Law professors are censoring their own courses. Worse, they are operating on the theory that many twentysomething aspiring lawyers might have an acute psychiatric crisis upon learning about the history of America in the 1850s. As Harvard law professor and New Yorker contributor Jeannie Suk Gersen explains in the piece “The Importance of Teaching Dred Scott,” some law professors are now expurgating the actual history of America in order to spare the (speculative, potential) feelings of certain students.
One University at Buffalo law professor strenuously argued that teaching Dred Scott v. Sandford could be harmful, specifically in that it “‘gratuitously traumatizes’ readers.” In this Supreme Court case, a slave sued for his freedom, and the court ruled that, as a black man, he didn’t have the standing to sue in the first place. It’s an argument worth engaging with, if only because it is key to understanding American history and why the Civil War became necessary (or was always inevitable). Yet, a law professor charged with teaching this history to future lawyers and scholars believes assigning students the text is “asking them to relive the humiliation of [majority opinion author Chief Justice Roger] Taney’s language as evidence of his doctrine of white supremacy[.] The power of quotation marks is limited. How we experience [Dred Scott] is not how students do.”
Their concern is that hearing directly from primary sources about the history of American jurisprudence is so emotionally upsetting as to make it potentially medically dangerous to teach the landmark cases that determined the country’s fate. History education for adult college graduates, we learn, is being cast as literal danger because people in history did and said horrible things. Merely by its existence, the 13th Amendment, which finally abolished slavery in the United States, acknowledges that such a thing as white-supremacy-based slavery had been practiced before its passage. Should we then skip the 13th Amendment in the constitutions we keep at law school libraries, like some superstitious elevator? Clearly not.
So, how have the professors here convinced themselves of something so preposterous? The answer is that vernacular, popular, or lay usages of psychiatric and therapeutic language smuggle in ideas that are medically inaccurate (and often ludicrous). For example, the New Yorker piece also details the tribulations of a Chicago-Kent College of Law professor. She has stopped showing a documentary called The Road to Brown that includes photos of lynchings because seeing historical images “made it traumatic in the classroom, given today’s levels of violence against Black people.” Notwithstanding how racist and presumptuous it is to assume that some people are more psychologically fragile than others on no evidence other than their skin color, it’s worth remembering how detached from the actual medical understanding of trauma this faddish talk is. Trauma doesn’t work like these people think it does.
Actual people with post-traumatic stress disorder often get “triggered” to “relive” their panicked physical responses based on some random thing, and to get better, they can’t just retreat from the world because there are upsetting things in it. Treating everyone as though they (speculatively) have PTSD and the whole world as their treatment facility makes no sense, especially if we don’t even bother to learn about what effective treatment for this rare and awful disorder entails. Yet, people who have no knowledge or even real interest in what experts are learning about treatments and ideas in PTSD research are ambiently picking up and misusing words from that field — and often without noticing that is where such ideas as “reliving” trauma and the literally injurious “harm” of words and images come from.
