The Read: Sarah Viren, "The Safe Space That Became a Viral Nightmare", New York Times Magazine
Friday's Child is Loving and Giving
I wrote a while back about Sarah Viren’s collection of “literary non-fiction”, Mine. But I forgot than when I summarized my reasons for reading it that another reason was that I really, really liked her long piece in the New York Times Magazine in 2020 about her wife’s difficult encounter with Title IX bureaucracy and a great deal else. And then her even more extraordinarily excellent unpacking of the case of Andrea Smith, the University of California Riverside professor who has falsely claimed Cherokee ancestry.
Her new article this week about a confrontation between Arizona State University students that turned into a viral video is equally excellent.
My first reaction on reading the essay was, “what viral video?” I realized that this shows you the intensely narrow chronological window that social media explosions are confined to. I’m reading Twitter much less these days generally, and over the summer I had a couple of weeks where I was just too busy to follow it at all. Under those circumstances, something can go viral, be of great and urgent concern to many of the people I follow, and then entirely disappear from view. If you weren’t there when it blew up, it never happened at all.
I’m not sure that’s any better in a general sense from how literary, cultural and intellectual controversies erupted in late 20th Century print culture, especially in relationship to academia. They tended to burn at a much slower pace. If a moderately well-known public intellectual went up on stage in New York or London or Paris and said something just completely awful or idiotic, it might take months or even years for that to become appended to their name, if ever. If they’d said it on TV or at a filmed event, maybe that happened faster. It didn’t happen at all if it was inexplicably in contradiction to everything else that person said, wrote or did—it needed to seem as if it was a turn or a break for that figure, and maybe one that forced everyone to rethink what that person had said or done before. But if it got to the point that a conversation started happening in print about that moment, then it tended to linger and iterate and gain steam. It changed readings and reputations. People added on, went back to the moment, over long cycles of accumulation.
Student activism only entered into general reference in the same way when it was either an extraordinary spectacle that garnered press attention—the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the seizure of buildings at Columbia and elsewhere, the building of shantytowns on campuses by anti-apartheid activists—or when conservatives whose disdain and antipathy to academia grew more and more intense over the years were looking for an incident or moment they could amplify and parody through coverage in right-wing media or by feeding to the national press.
Student activists being what they are—young, sometimes careless about the circumstances of their mobilization, sometimes unaware of the larger tactical environment of cultural and social struggle that is creating a surveillance of their actions—not infrequently have provided that fodder for conservatives. (Oberlin’s settlement of a lawsuit this week is another example.)
Viren’s story gets at this beautifully. At its core, the incident itself at ASU is complex, and in both professional and personal terms, I feel for everybody involved. Like them (I think), I wish it hadn’t happened at all, but I also understand exactly why it happened. In a wiser and kinder world, it would have been mediated quietly close to the community where it unfolded, and ASU would have found ways to own its responsibility for why it happened (dragging its feet on designating a space and then designating it in a materially careless way) as part of that mediation. Nobody else would have gotten involved or cared in that wiser world.
That of course is also a polite way of saying “I wish they hadn’t posted that video”. But Viren avoids short-cutting to that conclusion and I love that she doesn’t just serve this up as a series of didactic lessons to everyone. It’s the kind of essay that you hope lets everyone in it feel heard, even ASU officials who wouldn’t speak to Viren, except for the “vultures” who swarm over these moments. In fact, it’s the kind of essay I wish could serve as permanent vulture-repellant.
It doesn’t, sadly, because there’s a lot of money in being a carrion-eater—and a lot of power that feeds into the money-making and is fed by it. Thoughtful, subtle, detail-attentive investigation is so useful and important, but it only satisfies people who see the world in those terms.
I do—or at least I want to—so Viren represents the kind of person I want to hear from about the sort of incidents and cases that tangle up my gut and make me feel anxiety, sadness and confusion, where the microhistories involved in how something came to be are everything, the only thing, that really matters in moral and political terms. Even when there are bigger structures, bigger problems, at stake, I don’t want to start with those. I want to start where the human beings are. Viren is a fantastic Virgil for a journey that begins and ends at that point.
Image credit: "Arizona State University" by tacvbo is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.