leave the kids alone

The New York Times has committed two recent offenses against me. The first is simply being the NYT these days, reaching a level of annoying centrism so profound that they would probably bothsides the apocalypse.¹ The second is mentioning the University of Michigan (keep our name out of your fucking mouth.)²

The piece that set me off is predictably, infuriatingly titled “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?” As per usual for this sort of culture war nonsense, the article is tediously argued and overlong, though it does manage to sneak in a few decent moments, for example quoting a student of color who rightly points out that Michigan’s D.E.I. initiatives have been “superficial.” But what stuck out to me is a particular gotcha anecdote about The Kids These Days and Their Hatred of Literature.³ I’ve seen this particular anecdote bandied about elsewhere as evidence that the kids these days don’t want to engage with difficult literature, or maybe they just don’t want to read and are coming up with excuses,⁴ but I think if you read carefully (the thing that the kids are so often accused of not doing!) you’ll find that it’s not the case at all here.

Here’s the anecdote as it appears in the NYT:

In the [University of Michigan] English department, in the days after [George] Floyd’s murder, a student named Dylan Gilbert decided it was time to say something publicly about a fiction class she took the previous year with Scott Lyons, a professor there. Lyons had read aloud a paragraph from the William Faulkner short story “Barn Burning,” in which an embittered white tenant farmer utters a racial slur. The passage evokes how racial hatred bound impoverished whites to the wealthy elites who exploited them. Gilbert, who is Black, collected her belongings and left the room.

Lyons emailed Gilbert afterward, explaining his decision to teach the text but inviting her to discuss her concerns. “I don’t take issue with reading stories with the N-word in them,” she wrote back. “I understand the time period and that it’s a work of fiction. I do take offense when non-Black people say the N-word.” Lyons said he wasn’t sure what difference there was between reading the text and hearing it, but added that he took her point. “I simply am not in a place where I could keep my emotions composed when having a stressful conversation at the moment,” Gilbert replied. “I have really enjoyed your class and enjoyed having you as a professor. I would like you to consider that I have experience with that word coming from non-Black people.”

Her college years had been challenging, Gilbert told me. “After the Trump election, I was just angry so often,” she said. “People seemed so emboldened.” Drunk white frat boys had yelled the N-word at her, Gilbert told me; hearing her teacher utter the same slur was jarring and upsetting. After the class, Lyons assigned an article that discussed how some novelists employed slurs in their fiction to explore and critique bigotry. He also announced that, going forward, he and his students should refrain from speaking the N-word in class. Gilbert reported the dispute with Lyons to administrators, but was unhappy with how the school handled her concerns. After Floyd’s killing, she decided to detail her experiences on Twitter.

In relating the story to me, Gilbert recalled hearing Lyons “say the N-word again and again” and asserted that Lyons punished her for leaving by lowering her grade for the course. Lyons told me he uttered the word only once — the same number of times it appears in the Faulkner passage. (He gave a similar written account to the English department’s leaders at the time.) Though federal law bars Lyons from discussing Gilbert’s grades or class performance, he noted that she had twice declined to pursue a formal grade grievance.

I happen to love Faulkner; I took an entire semester-long class on him in college. We read “Barn Burning” too—it’s a great story, extremely upsetting. Our (white male) professor didn’t read the story aloud to us, of course. Why would he? In fact I can only think of a few times in any college course where we ever read aloud from a short story or a novel—and each time, students read the selection, not the professor. Plays and poetry were more often read out loud: plays for obvious reasons and poetry to highlight the rhythm and beauty of the language. There’s nothing wrong with reading fiction aloud in general—I’m a huge fan of audiobooks—but it’s rarely necessary or useful in a class setting (and might, in fact, take up valuable class time). What valid pedagogical reason could there be for a professor to orate a selection from a Faulkner story to his college students, especially a selection that included a racial slur?

There isn’t a reason. There just isn’t. This isn’t a complicated situation. This is a case where the student was completely in the right, and the professor did something needlessly horrible—either on purpose, or out of that deliberate obtuseness which is really just purpose lying to itself. If Lyons genuinely doesn’t understand the difference between a student silently reading a text that contains a racial slur and hearing a professor read it out loud in the classroom, then he’s too stupid to teach at the University of Michigan. I also think he was probably lying about how many times he said the N-word, given how often it’s used in “Barn Burning.” It’s impossible to know which passage he read, given that the offered description—“evokes how racial hatred bound impoverished whites to the wealthy elites who exploited them”—is a more accurate interpretation of the whole story than any single paragraph. A reporter who cared about finding out what actually happened in this classroom, and didn’t just come at this case with the editorial remit “bothsides this business as much as possible” might have asked better questions.

It’s fashionable lately to say that the kids are judgmental and puritanical, the kids don’t know the difference between fiction and reality, the kids don’t want to read, the kids are avoiding their responsibilities. But Dylan Gilbert was very straightforward about stating that she understood that she was reading fiction, and that Faulkner was writing at a particular period in time, and that it could be okay for a writer to use upsetting language. In fact a whole lot of the time when college kids complain about their English classes or anything else, their complaints are totally valid and simply reported on as if they’re crazy. Oberlin’s infamous banh mi story is basically just a right-wing grievance myth, where the often-mocked complaint about “cultural appropriation” came after a much longer list of complaints about Oberlin’s cuisine, which was mainly that it was gross.⁵ Sometimes the kids don’t express themselves very well—they’re kids. Sometimes their complaints are off-base—again, they’re kids. Sometimes they express themselves just fine, and everybody pretends they’re crazy because it’s easier than admitting they’re right, and that the authority figures who are supposed to be teaching them and feeding them have screwed up badly.

To the extent that there really is a cultural crusade against “difficult” or upsetting literature, combined with a refusal to read or to read carefully, a huge part of this is—obviously—instantiated by right-wing book banners on behalf of silenced children. And a much smaller part does seem to be coming from kids online (which, once again, they’re kids). But when it comes to these much-fretted about left-wing literary cancellations on the grounds of supposedly offensive prose, they’re mostly the result of grown adults, usually other writers, leveraging frustrated and often convenient allegations of biased and upsetting writing at other writers in their field, usually based on reading brief quotes rather than whole texts.⁶ This sort of thing doesn’t get properly contextualized very often, in part because it’s easier to blame the kids these days. It’s always easier to blame the kids these days! But usually the adults are the ones who are nuts, and are behaving badly, and need to reckon with themselves.

1. “Was the seven-headed beast of the abyss created by campus wokeness? We’re not really committing to anything, but if you think about it, maybe the real cause of the brimstone tornado currently swallowing the eastern seaboard is women’s refusal to commit to having children…”

2. Third offense: the NYT still owes me payment for a piece I filed in July and they’re no longer responding to my emails or invoices. If anybody has a direct contact in their billing department, please let me know at lyta dot gold at protonmail dot com.

3. Mentioning this subject is basically like lighting a Lyta-shaped bat signal, I am ON IT.

4. Whether the kids these days physically can read, thanks to bad teaching practices, social media distractions, and the social pressure to have a highpowered career or starve, is another matter entirely.

5. I went to Oberlin in the 2000s, the food was gross as hell then too.

6. Obligatory bUy mY bOoK moment (sorry, if we can get all my outstanding creditors to pay me, maybe I’ll stop.)