The Courage to be Wrong: Risk, Care and Fear in Humanities Study
As a literature student, my academic work frequently engages with ethical issues, particularly surrounding colonialism, race and gender.
These themes arise often in the weekly readings and seminar discussions on my degree. Week on week, we are exposed to writers who illuminate various deep-rooted and systemic social issues – misrepresenting, othering, bias, racism, unrecognised privilege of our own academic context. So I was really surprised when I realised that the urge to write and talk about these issues is not shared widely by all students.
Talking amongst friends earlier this year about upcoming assignment plans, each confessed that they actively avoid discussing race, gender, colonialism, or any other urgent social issues in their work. They unanimously agreed that this was for fear of making a faux pas; for fear of social backlash dealt out at their mishandling of a delicate set of socio-political circumstances. Some had deeply internalised the virulent abuse publicly flung at ‘problematic’ individuals via social media, anxious that they might be exposed, too. Precisely because these themes were ‘complicated’ and required careful treatment they were perceived as threatening and dangerous for students to discuss.
There’s a paradox here. Unsafe spaces appear in our academic life, in the very place designed for troubling representations to be debated and worked through in critical enquiry. If we cannot find the courage today to write and talk about urgent social issues – whether due to internalised guilt or the pressures of performativity – academic spaces risk becoming devoid of their ethical advocacy. They are in danger of losing touch. Will the Humanities be able to hold up a mirror to the prevailing narratives of life if students are becoming too uncomfortable to touch it? Is there a way out of this conundrum?
Ethical issues are at the front-and-centre of social consciousness. But we seem to need thicker skins. The courage to be wrong is in desperate need of a revival! I am wrong about many things: as a skinny, white, cisgendered woman I inevitably have enormous blind-spots created by the blinkers of privilege. During my degree, there have been many guides that I have turned to. Reading postcolonial critics has been a continual reminder that the bedrock of suffering and exploitation remains solid. For me, that reminder helps keep material facts at the fore: real prejudices, real harm, real structures of violence inherited from centuries of colonial expansionism and an exploitative economic world-system.
I am wrong about many things: as a skinny, white, cisgendered woman I inevitably have enormous blind-spots created by the blinkers of privilege.
These issues need exposure and rigorous academic critique. The how and why of these systems require the next generation’s involvement, to help to bring them to a close. In the face of such variegated and complex conditions, we are bound to be sometimes ignorant, to be stupid, to be imperfect in our judgements. But as Ato Quaysson writes: ‘those who lose their limbs to landmines, are displaced due to refugee crises, or merely subsist in the intermittent but regularly frustrated hope that the world can become a better place cannot wait for complete moral certitude before they take action to improve their existence’. While we wait to see what kind of people we are to become in the wake of this global crisis, his words echo in my mind: ‘we ought to take courage to make ethical judgements, even in the full knowledge that we may be proved wrong’.
