Kansas City, perhaps the most unlikely is Stormfront.org, one of the oldest and largest white nationalist forums on the internet. 

“We have enough of a problem with how we are portrayed without some homicidal whack job coming along and reinforcing that,” Stormfront founder Don Black told The Daily Beast.

As the folksy truism suggests, you can't put lipstick on a pig or polish a turd.


Black continues:

But Black said Miller has long been rejected by much of the white nationalist movement, not only because of his work as an FBI informant but because he allegedly fathered two children by an Asian woman when he was younger. Now, argues Black, Miller is all over the news giving the white nationalist movement a bad, or worse, name. 

“From the news reports, it seems that none of his victims were even Jewish,” said Black. “Everybody is outraged because killing people at random is pretty horrible. It was bad enough when it looked like he had targeted and killed Jews, but the fact that he didn’t even do that is really kind of weird and suspicious”

...In the SPLC’s initial report disclosing Miller as the sole Kansas City shooting suspect, the center noted that a forthcoming study “will show that nearly 100 people in the last five years have been murdered by active users” on Stormfront.org. 

Black said he’s “waiting with bated breath” to see that study. “There have been a few people who have come through [Stormfront] that are mentally unstable and went on a killing spree, but their posts didn’t indicate anything like that and they certainly wouldn’t have been tolerated by our moderators if they had,” he said. 

“We’ve got 286,000 registrations. We’re going to have a few people like that,” he went on. “I’m sure Facebook and Twitter have a lot more than that, and I’m sure we’re a lot less tolerant of any kind of suggestion of illegal violence than those sites.” 

After all, he said, Miller was not allowed to post on Stormfront.

Hatred is so normalized that white racial chauvinists are unable to see how distorted their sense of reality and moral compass actually is. Frazier Glenn Miller is one of their tribe. Only now that he has acted on the collective violent fantasies of the White Right is he to be shunned instead of valorized...in public.

We often talk about the transformative power of teaching and how the classroom is a political space. Unfortunately, the importation of neoliberalism into the classroom, with its please the customer at all costs approach and accompanying destruction of academic freedom, has subverted the ability to have truly transformative moments which challenge students by taking them out of their comfort zone.

David Embree, a very brave adjunct lecturer at Missouri State University, was not intimidated by such realities. In January of 2012, he invited Miller to speak to his students. Embree also had supportive supervisors and administrators who believe that learning should involve exposing students to a world that is not necessarily nurturing, validating, safe, or supportive, and in which their priors and egos will be sustained and validated.

Embree allowed his student to see, in the flesh, that there are people who hate the very fact of your existence because it is offensive to them.

As an adjunct, he has no job security. A complaining student or their parent could cost him his job. Embree did not sacrifice his truth-telling, however pragmatic and understandable such a choice would have been, in the face of the real possibility that a sincere commitment to teaching as a real vocation is a firing offense in today's neoliberal model of higher education.

I do not know what silly hoops and obstacles such as "trigger warnings", consent forms, or allowing students to opt out of a difficult class activity, David Embree had to negotiate. In many elite institutions, the worst aspects of political correctness--what has become the very thing that Right-wing authoritarians and Culture War bloviataing types have caricatured and mocked--would have precluded Embree's inviting a White Supremacist like Miller to speak to his classroom.

Or alternatively, Miller would have been granted a visit but only after there were safe rooms and spaces for "emotional decompression" and "sharing" fully equipped with counselors and psychologists to protect the children of the privileged from intellectual and emotional shrapnel.

David Embree did a great service by inviting Frazier Glenn Miller to speak to his students. We need more college professors and lecturers like him. Unfortunately, men and women like David Embree are being silenced and/or forced out of the profession by the onerous weight and surveillance of crooked and myopic student evaluations, and a business model where pushing the students through to graduation  in order to take in their monies along the way, is transforming the college and university into a glorified and overpriced trade school and degree mill.