Roxane Gay is a progressive author and writer who also works as a professor. An online bio from Purdue described her this way.
Roxane received her Ph.D. in 2010 from Michigan Technological University in Rhetoric and Technical Communication. She also holds an M.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln.
Her research interests include the intersections between race, gender, and popular culture, contemporary fiction, and the political novel.
She's also a contributor at the NY Times. Her latest opinion piece, published yesterday, is titled "Civility is a Fantasy." As she sees it, civility is a trap designed by the powerful to limit the conversation. Her jumping off point for this observation is the murder of Charlie Kirk, specifically JD Vance's reaction to those who celebrated Kirk's death.
After encouraging podcast listeners of the recently deceased Charlie Kirk to become online vigilantes in search of anyone “celebrating” Mr. Kirk’s death, Vice President JD Vance said last week: “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility. And there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.”
Vance was doing what conservatives often do — conjuring up people so his followers have someone specific to foment against. This brand of demagoguery is incredibly dangerous, because when informally deputized vigilantes realize that few real enemies exist, they accept any substitute. They direct their manufactured ire toward innocent people, marginalized groups and, eventually, each other.
Stop for a moment and consider that Gay is using the murder of an outspoken conservative by a gay assassin to make the case that conservatives are prone to irresponsibly whipping up vigilantes. The lesson Gay apparently took from Kirk's murder was that we need to be on guard for right-wing hate. This is repulsive and an inversion of the real offense here.
Read this next bit with Charlie Kirk in mind, not just his death but his approach in life.
Civility is the mode of engagement that is often demanded in political discourse; it is the price of admission to important political conversation, its adherents would have us believe; no civility, no service. But civility — this idea that there is a perfect, polite way to communicate about sociopolitical differences — is a fantasy.
The people who call for civility harbor the belief that we can contend with challenging ideas, and we can be open to changing our minds and we can be well mannered even in the face of significant differences. For such an atmosphere to exist, we would have to forget everything that makes us who we are. We would have to believe, despite so much evidence to the contrary, that the world is a fair and just place. And we would have to have nothing at stake.
Charlie Kirk was the person calling for civil dialogue. His very uncivil (alleged) murderer is a person who had something at stake. In case there was any doubt she's talking about Kirk, she makes it very plain in her next line. [emphasis added]
In the fantasy of civility, if we are polite about our disagreements, we are practicing politics the right way. If we are polite when we express bigotry, we are performing respectability for people whom we do not actually respect and who, in return, do not respect us. The performance is the only thing that matters.
The line about "practicing politics the right way" is clearly a dig at Ezra Klein who published a column after Kirk's death titled "Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way." Klein argued that while he disagreed with Kirk's politics, he respected his commitment to civil dialogue.
You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.
Who is Roxane Gay talking about here? You should only need one guess by this point: [emphasis added]
Civility obsessives love a silver-tongued devil, wearing a nice suit, sporting a tidy haircut, while whispering sweet bigotries. The conservatives among them push for marginalized people to lose their rights and freedoms and, sometimes, even risk their lives. They will tolerate a protest but only if you congregate in an orderly fashion, for culturally sanctioned causes, and if you don’t raise your voice or express anger or overstay your welcome.
Within this framework, incivility is refusing to surrender to hatred, refusing to smile politely at someone who doesn’t consider you their equal, refusing to carve away the seemingly unpalatable parts of yourself until there is nothing left. To be uncivil means pointing out hypocrisies and misinformation. It means accurately acknowledging what people have said, with ample documentation and holding them accountable for their words and deeds.
Gay doesn't go so far as to rationalize Kirk's murder but she does clearly think the appropriate response to him would have been something closer to a riot than a civil exchange of ideas.
My own impression is that Gay read Ezra Klein's piece, found it irritating, then watched a bunch of Charlie Kirk "Prove Me Wrong" videos in which he was mostly civil and the student radicals who challenged him were mostly flustered and borderline incoherent. And her conclusion is that the game itself was rigged. By being civil, Charlie Kirk was somehow cheating. We should really see the programmed ranting of leftist agitators as deeper and more meaningful than it is.
In any case, her whole argument falls apart near the end when she complains that people are unkind to her for her speech. [emphasis added]
As a writer, as a person, I do not know how to live and write and thrive in a world where working for decency and fairness and equity can be seen as incivility, where it can result in threats on my life, or those of my family...
She's so close I'm not sure how she missed it. No one's life or family should be threatened over political views. Civility is not a gimmick used by the powerful against the powerless. On the contrary, it's a standard that applies to everyone and grants a platform to those without power to challenge those who have it without risking their lives.
Gay is not the victim here, no matter how much she wants to be. The victim is the conservative man who was shot in the neck in front of his family. Tyler Robinson told his trans boyfriend, "Some hate can't be negotiated out." In other words, he also believed the kind of civil dialogue Kirk was offering was a "fantasy." Instead of going there to talk, he took his rifle and his leftist anger and went one step beyond the kind of cancel culture incivility Gay is recommending we embrace.
Again, I don't want anyone making threats against Gay or her family (or anyone else for that matter). But the way we avoid that outcome is by insisting everyone involved remain civil. But that's something Gay apparently does not believe in, at least not when it comes to the people she disagrees with.
