I Am on Kirk’s “Professor Watchlist.” I Know How It Destroys Civil Debate.

I deeply value free speech and debate. The watchlist created by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA is anathema to both.

By George Yancy | Truthout

After the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk — one that I unequivocally found to be unconscionable, unacceptable, and sickening — I thought about his wife and children. I am married, and I have children. I can’t imagine the unspeakable sorrow that Kirk’s wife and children must be experiencing. So, I will continue to mourn his death and their loss. I do so because I believe in love, forgiveness, and the sanctity of human life. I also believe in the First Amendment. So, here we are.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s tragic death, a great deal is being discussed now about his legacy regarding free speech and open debate. What I have to offer to readers in this regard is my own very personal experience of the organization that Kirk founded — Turning Point USA (TPUSA).

How Kirk’s Organization Targeted Me in 2016

In 2016, TPUSA produced an online list titled “Professor Watchlist,” a site designed to identify professors who purportedly “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” I don’t “teach leftist propaganda in the classroom,” and I never discriminate against conservative students, but I was nevertheless placed on the list soon after its creation in 2016, apparently because I am a philosopher who examines the complex ways in which white people are socially and psychically complicit in the perpetuation of anti-Black racism in the United States.

There’s no way for me to know whether or to what extent my placement on the Professor Watchlist extended or intensified the ongoing avalanche of racist threats and slurs that I had already started receiving after I published an open letter in The New York Times in 2015 titled “Dear White America” — a letter that sought to challenge the racist “innocence” of white people and was the source that Turning Point USA cited as grounds for placing me on their watchlist. But being placed on the Professor Watchlist undoubtedly magnified the feelings of trepidation and outrage created by the racist invective constantly pouring down on me throughout that time.

In response to “Dear White America,” I received an ongoing series of hate messages via email, voice message, and postal mail such as:

“Dear N***** Professor… You’re a f***ing smug N*****. You are uneducated with education. You are a f***ing animal. Just like all Black people in the United States of America.”

“Hey Georgie boy… You wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for affirmative action. Somebody needs to put a boot up your ass and knock your f***ing head off your shoulders…”

“There are two ways you can return to Africa: On a passenger ship, or in a coffin freighter. Choose quickly.”

“In a sane world, this ugly n***** would be just beheaded ISIS style. Make America WHITE Again.”

With apologies to those who already encounter this kind of triggering hate speech regularly and do not need more of it in their lives, I reprint these examples here to show the ways in which there is a failure of vulnerability to truly listen to those deemed “the other,” dreams of returning to a white mythical past of “racial purity,” an unabashed ascendancy of white nationalism, political disinformation about white “victimhood,” an intentional disregard for civic responsibility, and an intentional fomentation of hatred by a Trumpian regime hell-bent on creating and exacerbating racial, political, and religious divisiveness. All of this is at the heart of what is actually shutting down space for civil debate and free speech in this country.