The Yik Yak app, which allows people to post anonymously to other users within a five-mile radius, is popular – and controversial – at Dickinson and on other college campuses. Indeed several colleges, including the University of Idaho, Utica College and Saint Louis University have taken steps to prohibit access to Yik Yak on their wireless networks, though the app can still be accessed by students through the cellular networks provided by phone companies.

In each case, administrators justified their actions, made under pressure from student groups, by saying that material appearing on Yik Yak violated the institution’s regulations concerning racial and sexual harassment. Since the anonymity of the app precludes assigning individuals responsibility for specific content, the only recourse is apparently to register the school’s disapproval of the medium in which that content is presented.

As the issue has been discussed here at Dickinson and around the country, it is connected to a recently reconceived and revitalized movement for civil rights. The movements on campuses are part of larger cultural movements that have emerged in part as response to recent episodes of police violence against people of color.

If anything is obvious to me, it’s that this movement is necessary. In the period since the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, and in particular between the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the outbreak of violence in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, we reached the point at which, though only crazed extremists openly espoused white racism, the entire society continued to be organized along racist lines. This is reflected in wide income and educational disparities, incarceration rates, persistent or even increasing residential segregation, and so forth.

White American liberals (the sort of people who most of your professors are, for example) congratulated ourselves far too vociferously and far too quickly for having addressed the problem of race; the public story of racial progress became more and more luridly false to the reality of continued racial oppression. In order for this reality to again sear itself into our consciousness, we need to hear black voices, perhaps angry ones, or even to witness outbursts of rage such as those that have torn at Ferguson and Baltimore. And we white people who work at Dickinson need to hear these voices locally, or perhaps be confronted with them in the form of die-ins and demands.

Were such demands presented at Dickinson, and more widely were new agendas for addressing racial injustice in America to emerge, I would hope to support them. But I cannot support ways of addressing injustice – such as trying to prevent ourselves and one another from using Yik Yak, or for that matter from using certain terms we disapprove of – that focus on restricting expression, restrictions that have taken center stage particular in college movements on these matters.

I think these strategies rely on a false idea about what oppression is and where it originates. I think they are incompatible with the teaching and research missions of an academic institution. Here I just want to argue that they are completely counter-productive, helping to exacerbate the conditions they intend to address. It is often said that racism can be largely unconscious, or more richly that it is primarily a matter of entrenched systems of oppression in which we all take up a place rather than a matter of personal racial animus or bigotry.

Here is a story about how the racism of white people became largely unconscious. During the Civil Rights movements, the use of certain racial slurs and overt expression of stereotypical or bigoted attitudes were centralized as emblems of white racism. I think some people reached the conclusion that if the wrong terms never appeared in their mouths, or even in their minds, they could not be racists. In other words, we mistook the signs for what they were signs of; we thought vaguely that changing the words would change the income levels. We entertained the idea that ‘words are important’ and that linguistic changes were substantive changes.

Now, words may be important. But talk is cheap.

If the past few decades have shown nothing else, it’s that the ways people talk can change entirely while the ways they behave change very little. Active and sometimes extreme social sanctions on racist speech did nothing to address substantive racial disparities, but they did a lot to help white people congratulate ourselves for not being racists, and that if inequality continued, it could not be our fault. So we didn’t have to do anything about it.

The hallucinatory situation of a society in which no one takes themselves to be a racist but which is still obviously organized in a racial hierarchy was produced in part by de facto speech restrictions.

Malcolm X often said that he’d rather deal with an outright racist than a smiling white liberal; at least in the former case he knew what he was dealing with. And I daresay if you wanted an honest assessment of our student body, you should go – as I have not – to Yik Yak, where, if people are agreeing with you, they are not agreeing with you because of mere social pressure. If they stand with you, it is not only because everyone is standing up around them, or because they think their jobs are at stake, as the jobs of a number of college administrators have turned out to be.

Indeed, the proper response to racist or other unapproved attitudes being expressed on Yik Yak is to use Yik Yak for community formation within and across the lines that divide us, to organize Yik Yak self-and-other defense. Yik Yak pointedly makes tools for such purposes available, and they have been used in just these ways on many college campuses.

In general, the harm done by symbols has been far less than the harm done by chains, or lack of resources, or prison cells, or barriers to education, though of course all of these are intertwined. At this point, though, we should know better than to reach for simple symbolic solutions to complex substantive problems.