I used to argue with my very progressive mother about whether women belonged in combat.
Women create life, she told me. They should not be in the business of snuffing it out.
I think her rationale probably sprang from her pacifist tendencies, but hers was not an unusual point of view.
Indeed, American women were not officially allowed to serve in all combat roles until 2016.
When I read last week that Boeing's new communications chief is out of a job for penning an essay almost 33 years ago opposing women in combat, which he had long since renounced, I have to admit, I was surprised. I probably should not have been.
After all, we are in the midst of this decade's great reckoning, which was unleashed by women who were sick and tired of being sexually harassed and violated by powerful men. The #MeToo movement, among other things, caused a great culling of abusive male bosses that continues to this day. The current iteration of the reckoning is more complicated. At its roots are a rage against racism and sexism and longstanding social inequities that have manifested themselves in every aspect of American life. There is, in addition, something relatively new afoot. It has to do with the nebulous concept of safety.
This idea, as Jonathan Chait recently wrote in New York magazine, "frequently collapses the distinction between words and action ... by describing opposing beliefs as a safety threat." I first encountered the concept during free-speech debates on college campuses, where, for instance, students were virulently opposed to inviting, say, a right-wing provocateur like Milo Yiannopoulos onto campus, because he made them feel unsafe.
So, for example, when Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an overheated essay urging the president to call out the military to quell violent protests, he was accused of endangering the safety of Black reporters at the New York Times, where his essay appeared. The opinion editor was forced out for his poor judgment, both because the piece was shoddily edited and also because he hadn't read it before publication.
Around the same time, a young political data analyst who worked on the reelection campaign of President Barack Obama tweeted out a Princeton study that found _ to greatly simplify the work _ that violent protests after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. reduced the Democratic vote, and peaceful protests increased it. The analyst, David Shor, was attacked for, among other things, "anti-Blackness" and soon lost his job.
As Chait put it, "Since criticism of violent protests is racist, and racism obviously endangers Black people, an act as seemingly innocuous as sharing credible research poses a threat to safety."
Of course, Shor was not criticizing anything.
He was highlighting a research paper produced by Omar Wasow, a Black political scientist who co-founded the social networking site BlackPlanet. Wasow has spent 15 years studying civil rights protests of the 1960s, and has, as he tweeted, "paid particular attention to how nonviolent and violent actions by activists & police influence media, elites, public opinion & voters."
Seems pretty innocuous, but the very act of studying violent protests is perceived in some quarters as inappropriate, or "not helpful," as one history professor told the Chronicle of Higher Education. Even raising the question, University of Michigan Professor Heather Ann Thompson told the Chronicle, puts an undeserved onus on people protesting injustice.
