Roxanne Gay, the author of the essay collection Bad Feminist, was the recent winner of PEN Center USA’s Freedom to Write award, given to writers who have “demonstrated exceptional courage in the defense of free expression.” Gay was an unusual choice because the award usually goes to people who genuinely have been persecuted for their writing—such as dissidents and assassinated journalists. The award is so associated with persecution that PEN’s website specifies that “funds are collected from our members for the purpose of helping other writers or their families for lawyer’s fees, bail or medical needs.”
Suffice to say, being a liberal American feminist does not carry with it any real risks these days. If anything, it’s a label that has cultural cachet. And Gay’s winning an award for “free expression” is especially odd given her fondness for identity politics. Last week she penned a New Republic article defending the grievance hysteria at Yale and the University of Missouri, where student protests are premised in no small part on shrinking the scope of free expression and debate. Indeed, she criticized Purdue University president and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels for emailing a statement supporting liberal values and free inquiry on college campuses. Here is Daniels’s email:
Gay’s response on Twitter: “What on earth is a university president doing, sending this email?”
Let’s go ahead and answer this rhetorical question: University professors have been recently caught on tape urging physical assaults on student journalists, and the panic about racism rapidly spreading on campuses is actually corrosive of concern for real racial injustice. In a world that still has over 35 million enslaved people, the amount of attention paid to micro-aggressions at Yale is an affront to common sense. Daniels’s statement supporting free speech on college campuses seems perfectly appropriate. More university presidents and administrators should speak out along the same lines.
There is a variety of ways to interpret Gay’s tweet and article, but none of them suggests she’s “demonstrated exceptional courage in the defense of free expression.” PEN’s bestowing the Freedom to Write award on her is an embarrassment to all involved.
