Barn Burning
Affirmative action is coming to an end
So hard and fast has the doctrine of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) flown off the rails that even The New York Times felt compelled to comment on the smoldering wreckage.
In October, it documented the University of Michigan's decade-long quest to impose DEI by any means necessary despite explicit bans on affirmative action. That seems especially relevant now, given that Donald Trump has returned to the White House and launched a frontal assault on this ideological hydra. Its tremendous resilience has been matched only by an enormous price tag.
The marginal utility looks limited: the sole return of an investment of $250 million into achieving the aims of the DEI since 2016 is a bureaucratic arms race. The people hailing on the successes of these affirmative action policies inevitably depend - either for status or employment - on its survival. The Ann Arbor campus grew to have more than twice the number of non-faculty employees than full-time faculty members. Black undergraduate enrollment, meanwhile, hardly improved. They have hovered from four to five percent.
But rather than enlightening its students, an intellectually and socially stifling atmosphere of fear and paranoia reigns over pupils, staff, and faculty alike. In one case, a black student named Dylan Gilbert filed a complaint against an English professor called Scott Lyons after he read aloud an excerpt from the William Faulkner short story "Barn Burning" that contained the n-word. The fact that it was a passage from an award-winning work of fiction didn’t shield him from the outrage that flew his way. The irony is that the mob that came for Lyons has much in common with the character of Abner Snopes from the story he cited, the white tenant farmer who uses the slur. More on that later.
It is not insignificant that this ordeal provoked a rebuke from an acclaimed author like Joyce Carol Oates. In a tweet, she wrote:
DEI fanaticism in Ann Arbor: intended to promote diversity, equality, inclusion on campus but in practice results in a fraught atmosphere in which everyone is scrutinizing everyone else, especially but not exclusively white professors, for "microaggressions." In the words of a professor attacked for teaching a story by Faulkner -"Like giving six-year-olds Tasers."
The history of DEI at American universities is entwined with the state's role as a spearhead of affirmative action. Indeed, it was Hobart Taylor Jr., a black lawyer and University of Michigan alumni, who coined the term "affirmative action" in 1961 and inserted it into an executive order signed by President John F. Kennedy. After the Bakke v. University of California decision in 1978 ruled racial quotas in college were impermissible, Michigan devised a blueprint for the way forward.
The so-called "Michigan Mandate," launched in the late 1980s, aimed to create a "multicultural community for our nation." That vision encountered a hurdle in 2003 when the Supreme Court held that Michigan's affirmative action policies—namely, racial quotas in student admissions—were unconstitutional. In response, Michigan became more creative with enacting and spreading diversity without running afoul of the courts, giving rise to DEI as we know it today. Subsequent rulings and referendums against diversity practices were met with similar maneuverings that utilized managerial bureaucracy to do what the law prohibited or made tricky.
After the university declined to give the professor who cited the passage with the n-word the guillotine, the student who denounced him, Gilbert took her claims against Lyons to social media, ginning up a storm of outrage against him that provoked a deluge of hate mail and ostracization. The pressure led the English department to reportedly convene a workshop for "critical race pedagogies," in which a consultant argued that professors should never assign any literary works that contain slurs, period.
To say that this would be a shame would be a profound understatement. Invisible Man, Native Son, Beloved, The Sound and the Fury, Gone with the Wind - would all disappear. Works by Mark Twain, Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger, John Steinbeck would be pulled from the academic canon in this bureaucratic war to sterilize literature. The Western canon as we know it would have to go through some deep cleansing, so much that it would lose its authentic meaning.
But “Barn Burning”, in particular, holds a mirror to those aligned with the DEI who, if they gazed carefully enough, might recognize shadings of their own perverse sense of justice in Abner, the cruel patriarch of the Snopes clan.
“Barn Burning” is seen through the eyes of Colonel Sartoris "Sarty" Snopes, Abner's ten-year-old son, and it is mainly through his perspective that Faulkner explores class distinction and social inequity. Set in Mississippi, it’s a richly textured tale about the influence of fathers on sons.
Abner is a violent man of ill repute, a Civil War veteran who was shot "by a Confederate provost's man" while trying to steal a horse. By the time the story starts, he is embittered from years working as a tenant farmer for wealthy whites. That bitterness manifests in his appearance with "a pair of eyes of a cold opaque gray between shaggy graying irascible brows and a short scrabble of iron-gray beard as tight and knotted as a sheep's coat."
It is the eyes, for Faulkner, that tell the most, and Abner's are "fierce and intractable and cold."
Sarty, in contrast to his father and siblings, and despite his young age, is morally sensitive and keenly perceptive about the world around him. Sarty is fiercely loyal to the clan—his "blood," as Abner says—and yet he quietly pleads that his father, who he defends amid every offense, change his ways, even as Abner draws Sarty further down the road toward becoming like him. Faulkner asks the same question John Steinbeck does in East of Eden: are men fated to inherit generational sin, are they doomed to become their fathers? Can they choose to break the chain? On this alone has Faulkner already ventured beyond the depth of those whose appetite is reserved for the superficial "exploration" of racial grievances.
Abner is a complex figure toward which Faulkner actually seems sympathetic, though it is a torn feeling. He is deeply flawed, yes, but also defiant, proud, in possession of "wolflike independence" and "ferocious conviction in the rightness of his ways."
However, it is precisely that ferocity of conviction and pride that results in Abner making choices that bring suffering to those around him, a point that is best illustrated in an offending scene.
With Sarty in town, Abner goes to the home of an aristocratic, land-owning white man who has hired Abner as a sharecropper. As he approaches the mansion, Abner deliberately stamps his foot in fresh horse droppings. He is greeted at the door by a black servant who, Faulkner notes, is neatly dressed in a linen jacket, in contrast to the impoverished appearance of the Snopes. The servant says, "Wipe yo foots, white man, fo you come in here," to which Abner replies, "Get out of my way, n*****." Abner then tracks the dung into the resplendent estate and smears it over the wealthy white man's imported rug, intentionally ruining it. As they leave, Abner remarks that the property had been built with "n***** sweat," and that perhaps the owner wanted to mix some "white sweat with it" now.
Abner is outraged by a class structure that has situated him on a social rung that is arguably closer, or at least too near for him, to the black servant than the white aristocrat. That is why he disregards the black man's authority with a slur and smudges the rug of the landowner. And when he is forced to pay the price for that act of property destruction, Abner decides to set fire to the wealthy white man's barn—an act he has done before and which has forced his family to stay on the move, worsening their lot.
Abner suffers from a skewed notion of justice. He reacts to what he perceives as inequity by lashing out, countering injustice with injustice, succeeding only in shaming himself and injuring those around him. Like those who would cancel Faulkner (and professors who read Faulkner), Abner is a creature consumed by resentment, assured of his righteousness above all when he is in the wrong.
Victimhood is like an intoxicating drink that clouds judgment. People who think of themselves as victims, who are drunk on victimhood, like Abner, are capable of inflicting all manner of harm upon others over the slightest perceived offense. The victim thinks of themselves as righting a wrong, and therefore, all their actions are justified, above reproach and the law.
They are, in their minds, like the Greek tragedy of Antigone, pouring dirt and sand upon her fallen brother against a king's decree forbidding a proper burial, knowing her life would be forfeit. It is easy to see what an exhilarating experience it is to look at your life and actions in this heroic way. But Antigones they are not.
The creatures coddled by DEI, cultivated by the victimhood that it feeds, are never the ones to pay the price for their transgressions against society, against others who never wronged them. That might be changing now, as fewer people seem willing to treat Abners like Antigones. However, the forces and attitudes that enabled the rise of DEI will likely remain in place even after that acronym has fallen out of use and the initiatives associated with it fade from public view.
Trump’s actions have lopped off several of its heads, and it’s hard to see how they will grow back any time soon, but they almost assuredly will try to. Federal agencies are removing DEI guidance after Trump’s crackdown. But the cultural institutions that shape the minds of younger generations at university may show resistance nonetheless.
In light of that, championing the writers that have shaped our culture, like Faulkner, will be a matter of first importance.
Pedro L. Gonzalez is an American journalist, writer and columnist for Chronicles Magazine. You can find more of his work on his page Contra.
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