“What is truth?” This question is probably the most famous phrase attributed in the Gospel to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who went on to condemn Jesus Christ to death with a show of washing his hands.
He was specifically questioning Jesus’ assertion that he had “was born and came into the world to testify to the truth.” But he went on to do something that puts the question to the very idea of truth. Despite believing Jesus to be innocent, he knowingly handed him over to be crucified, despite having the power to prevent it. This is very much in keeping with his implication that there is no truth. Jesus is just one man, after all, whose death was in keeping with popular opinion. Why should Pilate care about the innocent and guilty being crucified together?
I’m reminded of this not only because we are in the octave of Easter, but also because this “might makes right” concept of truth — or rather its rejection — has bizarrely taken hold with people who clearly and demonstrably believe the opposite. For activists who try to spread the gospel (sorry, “awareness”) of oppression, the notion that their oppression should matter to anyone besides themselves depends entirely on the idea that there is truth.
But don’t go explaining that to them, because they’ve decided the very idea is rooted in “white supremacy.”
Others have already explored the basic facts of what happened: Heather Mac Donald, author of The War on Cops, was invited to speak at Claremont McKenna. Her live lecture was shut down by activists who used violent and threatening tactics to prevent the public gathering from occurring.
When the president of Pomona College, one of the schools in the Claremont consortium, wrote in an email that what had happened was shameful and contrary to the values of the school, a group of freshman and sophomore students wrote to object, demand his apology, and further demand punishment for students who write for the Claremont Independent on the grounds that they habitually express different ideas from their own.
That sounds like a very hard and robust version of the idea that there is an objective truth. After all, they’re demanding punishment for deviations from it, are they not? But no, in their open letter to the college president, they both demanded punishment for heretics and also challenged his assertion that there is truth which one attends university seeking to understand:
Your statement contains unnuanced views surrounding the academy and a belief in searching for some venerated truth. Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of ‘subjectivity vs. objectivity’ as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth–’the Truth’–is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.
This is so thoroughly dumb that it’s hard even to know where to start. In the context, it’s only a minor matter to point out that the concept of objective truth predates the Enlightenment (and Christ himself) by many centuries and has by no means been limited to Western thinkers.
But what’s far more ridiculous here is the self-undermining nature of this attack on objective truth. Objectivity is a concept without which (to accept their terminology arguendo) there would never be any reason for anyone with “privilege” to care about anyone else’s oppression, except in cases where it directly affects them — say, for example, my nanny gets deported by the Trump administration.
How can an activist on the one hand demand that I look outside my own blessed, privileged life and see things from a fair perspective that makes me appreciate the situation of the oppressed, yet on the other hand maintain that no one should have to look outside themselves for “some venerated truth” because the very notion is steeped in racism?
I suppose it would be too cheeky to suggest that the signatories to the open letter are therefore self-admitted white supremacists. But that this sort of shoddy, illogical thinking is par for the course for today’s college sophomores is really just a sign of the obvious rot that has taken hold of American education from top to bottom — a rot that is increasingly making itself visible in American political life.
