Over the next few days, well-meaning people will approach Jeremiah Keenan in the interest of bridging the gap and educating him as to the error of his ways. I do not intend to be one of those people. The words he has written in "Becoming a racist" are hate speech. They should never have been printed.
Jeremiah doesn't want to be called a "racist," in part because he feels that conversations about race do "little to solve real-world problems." That's fine — I will use a different word to express my problem with Jeremiah. He is a bigot. He is a very bad guy.
That is harsh, uncompromising language, but given the discriminatory invective he has spewed — which spreads hate indiscriminately in the direction of people dealt harsher hands than him who he terms the "so-called 'underprivileged' class" — it is not unjustified.
Penn, Jeremiah argues, has forced a well-meaning white guy to have to confront what W.E.B. Du Bois (you know…the guy for whom the "black dorm" is named) described as "double consciousness," a "sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others."
That two-ness was something Du Bois wrestled with constantly in his work and his life. He ultimately chose to leave Penn because his race would prevent him from ever earning tenure. Forced to confront how others see him (in addition to the structural nature of privilege and how it takes hold on a college campus), Jeremiah does not like what they see.
He claims never had to "consider race outside of history" because, as far as he knew, his race, sex, gender, sexual orientation — his identity — never mattered. It never prevented him from being catcalled in the street. It never prevented him from being stopped while "driving while black." It never made him three-fifths of a person. It never prevented him from feeling uncomfortable in the body he was born with. Jeremiah was just fine with the skin he was in.
It is funny: The only person really asking for "special treatment on account of race" here is Jeremiah — he does not want to have to acknowledge role race has played in his twenty-some-odd years on earth. Instead he would rather render race — and his own privilege — invisible while he commits aggressions of the micro and macro varieties. It was never the color of his skin that made people call him a racist. He has earned that epithet through his words and actions.
Giving a pulpit to such unabashed hate makes you complicit in perpetuating it, no matter how much traffic it may generate for your website. Sure, Jeremiah has the right to say what he wants and think what he wants, but this is intolerance of the highest order. It's cruel. It's vile. It's racist.
One last point: Jeremiah takes particular exception with Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent appearance at Penn. If he had even read Coates' article, which focuses mostly on racial redlining, a systematic practice that still insidiously, he'd learn that Coates was not putting a dollars-and-cents price on the oppression. Instead, he argued simply for a "full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences."
Jeremiah doesn't want to accept the consequences of our collective biography, past or present. Why would he?
John Vilanova is a first-year Annenberg PhD student from New Jersey studying contemporary and historical representations of race and, more broadly, the persistence of privilege and inequality. His email address is jvilanova@asc.upenn.edu.
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