The Leopards Ate Vincent Lloyd’s Face

A couple weeks ago, a professor of Africana Studies at Villanova University, Vincent Lloyd, wrote a powerful essay about being “a black professor trapped in anti-racist hell.” It’s a fairly long essay, but worth reading as it provides one of the best “insider” views of anti-racist indoctrination around.

To cut to its chase, Lloyd’s pretense of running a seminar for “multicutural” students where they could “think deeply” about “uncomfortable ideas” was taken captive by dogmatic “factorums” running simplistic workshops.

I am no stranger to anti-racism workshops: I have participated in many of them, and I have facilitated them myself. But the Telluride workshops were being organized by two college-age students, filled with the spirit of the times. From what I gleaned, they involved crudely conveying certain dogmatic assertions, no matter what topic the workshops were ostensibly about:

• • • Experiencing hardship conveys authority.
    • There is no hierarchy of oppressions—except for anti-black oppression, which is in a class of its own.
    • Trust black women.
    • Prison is never the answer.
    • Black people need black space.
    • Allyship is usually performative.
    • All non-black people, and many black people, are guilty of anti-blackness.
    • There is no way out of anti-blackness.

The upshot was that after Asian students were voted off the Island by the Lords of the Flies, Lloyd came next and he didn’t like being treated like Piggy, because he wrapped himself up in word salad that provided him with the comfort of believing that while he was in nearly complete agreement with the college student workship leaders, his methods were more “refined,” thus conveying a legitimacy to his path of achieving racist hegemony whereas theirs was crude. To prove it, he wrote that the leopard ate his face.

They alleged: I had used racist language. I had misgendered Brittney Griner. I had repeatedly confused the names of two black students. My body language harmed them. I hadn’t corrected facts that were harmful to hear when the (now-purged) students introduced them in class. I invited them to think about the reasoning of both sides of an argument, when only one side was correct. The students ended with a demand: In light of all the harms they had suffered, they could only continue in the class if I abandoned the seminar format and instead lectured each day about anti-blackness, correcting any of them who questioned orthodoxy. The only critical perspectives they were receiving during the summer, they claimed, were from Keisha. A white girl—the one with all the snails—punctuated their point: “Keisha speaks for me: She says everything I think better than I ever could.”

While pseudo-intellectual narcissism is one of my least favorite ice cream flavors (along with rum raisin), Lloyd evoked a certain sympathy. It was sad to see good intentions burned on the altar of racist hatred, even if the good intentions were themselves dedicated to similar, if not the same, methods of achieving the salutary goal of eradicating racism. That his perspective revolved around wrapping his methodology in the language of goodness and “Keisha’s” in shallow evil, of course, didn’t make him the good guy, although it does allow him to come off better than the vicious and shallow Keisha, which was part of Lloyd’s problem since not even a black man can dispute a black woman, even if he’s a prof and she’s an undergrad, because she stands atop him in the hierarchy.

At Persusasion, Yascha Mounk interviews Vincent Lloyd about his Telluride experience.

Mounk: They tell you, “You’re harming us.” How do you respond?

Lloyd: The language of harm seems like it is soliciting apology. It seems as if it’s saying, “Can you apologize to me for this harm?” That’s our natural human instinct. I think the students were frustrated that my inclination was not to immediately apologize. It was to think through how we can structure this seminar differently so that the issues that they cared about can be in the center. There were various opportunities for students to present additional readings or additional issues or texts that they cared about. And we encouraged students to use those opportunities to bring in what they felt was missing.

We tried to be responsive in that way using the structure of the format of the seminar and pointing out to the students ways that they could strategically use that structure to get the things that they were looking for to get their needs met.

Mounk: Did that work?

Lloyd: No.

While it’s easy to say Lloyd wasn’t the bad guy here, was he the good guy? Was he just as much a part of creating the monster that eventually brought him down? One of the points that bears repeating is that the internal contradictions of an ideology grounded in centering power in racial identity is that it cannot, by definition, suffer any other thought since it would be, by definition, bad racist not to be good racist.

Lloyd: We are at a moment of paradigm shift in how we think about race in America. We were in a multicultural paradigm for a long time where blackness was one among many different racial identities, all of which were celebrated, all of which had different forms of oppression that we could stand in solidarity with but ultimately in the direction of all living happily together in a rainbow nation. Now, the demands of black justice movements and other movements are saying, “Actually, they are deep, deep problems in US culture, US institutions, and US laws. We don’t need inclusion and integration. We need to imagine something new. We need to imagine black justice outside of the existing institutions’ paradigms.” I think that’s entirely right. I think there’s something that’s deeply problematic with a multicultural paradigm that had been obscuring anti-blackness, which was causing all sorts of harm, as it’s being revealed every day now as we’re investigating anti-blackness in real estate and healthcare and the environment. There are real problems there and we need a new paradigm to address that. But we’re in a moment of transition. So it’s unsettled what that will look like and because it’s unsettled this sort of toxic and abusive environment can grow, because there’s no dominant, settled paradigm.

Apparently, multiculturalism is a convenient lie, and the new paradigm involves one dominant race and everyone else better do as they’re told. Forget inclusion and integration. Forget a “rainbow nation.” The only remaining question is how it’s to be accomplished, and apparently it won’t involve Lloyd.