OpenXChange: A Call to Engage

OpenXChange, Stanford’s start-up-sounding initiative “to strengthen the Stanford community through purposeful engagement,” has been around for only about four months. However, it has already become clear that its ultimate success is dependent on our participation outside of these events.

In the last year and a half, Stanford University has been enveloped by the contentious campus protests that have more recently taken hold across the country. Our community so often seemed divided over social and political issues, from sexual assault to Black Lives Matter. However, the division seemed less about opposing viewpoints on the issues at hand than about the methods used to address them. Science denial is hard to find in Palo Alto, but opposition to the Fossil Free movement isn’t. Similarly, few on campus would deny the legitimate grievances motivating Black Lives Matter, but many were displeased with the Bridge Protest on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2015.

Recently, “activism” has become a dirty word among those who have been made uncomfortable (and even among many tacit supporters of the activists’ causes), while “dialogue” has correspondingly become anathema to those who are on the frontlines demanding real solutions.

The administration could not sit idly by as agitation continued to rise, so on September 10, 2015, President Hennessy and Provost Etchemendy announced the launch of OpenXChange, which claims:

Whether it be through large-scale events in Memorial Auditorium or through intimate discussions in Stern, by challenging Stanford students, faculty and staff to think critically, investigate, and engage together, we as a community will continue to appreciate and learn from our differences.

But OpenXChange was not welcomed with open arms by all. Some were suspicious that the program could be used to silence the activist community on campus.

Stanford Daily columnist Lily Zheng wrote:

To Stanford: We don’t need OpenXChange. We need mandatory education for students, staff, and faculty alike, more financial support for marginalized communities and community centers, more faculty diversity and institutional change to better support survivors, first-generation and/or low-income students, queer and trans students, students of color and other communities on campus that gain next to nothing from this new experiment. To OpenXChange: It’s ironic that you promote listening as a prerequisite to dialogue, because you sure didn’t listen to us when you made your initiative.

While the demands for increased faculty diversity and financial support are definitely reasonable, in fairness to OpenXChange, when it comes to issues of identity politics — defined as a wide range of political activity and theorizing founded in the shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups — many who don’t share in the aggrieved identities would likely be unreceptive to mandatory education. However necessary it may be, it is discomforting for some to be forced to think about the experiences of a marginalized group. Understanding racism, sexism, and other forms of inequity requires an acknowledgement of privilege — another dirty word for many of those who have it — and mandatory education to address privilege would be akin to throwing your friends into a pool to teach them to swim (it might work, or they might drown).

But difficulty is no excuse not to try.

OpenXChange relies on its appeal to those who already are willing to engage and to be educated. It opens its swimming pool to everyone, but only those who already know how to swim (or at least are eager to try) generally come.

At the OpenXChange event on Wednesday night titled ‘Just Mercy: Race and the Criminal Justice System,’ Bryan Stevenson (Professor of Clinical Law at New York University, Author of Just Mercy: A story of justice and redemption, and Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative) spoke for about 45 minutes to a packed Cemex Auditorium, two overflow rooms, and countless others who followed the online livestream.

Stevenson spoke movingly about race and the criminal justice system, interweaving wit and emotion, statistics and anecdote. He broke his argument down into four major points:

1. The power of proximity and the need to get close to injustice to fully understand it.

2. The imperative to change the narrative that sustains white supremacy.

We’ve never really confronted the history of racial inequality in this country, and as a result of that, all of us are infected by this disease. We are all carrying this illness, this disruption that has been created by a narrative of racial difference. Our parents and our grandparents didn’t talk about things that we needed to talk about, and because of that, we continue to suffer.”

3. The importance of remaining hopeful.

Injustice prevails where hopelessness persists…When you find yourself beginning to think that you cannot make a difference, when you begin to accept that these are problems too big for us to confront, to change, to challenge, you are going to contribute to the problem of injustice.”

4. The willingness to do uncomfortable things.

When you get proximate, when you have to change narratives, when you have to stay hopeful in the face of inequality, when you do uncomfortable things, it will break you…but I’m here to tell you there’s a power in the broken. This country will not be saved by the elites, the privileged, those who are whole and happy. This country will be saved when broken people reach out and find and claim their humanity. It’s the broken who understand the power of mercy; it is the broken who understand the need for compassion; it is the broken who can lead us to the places where justice must prevail.

Stevenson was then joined onstage by three Stanford professors for an hour-long, Katie Couric-moderated discussion. MacArthur Fellow and social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, esteemed political scientist Gary Segura, and criminal law expert Robert Weisberg detailed the political forces at play in modern-day criminal justice reform, implicit bias in law enforcement, and the controversy over historical symbols with racial overtones. Eberhardt recalled a heart-wrenching story of an experience with her own son that showed how pervasive subconscious racism is in our society, and Stevenson reminded the audience that in some states Martin Luther King Day shares the holiday with Robert E. Lee Day.

The audience for the event was probably very self-selecting, but, even then, not everyone left the event satisfied. The Stanford Review published a critique yesterday:

The event was an immense opportunity for debate on race in American culture, but the panel’s uniformity of opinions more nearly approximated a lecture than an exchange. Audience-submitted questions, the sole interactive component of the panel, were limited to two. Couric even joked that “my questions are significantly better than your questions.” This highlighted a vague disingenuity, in both OpenXChange and the panel, which was made even more glaringly obvious when the only query that temporarily stumped the panel was on how to properly conduct dialogue about race in the real world…Finally, Gary Segura, a Stanford professor of political science, stated that one way to start a conversation was to tell a white person that they are advantaged because their grandparents were advantaged. No other option was seriously entertained. This declaration of privilege is not necessarily wrong, but this proposal is disappointingly simple given both the expertise of the men and women on stage that night and the mission statement of OpenXChange itself…This is the problem with OpenXChange: it threatens to promise dialogue and deliver lectures instead.

That the event seemed more a lecture than an exchange should not have come as a surprise since it was advertised as the “11th Annual Kieve Distinguished Speaker Lecture” (which is even pictured in the Review article). No one would deny that the panelists were very one-sided on Wednesday night, but the OpenXChange event was not meant to be a debate on race in American culture. As Lily Zheng wrote in her September Stanford Daily column, “Lived experiences are not open for debate.”

The theme of the event was to promote engagement in discussions of race. Segura’s response to the final question of the evening was not a simple proposal. It was a challenge:

Calling out white privilege — not in an angry way, but just sort of explaining how an average middle class white person is still the beneficiary of decades of systematic bias and exclusion — that, I think, is the first step towards getting people to understand that the world that they live in is not just, and their life is not glorious because of their own wondrous merit — however meritorious they might be — but because of a system of bias that’s been in place for a hundred and forty years or so.”

Many of the white people in the room appeared to be receptive to this logic and not made uncomfortable by the message, but that’s probably because most of the people who flocked to the event on Wednesday night were the pool-goers who already know how to swim. They were the Stanford community members who are already more likely to be comfortable discussing issues of race, especially with each other, than the broader Stanford community is. They are the familiar faces at other OpenXChange events.

For them, the participatory component of OpenXChange need not come during the actual event. The onus is on the attendees to have conversations with their friends and peers that weren’t there. Race is not something that is talked about at the freshmen dining hall tables, but it can be. It should not take an accusatory tone, for it’s not about being made to feel guilty. As Bryan Stevenson concluded, “It starts with truthtelling. If we just tell the truth about the ways in which racial inequality manifests itself, people of goodwill will want to reconcile themselves to that truth; they’ll want to do some things that are corrective; but if we don’t tell the truth, if we hide from it, if we allow the denial that exists in so many ways to persist, we won’t actually get there.”

Yes, confronting privilege with your friends might be uncomfortable, but the water usually is uncomfortable the first time someone gets their feet wet. Difficult discussions about historical injustices that have led to today’s inequities are imperative to make any progress. OpenXChange was never meant to be a solution to all of the outrage and injustice on campus, but it can at least be a call to action for those who want to make change.

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*Update: Philip Clark of the Stanford Review wrote a response to this article, to which we wrote a response here.

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Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna, a sophomore studying political science, is the national editor of Stanford Political Journal.