Red Alert On Tolerance

Look out children: academics are now entranced by something called “Teaching Beyond Tolerance.”

Since their emphasis on tolerance netted us about a couple of hundred restrictive speech codes at about as many colleges and universities, who knows what the new fad will yield on American campuses. Shana Agid and Erica Rand give a preview of coming attractions, sort of, in the latest issue of Radical Teacher.

“We wanted to imagine another set of possibilities for educators and students alike, grounded in a different set of assumptions: that so-called ‘hate’ violence is not simply aberrant, individualized, or isolated; that is grounded in structural inequalities of race, class, sexuality, gender, and nationalist imperialism that also contribute to the structure of educational settings; and that the very lack of specificity in many understandings of ‘hate’ and ‘tolerance,’ besides the dubiousness of mere tolerance as a goal, works against meaningful educational and activist interventions,” they write.

Agid is a visual artist. Rand teaches at Bates College. “That the role of education against hate is most often articulated in terms of a goal to create merely ‘tolerance’ is perhaps one obvious insight into the limitations of this plan for people actually targeted by dominating violence,” the ladies observe.

Rand has written such tracts as Barbie’s Queer Accessories (1995) and The Ellis Island Snow Globe (2005), both published by the Duke University Press. Radical Teacher, in which her thoughts on tolerance appeared, is “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.”

“In an educational model built upon the idea of teaching tolerance, where tolerance is an acceptable, even ideal, endpoint, the trope of witnessing for the purpose of understanding violence or ‘hate’ in a universal humanizing sense, not as a manifestation of structure of power and deprivations, hesitates to meaningfully engage students/viewers/experiencers in their own relationship to those structures,” Agid and Rand explain, in a way. “In other words, you may feel bad for those people, but you are not challenged to find out your actual relationship to that thing or those people you feel badly about.”

And how do they propose filling this perceived void? They are intrigued by the suggestion they quote from INCITE, which they describe as “a radical anti-violence organization”: “All intervention programs should have anti-oppression analysis.”

As Pink Floyd put it more than a quarter of a century ago: “We don’t need no thought control.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.