I was detained at an Emory protest. Here’s what the university got wrong.

Credit: the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

OPINION

“Young people are the ones to take to the streets and the campus quads to raise the warning bell about what is amiss in the world.”

By Noëlle McAfee

May 10, 2024

April 25, a Thursday, did not go as planned. Instead of overseeing a series of meetings with an external review team in town to assess the department I chair at Emory University, by 11 a.m., I was in a police vehicle with a group of students and other protesters being hauled off to jail, and a clip of me being arrested began to go viral.

The clip is indeed mesmerizing: Here’s this nicely dressed, rather composed, somewhat older professor with blonde hair being handcuffed and dragged down the sidewalk by a police officer with his face covered in a balaclava as she pleads with a bystander to please call the philosophy department and tell them that the chair of the department and president-elect of the university Senate has been arrested.

I was one of 28 people arrested after the university administration called on the Emory Police Department to disband a protest that had sprung up that morning, a protest aimed at stopping support of a public safety training center and investment in Israel. I now know that the administration knew that Emory police would call in the Atlanta Police Department and, it seems, the Georgia State Patrol as well. (The university president said he does not know who called the GSP, though an email sent out by the Emory’s public safety official notes university participation.) I had happened down to the quad that morning to observe things, hopeful that the administration would not repeat the catastrophe of a year earlier when it had summoned a heavily militarized APD to disband a group of peaceful protesters. Surely, university officials wouldn’t be so stupid.

I found a colleague milling around the peaceful protest, along with other onlookers, enjoying the weather and chatting with colleagues. “At least the APD aren’t here,” I said to him. “Oh, yes they are,” he replied, pointing to the far corner of the quad. And then we saw a line of Georgia State Patrol troopers marching down the side of the quad, stopping just steps before where we stood. And then in a flash the GSP attacked the quad from one side and the APD tore into it from the other, leading to utter mayhem, screams, sounds of rubber bullets, acrid gas in the air, and right in front of me two or three officers pummeling a young woman who was on the ground trying to protect her face with both hands.

Since getting arrested for refusing to back away from this scene of police brutality, I have gotten love letters from all over the world, thanking me for standing up for the Palestinian people. I have also gotten hate mail and death wishes for the same. I seem to be a screen for people’s projections: the first in hopes that someone with some privilege in the West will care about the massacre of Palestinians; the second in outrage that anyone supporting Palestinians must be an antisemite or boneheaded elitist lefty academic who ought to lose her job or worse.

What they all misunderstand is my reason for being on the quad. It was not to express my views about the situation in Gaza, which I find to be too complex to convey in a round of chants and slogans. I was there to protect our students’ roles as civic actors, the conscience of our culture.

Think about it: At least every decade or two, young people are the ones to take to the streets and the campus quads to sound a warning bell about what is amiss in the world, whether an insane war on a small country in Southeast Asia or complicity with South Africa’s apartheid regime or climate crisis or the obscene wealth gap or now the situation in Gaza. Students carry out a vital role in a democratic system: identifying and thematizing issues. They name and frame problems. They put issues on the public agenda, which deliberative bodies can take up and start figuring out ways to address along with the various complexities that don’t make their way into protesters’ chants, slogans and demands.

When university presidents call in the cops to violently dismantle peaceful demonstrations, they demonstrate how little they know about how democracy works. They send a message to students that their voices are just an annoyance at best, dangerous at worst. These administrators might tolerate students reading about Henry David Thoreau and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but they better not act like them. Obey the law, never question it. This all goes along with the neoliberal turn of a politics that champions consumerism and criminalizes political engagement, that cuts programs in the humanities in favor of more job training, that has no understanding of a liberal arts education.

I was one of the first people released from jail that day — with a ticket in my bag for disorderly conduct and criminal trespass. I called an Uber to take a student and me back to campus. It was quite surreal. That day and the next, in between meetings with our external reviewers, I wandered the campus to find students and faculty shocked and somber but continuing their discussions about the situation in Gaza and Israel — and Emory University. But at the university administration level, nothing changed. That evening it again called in cops and dispersed students. In meetings with the Senate and constituencies, it continues to vow to uphold law and order and seems to have no capacity for understanding the civic role of the university it runs.

Noëlle McAfee is a professor and chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University, where she also is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and interim co-director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program. She is president-elect of the Emory University Senate.

Fantasies of Entitlement

There’s an old civil rights slogan: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. The slogan of the Trump base might be: He is the one we were waiting for. And they will continue to wait, now even after he has left office, even after a second impeachment, and even if the Senate votes to convict and prevent him from office again. They will continue to wait and clamor for someone who will restore what was supposed to be theirs: the American dream promised to descendants of the Europeans who came to America, white America.

The Trump base is not going away. In psychoanalytic terms, it remains gripped by a fantasy of white entitlement, an identity of being those who are truly deserving. They are beset by paranoia that enemies have stolen what they deserve.

This identity is largely unconscious, anxious, and unstable, a defense against a more primordial anxiety of having no real or rightful place in the world. One need not be a member of a white supremacist organizations to have an identification with whiteness and all its connotations. But most of those enticed by it are white.

Unlike historically rich ethnic or religious identities—whether Italian or Nigerian, Jewish or Muslim, whiteness is not really an identity at all. It is an epiphenomenon and legacy of colonialism, something shared by colonialists and constructed in opposition to those colonized.

White identity is guilt-ridden and fragile to its core; but it has through American history been the ticket to membership, inclusion, and citizenship. And now in the second decade of the twenty-first century, that ticket is being called out for being a fraud. It will no longer get you to the front of the line. You will need to wait your turn like everyone else.

Many in the Trump base deny they are racists, but there is ample evidence of their unconscious belief and primordial anxieties. Look at the symptoms.

During the election season, every single time Trump or one of his surrogates was asked about racial injustice, they immediately associated to Antifa. This is a symptom of the large-group identification and its childish defenses, including a paranoia that someone is out to destroy them.

Other symptoms need no psychoanalytic interpretation: the gallows at the morning rally on January 6, the Confederate Flag brought in to the US Capitol, the t-shirts emblazoned with racist and genocidal slogans.

Those enticed by a fantasy of white identity, whether consciously or not, are enraged at being denied the entitlement that should come from being the ones who made America great. For the fantasy of entitlement to stay alive, it needs someone who might fulfill the fantasy. Trump was their man. But without him they will find someone or something else.

A fantasy of white entitlement also thrives by identifying enemies to blame for  robbing them of what they deserve. Conspiracy theories readily supply these, from the Deep State trying to undermine Trump to those largely black urban populations stealing the election.

What is to be done? Certainly, closing down online venues for conspiracy theories and misinformation helps. But so long as the root of the problem persists, no amount of “fact-checkers” will set things straight. No account of Trump’s tens of thousands of lies will unsettle his followers’ certitude that Trump (or whoever comes next) is their savior. Those caught up in these extreme defenses will find whatever “facts” fit their delusions.

To get to the root of the problem, we need to address the fundamental anxieties at work. For those white folks who have been left out of the global neoliberal economy, there is the anxiety of being in unmoored in the world. For those white folks who are profiting from neoliberal economies, there is an unconscious anxiety that whatever place they have was ill-gotten.

We need to embark a new collective founding of our country. This will include public policies that address the ways in which a neoliberal global economy is in fact robbing many of a decent life. A new founding will also include what each of us can do in our day-to-day lives, asking our neighbors and kin caught up in conspiracy theories, rage, and paranoia: How are you doing? Is everything alright? We can and should create spaces for everyone to reckon with guilt and responsibility, build relationships across differences, and share their grief and worry about the country.

In the end, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

The Power of the People

Governments and their institutions can do a lot of things. But one thing they cannot do is create their own legitimacy. That’s the brilliant thing about politics, no matter how fascistic it might be: institutions want to be seen as legitimate. But only the people themselves can bequeath legitimacy on their institutions.

What we are witnessing across the world in the #blacklivesmatter protests following the murder of George Floyd is a massive withdrawal of legitimacy from the police.

An op-ed in today’s New York Times makes this point perfectly. Hahrie Han writes, “Something unthinkable happened in Minneapolis over the past two weeks: The Police Department lost its legitimacy.”

It did not happen overnight, nor just over the past two weeks. “This work was possible only because organizers could build on years of organizing that connected people and built the skills they needed to mobilize a rapid response. As Ms. Fairbanks said: ‘No single person or organization made this happen. It took years of people, especially black women, doing the groundwork of building trust and accountability. It takes years of conversations about what it means to be community. That is what gave us the opportunity to align when we needed to.'”

On Cardigans and Social Distancing

Sitting in front of a fire, wearing a cardigan sweater, in February 1977 President Jimmy Carter addressed the nation about the energy crisis that had punched the country in the gut. Clearly the White House’s thermostat must have been turned down. The fire crackled, making the living room warm and toasty. Carter spoke of national policies but also what citizens could do, uttering the words “conservation” and “sacrifice.” The message was clear: turn off unnecessary lights, turn down the thermostat, put on a goddamned sweater.

I remember clearly the contrast from the December before, when every house in my neighborhood was decked out in holiday lights, to the following December when there were no holiday lights to be seen. Everyone took to heart the message of conservation, and also perhaps the message that the annual rite of hauling out ladders to string the lights was no longer necessary. And ever since, the rite is no longer obligatory but voluntary. Now I marvel when I see a house strung out in lights.

I wonder what social distancing — what the mandate to work at home, what the elbow bump (that now is even too close) — will do to our social practices. I can teach class from my living room. Maybe I could teach it from across the world? Why risk running into a student or colleague in the hallway?

Jimmy Carter was absolutely correct about what we needed then and still need to do now about our energy habits. He discussed not just conservation but renewables and a comprehensive national policy.

Now in the face of a viral pandemic, it is absolutely right for us to stay as far away from each other as we can. But not forever, I hope. Not for long.

Conservation is key for energy policy or what we now think of as climate change policy. Social distancing is necessary to stave off the coronavirus. But these are ways of addressing symptoms, not getting at underlying and systemic processes. Addressing climate change means developing renewable sources of energy, just as Carter anticipated over forty years ago but which has yet to be carried through. In fact, under the cover of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has been busy rolling back Obama’s climate change measures.

Likewise, preventing pandemics requires robust public health policies. But instead of these, the United States’ health care system is geared to addressing individual’s needs (or at least those with decent health insurance) not the systems that allow for the proliferation of illness in the first place.

If we address the roots of these problems, maybe the future could hold holiday cheer and lots of hugs and kisses from all our friends.

3/24/2020

I am uninspired,
a little broken, a little sad, and
trepidatious, undone by my mother

wondering if I can write poetry,

but I suppose I already am. This
is a long poem,

interrupted by news flashes and news holes.

Barrenness. Grape purpleness, a virus
ravaging people all over the
Earth,

and there’s not much I can do. The
best I can do is nothing.

Don’t leave the house. Maybe
stay in this little nook of the
house, with my microwave and
big white fridge, with my French
press and small jar of sweetener.

Maybe doing nothing is the
best revenge
against a microbial virus with
the fucking gall
to do this to us all

and a moronic president
hoping for full pews on Easter.

That’s not my Easter
you son of a bitch

Take that in your eye, in your
orange morass of hair and
white-rimmed eyeballs.

 

Gone Poet

Not so long ago, epidemiologists said of a new deadly virus, “not if, but when.” Now the answer is “now.” I read all the news all day long, and it seems there is nothing left to say. Then today a friend wrote me with a “chain mail” poetry letter. So I sent a poem to a stranger, one of my favorite Robert Creeley poems, I Know a Man.

So there are words after all. I will start by digging up some poems I wrote half a lifetime ago. And maybe I will start writing some new ones.

Cactus Leaves

I’m getting
used to the idea
of death
he said to her
while she lay
sucking cactus
leaves, occasionally
sitting upright
to pull a thorn
from her teeth,
and  later, when
the glare gave
way, they made
love in the sand
seeking redemption
then talked
smoking about the
lack of things
to dwell on ever
since abandoning
the Cutlass on the
side of I-91
having assumed
it wasn’t carrying
them anywhere
anyhow,
but still neither
of them mentioned
their visions:
the well and the
swelling tide and
drowning

Our fascist times?

forlorn bridge

How could it get worse. A president found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors by the US House of Representatives let off the hook by a Senate more willing to look after their own future than the present and future of the country they are supposed to serve.

In my piece last summer for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “The Public Sphere in Dark Times,” I argued that thanks to the robust role of the informal public sphere even Trump could not turn this country into a dictatorship. The events of this past week are put these ideas to the test.

In that piece I distinguish three realms of the public sphere: 1) the formal one of elected bodies, 2) the elite one of leading news media and “opinion leaders,” and 3) the informal one of the street, social media, informal conversations that radiate and connect with each other all over the country and around the world. I argue that all three realms intersect and bounce around and test each others’ ideas.

At this point in time, the formal realm of the public sphere is deeply divided, but enought of it has gained power to legally, if not in any other respect, exonerate Trump. The elite opinion realm is also divided but for the most part highly critical of trump. The informal public sphere, at least as far as Twitter shows, also really critical. The rest of the public sphere, slumbering away in the hinterlands, a sleeping polar bear of apathy? It’s hard to say. Will the informal realms of the public sphere be able to hold the more formal and conservative ones accountable?

My theory is not a crystal ball. Time will tell.

Quitting Facebook

Screenshot 2019-11-22 at 9.17.49 PMI just quit Facebook today. It wasn’t that big a part of my life but now that I’ve quit it I realize how much of my cyborg life it was. Just like my phone. I might not use it that much but it is always there. And now FB no longer is, not the scores of people from my adolescent years, not the students and colleagues from my 30s, not my more recent friends from greater DC and Boston, not my current philosophy colleagues from all over the world. Facebook made it possible for me to have all these great connections, just as it made it possible for it to scoop up private data from 31 percent of the global population. Yes, 31 percent. And then monetize us, harvest us, market to us, capture us for whatever they want. So I decided finally, after much prodding from a few friends, to say, no. No more. I have found an alternative to Facebook that promises not to sell my data, not to algorithmize my content, to just let me share my news with people I like. Maybe this is a fantasy that somehow I can keep my personal stuff to myself. But I’m okay with better being a good alternative to unacceptable.

What is so curious is that so many of my otherwise principled friends and colleagues are willing to scoop up the benefits of Facebook and turn a blind eye to the harm it is doing.

Falling water, falling away

Screenshot 2019-08-30 at 8.19.18 PMI just finished watching Ken Burns’ two episodes on Frank Lloyd Wright. I’m left with where I was at the start, with mixed feelings. Yes, Falling Water is one of the most stunning architectural masterpieces of the past century, but for the most part Wright’s architecture focused on creating inner sanctums, not windows to the world. And most of it leaves me cold.

He was a philanderer and a charlatan and a narcissist and an egoist. And there is no “however” to follow to make up for his personality flaws. The man seems to have been totally unbearable.

But there was genius. He knew how architecture could create a richer internal world.

Which makes me think about his mother.

Ken Burns’ documentary makes clear that Wright’s first and ever love was his mother, and he was hers. His father abandoned them, just as he later abandoned his own first family. The man never negotiated the Oedipus complex, because he didn’t have to. So throughout his life he remained the narcissistic omnipotent childish overlord, and demanded that everyone treat him as king.

But maybe in that pre-oedipal refusal of oedipus, in that refusal to succumb to a superego (the heir of the oedipus complex), he was able to retain an inner magical world that could create Falling Water? What does that say about the tradeoffs we all make every day, trading away creativity for civilization?

Time Management

Screenshot 2018-06-15 09.59.34I’m planning to run a workshop for graduate students on how to manage time, both the time when there’s never enough time and the stretches of time when there is all the time in the world (like a sabbatical). I’m still working on this, so let me run it by you all. Maybe you have some ideas? Please post them in the comments.

Time Management Workshop

Introduction

  • Zen things. Do one thing at a time. Do it slowly and completely. Do less. Put space between things. Develop rituals. Think about what is necessary. Live simply.
  • Find your style, whatever is ego-syntonic. Don’t use this as an exercise in making yourself a better person. Go with who you are and find methods that fit with who you are. Are you a morning person or a night person? Do you like to work at home or do you want to be around other people? Are you happier setting aside time blocks or do you prefer checking off tasks for the day? Do you prefer analog or digital tools to keep track of tasks?

Plot out your work.

  • Set a goal (map each goal separately) and then break it down
  • Develop a loose timeline and then plot it out backwards. If it’s a long-term project this might mean plotting month-by-month from the end to the present
  • Do this with your various goals and make a list month-by-month of what you’d like to accomplish. Plot it out.
  • Then start with month one. List what you would like to get done. Underestimate what you can do. Then start with week one. Don’t micro-manage every week or month going forward. Just focus on that one week in that one month. Give yourself a set of aims for the first week, then divvy them up over the week.
  • Depending on your own personality,
    • If you need a big chunk of time to get into something, aim for one big task a day.
    • If you prefer to work in spurts, spread things out over several days.
  • At the end of each day, be happy if you do even 80 percent of what you hoped to accomplish. And then give yourself some free time to chill. Every morning recalibrate the new day, depending on what you got done the previous day.
  • It’s okay to decide something is no longer important.
  • At the end of each week, reassess. At the end of each month, plot the next month.
  • Structure available time very modestly.
  • Give yourself time to relax and replenish.

Tools:

  • Digital tools: Pros — there are many apps, always in your pocket, no need to carry around a separate notebook
  • Analog tools: Pros — more physically present and in your face, writing by hand helps mental processing and remembering
  • My favorite tool: For me, digital is handy but easy to forget. I work well with the bullet journal. https://bulletjournal.com/pages/learn; and it’s oddly more nimble than the digital tools I’ve tried. You can use this method with any notebook though a moleskin with a bound edge is nice.

Tips for how to manage time when you are over-extended.

  • Make the most of available chunks of time

Tips for how to manage when you have big stretches of unstructured time.

  • Remember it will be over before you know it.
  • Don’t think all or nothing. Aim to do even a little bit every day you are planning to work.
  • Break big long projects into monthly then weekly then daily tasks.

No matter your style or how much or little time you have, forget about multitasking. Studies show that no one can multitask. Aim for serial monotasking, whether a day at a time or even just 15 minutes at a time. One can get an astonishing amount done in 15 minutes when monotasking. As a piece of this process – but not the whole thing — look up the pomodoro method. Feel free to adapt this for what works best for you.