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Warning: Please be warned that in the following blog post I describe in detail the early twentieth century lynching of Jessie Washington.

Spike Lee’s 2018 film BlacKkKlansman tells the true story of black Colorado Springs police officer Ron Stallworth’s operation to infiltrate and expose a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). To fool them over the phone into believing he’s white he performs their version of racism and gains the trust of Klan leader David Duke. For in-person meetings Stallworth enlists the help of Jewish officer Flip Zimmerman to be his white public face, a job which places him in harm’s way when Klan members suspect his Jewish heritage.

Vox‘s Alyssa Wilkinson closes her negative review of the film with a searing indictment of its racial politics. Rather than provoke white audiences’ discomfort and critique their complacent brand of liberal color-consciousness, Wilkinson argues the film is “just so obvious that it leaves room for a ponderously predictable net effect. BlacKkKlansman reinforces what we’re already angry about. And it makes us feel glad that we, at least, see through the pathetic lies.” Noel Ransome of Vice similarly excoriates the film for letting “white audiences in on a joke, while failing to demand reflections on that joke.” Leaving the theater disappointed, Ransome heard “white guys laughing as we huddled through those double doors, with me, the black dude, feeling like I whiffed some bullshit.”

It must be frustrating to enter a theater, excited to bear witness to a blistering take down of the KKK–America’s premier racist invention–only to interpret their real life cinematic counterparts as little more than comic foils to heroic police officers. I can see how Lee’s film may seem problematic on the surface. It appears to hoist a version of respectability politics on its black audience members whenever a good cop enters the frame to counteract the overtly racist bad ones. In his three-page critique of BlacKkKlansman, Sorry To Bother You director Boots Riley famously argued that, in contrast to Lee’s earlier work, the film has a deeply problematic pro-law enforcement bent, even inventing Jewish officer Zimmerman to manipulatively play off of the audience’s sympathies. He additionally accuses Lee of revising history to suit a white supremacist agenda, pointing out that the real-life version of the film’s police officer protagonist, Ron Stallworth, infiltrated and sought to destabilize black radical organizations that fought to undermine racist hate groups like the KKK.

The critics above are also troubled by the film’s post-production-added coda featuring a montage of carnage from the Charlottesville, Virginia protests stoked by non-KKK-affiliated racist agitator Richard Spencer when he sought to obtain permits to hold his Unite the Right rally on the University of Virginia campus. The nation stood bewildered later that day when president Donald Trump made his bizarre concession that protesters on both sides–anti-racist and racist alike–are equally to blame, despite white supremacist James Fields having rammed his car into a cluster of protesters and claimed the life of Heather Heyer. Given who the heroes of the film are, the coda may feel to some like it venerates the very culture of policing that failed protesters like Heyer, to whom Lee dedicated his film.

But these critical reviews of BlacKKKlansman too quickly chide Lee for taking creative liberties with the original historical source material and sanitizing it for white audiences. There is one vital problem with such deference to historical authenticity. It matters more how and what Lee revises than that he makes revisions in the first place. After all, history is not a neutral document of the past. Those who wield it can choose to use it to build coalitions, teach powerful lessons, destabilize social hierarchies, or reconstruct those hierarchies. In the case of BlacKkKlansman Lee only revises something to subvert it. For instance, it is true Zimmerman is fictional, yet his presence and role in the film is a necessary call for coalition between black people and Jews. Through Zimmerman and Stallworth we witness a shared history of being on the receiving end of hate–the core difference being that Zimmerman can leverage his whiteness to play his part effectively. One pivotal scene illustrates this difference. Zimmerman tells Stallworth he refuses to risk his life “to prevent some rednecks from lighting a couple sticks on fire” because for Stallworth “it’s a crusade. For me, it’s a job.” After accusing Zimmerman of cowering behind his fake white Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity, Stallworth reminds him that American racism is “our problem.” It is a powerful statement against complacency, of the urge to sit in the shadows and wait for American culture to move beyond its racist past and present. In intersecting Stallworth and Zimmerman’s shared oppressions, the film demands a black-Jewish coalition. Painful though it is to confront, like Stallworth Zimmerman’s life was already at risk before he entered the ranks of the KKK.

As for the film’s dubious depiction of heroic police officers, Lee himself defended his film in an interview with The Times, claiming his films have

been very critical of the police, but on the other hand I’m never going to say all police are corrupt, that all police hate people of colour. I’m not going to say that. I mean, we need police. Unfortunately, police in a lot of instances have not upheld the law; they have broken the law. But I’d also like to say, sir, that black people are not a monolithic group.

August 24, 2018

Despite initially refusing to confront Riley’s criticism, Lee here attempts to make a case for abandoning the all-or-nothing thinking characteristic of our increasingly polarized culture. Lee asserts, somewhat questionably, that we err in supposing, as his critics do with black people, all officers are part of a monolithic group. I confess the equivalence here gives me pause. Riley and other critics understandably wince at BlacKkKlansman‘s model for what good police officers look like. To be sure, our contemporary culture of policing is beset by a deep-rooted psychology of racism that leads some officers to extinguish innocent black lives for nothing more than existing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Other officers unwittingly fall victim to the racism threaded in America’s social fabric. If police officers are going to exist on the streets and in our institutions whether we like it or not, perhaps the answer to the problem of police brutality is to demand more from police. What does a good officer look like? How might we go about changing the culture of policing so officers better serve the most under-served among us?

Another refrain in all these critiques, both implied and explicit, is that BlacKkKlansman is too obvious or heavy-handed to be subversive. In its whimsical historical revisions, the argument goes, the film too often depicts its villains as absurdist and bumbling inversions of the genuine article as opposed to the real threats they continue to be, and therefore the film’s racial politics are muddied by its own absurdities.

But it’s in that very obviousness, that heavy-handedness, where Lee stages the film’s most persuasive anti-racist polemic. Consider the film’s centerpiece that glues the whole experience together, and which all the critics above mostly overlook. It’s a scene featuring Jerome Turner (played by singer and activist Harry Belafonte), another invented character who acts as the audience’s window into a horrifying past that could easily become the present. Turner tells of the brutal early twentieth-century lynching of Jessie Washington in Waco, Texas. The scene cross-cuts between two social gatherings. On one side the elderly Turner emotionally recounts Washington’s lynching from his vantage as an eighteen-year-old black boy witnessing it from the attic of a nearby building. Black men and women, some of them holding blown-up photographs of Washington’s lynching, surround Turner in rapt attention as though absorbing an important history lesson.

On the other side Klan leader Duke prepares an initiation ceremony prior to a celebratory screening of Birth of a Nation, the infamous D.W. Griffith-directed yarn that depicts the knights of the KKK as heroic saviors of America from power-hungry and idiotic black people. During that pre-screening baptism, Zimmerman waits patiently as Duke travels toward him down a line of kneeling Klan members and, one-by-one, splashes holy water on each of their robes. Zimmerman takes off his hood when Duke reaches him and stares at him with a mixture of fear, contempt, and sadness. We know he only begrudgingly accepts his initiation. Zimmerman, a Jew who passes as white, is a liminal figure. A target of the Klan’s racism himself, Zimmerman performs racism suitably, yet his watery, reluctant eyes threaten to betray that performance. He cheers during Birth of a Nation at its fantasy destruction of black men and boos alongside his Klan allies when black characters in the film seem to gain the upper hand. All the while, we sympathize with his necessary performance and wince whenever he pumps his fists to the film. We don’t envy his awful mission.

That film, after all, is credited with resurrecting the KKK during a time of already heightened racial tensions. It teaches the very lessons that led to Washington’s lynching a century ago. Indeed, few American films are as illustrative of the potent rhetoric of Jim Crow-era racism. For all its early cinematic innovations and breathtaking scope, Birth of a Nation inculcates the long existing Civil War and post-reconstruction-era stereotypes of the criminal black man–the freed slave buck–who rapes and murders white women.

One scene from the film is a particularly vile example of such stereotypes. It depicts an actor in blackface pursuing a white woman who repeatedly rebuffs his advances. After a short chase he corners her at a cliff side. With nowhere to run, she hurls herself over the edge, her body crashes against the rocks below, and she later dies. Her pursuer gets captured by the KKK, put on trial, found guilty, lynched, and left on a doorstep with a sign around his neck reading “KKK.” BlacKkKlansman instructs that the consequences of this scene–the lynching and its aftermath–are the only moments of truth, and so they are the only moments we are allowed to witness. By contrast, Birth of a Nation teaches its spectators that black men are scheming criminals, and white women are little more than meek and powerless victims of black men’s voracious sexual appetites.

BlacKkKlansman inverts these stereotypes and frames racist white women as willing agents who collude in others’ oppression. After waiting quietly in another room while their husbands undergo the ceremony, Duke finally invites the women into the venue. As Birth of a Nation plays, it’s the white women’s alternating cheers and boos that can be heard most audibly over the film’s racist imagery. Anytime a black man or woman is on-screen, their voices rise above the din to express disgust. When Klan members appear, their voices become part of a cheering chorus. They are not meek and powerless, but like their husbands, participate in racist destruction. They teach the same lessons they consume.

At this moment the scene cuts to Turner, who points to Washington’s lynching photographs held by the black women flanking him. Birth of a Nation, Turner says, came out the year before the mob murdered Washington. It empowered white supremacists and even captured the attentions of then-President Woodrow Wilson, who called the film “history written with lightning.” Turner utters President Wilson’s quote with a sardonic smile, showing his recognition that artists like Griffith bear the responsibility of distorting history to teach the wrong lessons.

This prolonged and complex scene juxtaposes two dueling pedagogies–one based on a violently stereotypical artifact of white supremacy and the other provoking a kind of mournful rage at the racist consequences of that hate. One is a piece of early twentieth-century cinematic history that resurrected the very hate group at the center of Lee’s new, twenty-first century cinematic response. The other is a lecture designed to heal the wounds inflicted by such cinema. Taken together, the scene mounts BlacKkKlansman‘s most persuasive argument that anti-racist pedagogy means asking students to bear witness, to see the obvious, to look upon the most odious features of our past and present. As spectators, we’re forced to confront the violence inflicted by Birth of a Nation and its racist acolytes, and Washington’s lynching is the most apt symbol of that violence. Well-documented in high-quality photographs, Washington’s burnt remains countermand a crowd of white racist celebrants cheering “white power.”

But the white racists don’t get the last word. The scene finally cuts to the black women surrounding Turner, chanting “black power” in unison, their coalition standing in stark contrast to such antithetical hate. Lee’s extended focus on the mostly-female students is no accident. Turner may have been the lecturer, but it is the black women who literally bear that photographic evidence.

It is worth considering some of those photographs in relationship to this scene as a core component of anti-racist pedagogy, as a means of bearing witness to events from which we may feel compelled to avert our gaze.

An old black-and-white long-shot photograph shows a large crowd huddled around a desiccated tree–a sea of white boater hats tilted toward the spectacle at the center. Small wisps of smoke blow from the base of the tree toward the eastern edge of the image and obscure a blurry mass of individuals in motion. One man seems to be stoking the flames with a stick, while another hunches over the blackened pyre as if to study it.

One could easily mistake the scene as an innocent depiction of a town gathering in celebration around a bonfire. The graininess of the early twentieth century photograph could almost make one overlook the fetal mass–a human–splayed across the burning embers, their head bent beyond view, their left leg, flayed and blackened by fire, extended over the boundary of the planter box surrounding the tree. The new detail suddenly paints a different portrait. The man in a light boater hat isn’t holding a stick, but a rope, and the man to his right isn’t studying the fire, but gleefully ingesting his and the mob’s brutal work. Another close-up photograph of the horrifying scene shows the gnarled and charred mass strung up against a low branch of the tree, the poor boy’s bones exposed, legs cut off at the knee, head tilted ever so slightly, face unrecognizable. A mob of white men in the background don self-assured grins.

The story doesn’t begin or end there. After Waco local Lucy Fryer was found bludgeoned to death in the doorway of her house, officers discovered Washington nearby the scene. Washington was a mere seventeen years old at the time when those officers gained his trust and promised to protect him from lynch mobs in exchange for a confession. Uneducated, illiterate, incapable of defending himself, and fearing for his safety, Washington confessed to the crime. Word and image can hardly do justice to what followed. Within three minutes an all-white jury found Washington guilty of murdering Fryer and sentenced him to death. Only seconds after the jury delivered its verdict a mob of 2,000 white men dragged Washington from the courtroom in chains, beat him mercilessly, stabbed him, and dragged him to the tree at the town square, where 15,000 spectators watched as they cut off his testicles, burned him alive, and amputated his fingers and toes to sell as souvenirs. Those white men then dismembered the body, bagged the parts, and paraded them around town. Waco’s mayor called in local photographer Fred Gildersleeve to document the event. He was more than happy to turn a profit on the lynching postcards they would be made into.

Looking intently at the photographs and reading articles that recount the tragedy cannot possibly capture the dense racism permeating Washington’s motionless remains and the self-satisfied smiles of the vengeful white men in the background. Instead, one can only force, as BlacKKKlansman does, such images back into our cultural memory so that we can bear witness to events that we must never forget. As Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith argue in their book Lynching Photographs, the photograph’s evidence “cannot be fixed” in time, but “is determined by context and circulation and the interests of certain viewers.” In planting the photographic evidence within cinema, as a counter-cinema to that which Birth of a Nation long ago inspired, white viewers must confront their own inaction in the face of obvious racist hatred. Establishing a new repertoire, an emotional performance in the vein of Turner, resurrects photographic evidence that was once sold for profit to hungry consumers. Perhaps our new context, the polished cultural lens through which we read such photographs, is our collective horror. Perhaps the obviousness is the point.

Reflecting now on Lee’s film and the photographic evidence of Washington’s lynching it inspired me to write about, I confess I’m at a loss, as an educator myself, for how to incorporate Turner’s transformative pedagogy into my own classrooms. Would a mere trigger warning justify displaying these still images of incomprehensible evil? Do I risk subjecting my black students to unnecessary trauma? Or is forcefully confronting that trauma a necessary precondition for social change? I labor to build coalitions in my classrooms, yet I’m also constantly aware of the rash choices my whiteness affords me.

Having revisited this scene over and over, I’m struck by Turner’s soft cadence, his calculated, ironic smile, his simultaneous wistfulness and candor. He occupies that throne not to exert control over his rapt spectators, but to report from personal experience and build community through storytelling. Perhaps my role as an instructor is not as Turner, but as a member of that audience, sinking into the background, listening more and speaking less.

Last summer I led a six-week online course on Identity in Video Games and Online Gaming Communities. After I had my students play and discuss a game about two teenage girls falling in love and running away together, I observed some objections that deserve further reflection.

For the first two weeks of the course we confronted the following fundamental but complicated questions: “what is a game?” and “what is the relationship between the game developer/author and the game player?” To guide my students’ thinking I had them play two of game designer Davey Wreden’s narrative experiments (or are they games?)–The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide. In The Stanley Parable players embody the role of the titular character, a disaffected worker who experiences an existential crisis at his banal office job where he perfunctorily presses whatever buttons his 1990s-era office monitor tells him to. As players roam a depressingly familiar office building haunted by empty cubicles and the faint buzz of electricity in the walls, a comic narrator describes or anticipates Stanley’s every decision. Occasionally the narrator will try to coax Stanley in one direction, but the player can guide him in the opposite while the narrator adapts to the unexpected (and totally programmed) detour. The object of the game, which takes up to two hours to complete, is to find as many of the seventeen endings–some very well-hidden–as the player can. Endings range from bleak and depressing to humorous and uplifting, yet because the sole object is to capture all the narrative threads the game resists giving the player any sense of closure. Instead, it acts both as a meditation on the existential implications of a player perfunctorily inputting commands so the game responds in kind (who is in control?), and a subversive commentary on all of what we’ve come to expect at the end of a story (resolution, contentment, a neat package).

The second week students played Wreden’s more thematically challenging follow up, The Beginner’s Guide, which is a narrative experiment about the relationship between the game developer (or artist) and the player (or the person who consumes the art). Here, Wreden himself acts as both museum guide and unreliable narrator while the player, a nameless spectator, navigates a series of micro-games or interactive art pieces crafted by a man named Coda, an ostensibly troubled aspiring game designer who Wreden met at a game developer’s conference in California. Wreden orders the games chronologically–progressing from amateurish experiments to depressive false starts–to create a narrative thread of his own design about an ambitious artist descending into madness. One soon gets the impression that Wreden has developed an unhealthy obsession with Coda’s art. He maps his own desires onto each game in order to frame Coda as his romanticized ideal of a troubled and struggling artist. It backfires. At the end of The Beginner’s Guide, Wreden subjects the player to “The Tower,” a severe and imperially oppressive game world of low-polygon, boxy, and gray structures. Here, players find themselves trapped by prohibitive game mechanics that stop their progress at every turn–an invisible maze that transports the player back to the beginning should they touch a wall, a dead end room with a door that only opens when somebody (certainly not the player) flips an inaccessible switch on the other side, and a five-digit lock with no combination in sight. Wreden, of course, intervenes and modifies the game design so the player can advance. Fed up with Wreden’s invasion of his privacy, Coda nests a terse demand at the end of “The Tower” that Wreden leave him alone and stop selfishly altering his games.

Unlike The Stanley Parable, which is a humorous take on agency and control that gives the player free rein to explore the rendered environment even as the narrator attempts in vain to exert his will upon the player, The Beginner’s Guide is serious, linear, and totalitarian. The first game is easy to stomach. It’s funny, intellectually fulfilling, beautifully written, and delivers its dark existential themes in small doses. In the end, it provokes us with its tongue-in-cheek design quirks and shows us the blueprints. But we’re kept at arm’s length from the designer himself, who remains contentedly silent and cedes all messaging to a narrator who hilariously believes he has all the control but is, ironically, part of the design.

By contrast, when I first played The Beginner’s Guide years ago it reminded me of Roland Barthes’ seminal essay, “The Death of the Author,” in which Barthes argues that our tendency to read an author’s intentions into a work of literature (and by extension, film) is misguided. He argues not only that the creator and the work are different, but that our insistence on merging the two limits our engagement with the work. It’s easy enough to apply this logic to video games. We’re left wondering who is the real creator of the games in The Beginner’s Guide, since Wreden’s narcissistic auto-narrator has stolen and modified all of Coda’s micro-games and cut-and-pasted them next to one another like lines in a heavily-revised poem. Wreden makes alterations, determines the direction, tells the player what to think, and confiscates all agency from the player–a nameless spectator beholden to the whims of an unreliable developer. It matters less whether Coda really exists and more that the player reflexively wonders. These could be Wreden’s games. Or they could be Coda’s. Or both. In any case, intention and result dissociate.

As expected, my students’ reflections on both games were incisive. They noted much of what I observe above. Most were comfortable calling The Stanley Parable a game, arguing that it fit, if a little uneasily, into Jesper Juul’s six criteria that he argues have to be met before something can reasonably be called a “game.” The criteria are:

1.) A rule-based formal system;
2.) with variable and quantifiable outcomes;
3.) where different outcomes are assigned different values;
4.) where the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome;
5.) the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome;
6.) and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.

Jesper Juul, Half Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 6-7

While it is tempting to dismiss Stanley Parable as a non-game for failing to conform to the second rule, as a couple of my students did, one could also argue that finding all the endings in fact constitutes “variable and quantifiable outcomes.” As expected with The Beginner’s Guide, students had a more difficult time calling it a game, since criteria two, three, and arguably four do not describe the experience (though it’s important to note that Juul’s definition may require some modification). With but a few exceptions, my students found both games narratively rich and emotionally complex. By the end of week two I found myself agreeing with most of my students.

I parted with many of my students by week three after their play through of Gone Home. On the surface, Gone Home is a story based in the year 1995 about a 20-year-old woman named Katie arriving back to the United States from a year of travel abroad only to find that her mother Janice, father Terrence, and little sister Samantha (known in-game as “Sam”) have abandoned the home they moved into less than a year before. As Katie/the player explores the interior of the Greenbriar Mansion bequeathed to her family by her deceased uncle, Oscar, she finds notes, magazines, tapes, bills, correspondence, locker combinations, half-written stories, and homework assignments scattered around the mansion. These disposable or sentimental fragments build a narrative about what happened to her family over the intervening year.

Any player would be forgiven for suspecting that something sinister happened to Katie’s family. A storm rages outside. All the lights have been turned off, yet the living room television is tuned to a forever-repeating weather warning. The home is in disarray–paper strewn everywhere, video game consoles unplugged from their outlets, a tent fort in the living room. Abandoned familiar spaces is a common environmental design used by developers of horror games. This is because familiarity can easily become terrifying. What happens, after all, when the home–an ostensibly safe space–transforms suddenly into a nightmare?

The difference is that here, the developers play off of our expectation that something terrible has happened to Katie’s family so they can perform a magic trick. As players explore the mansion, they discover not that the family had been killed, or that a haunting drove them out, but that in a desperate attempt to salvage their ailing relationship, Terrence and Janice left on vacation. Meanwhile, Sam, the game’s central character study, forged an unexpected romantic relationship with her classmate, Lonnie, and used Terrence and Janice’s vacation as an opportunity to run away together. Sam and Lonnie are teenage girls tortured by the social expectation that they fall in line and indulge heteronormative lifestyles. According to notes and correspondence left in the open, Terrence acted as authoritarian enforcer of this status quo and insisted on surveiling his daughter and Lonnie after he discovered their relationship. In that sense, Terrence is an embodiment of these social expectations. As a small act of resistance to Terrence, Sam and Lonnie express their budding feminist identities through their shared love of storytelling, video games, music, and art. They produce and distribute a feminist zine, earning them the scrutiny of their school teachers, classmates, and parents; they listen to the same riot grrrl punk (a popular genre of the 90s for its themes of feminist empowerment) at live venues; and they collaborate to write short stories starring versions of themselves–metaphors for the brand of resistance they embody.

One could argue that the developers never really pulled a bait-and-switch, but instead merely redefined the haunted house. Why should we fixate on literal ghosts when the traces a family leaves behind are ghostly in their own right? In a way, the game’s central conceit–the home–is haunted by the absence of a traumatized family. It is haunted by the evidence of trauma left behind.

I expected some resistance to Gone Home for its story about two young women falling in love. After all, in 2018, twenty-three years removed from the game’s setting, our country is still confronting institutional violence against LGBTQ+ bodies. Our art struggles still to ally with widespread acts of resistance to that violence. Some students are therefore likely to feel uncomfortable swimming in these uncharted waters. What I had not expected, however, was the objection that, unlike Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide, Gone Home is neither a game nor a rich narrative experiment. A common refrain from students was that Gone Home‘s bait-and-switch made the game feel manipulative and cliched, even offensive. Some argued that it compromised Gone Home‘s narrative integrity and relegated it to yet another story about queer women falling in love (in truth, I’m at a loss for other games with similar stories). Notably, save for a few students who were moved by Gone Home and, in two cases, personally identified with it, students rarely chose to discuss the game’s social justice themes directly.

I confronted these objections with the following challenges:

• Are there any other narrative experiments like Gone Home that pull a similar bait-and-switch?
• In response to the objection that Gone Home isn’t a real game, both The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide are measurably less complex. Neither game enables the player to open doors, or solve puzzles, or pick up objects. In both cases, the player is limited to walking around a small arena. They’re even spoon fed narrative arcs and told explicitly what each game intends to prove. With Gone Home, on the other hand, the player can solve puzzles, open doors, rotate objects, and unlock complicated interfaces. How do we reconcile the contention that The Stanley Parable, a less complex game mechanically, is a game, while Gone Home, a more complex game mechanically, is not?

Gone Home made many of my students uncomfortable. I can venture some guesses as to why. Shira Chess argues queer video games have the potential to subvert the traditional Freytag model of narrative, which moves from “inciting event, rising action, leading towards a climax, and then ultimately a falling action.” This model, she argues, privileges male sexual pleasure–a single, ultimate climax–as opposed a series of delayed climaxes. Video games like Gone Home are, instead, “constantly submerged in the story’s middle” that “revels in queer process: It allows for a space that is not defined by a single, ultimate climax but a multitude of climaxes that are not intent on necessarily finding an end.”

One could argue that both Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide fall under this new queer narrative model, to a degree. However, the former more readily mirrors a series of self-contained mini-narratives, each with an individual climax and falling action that adheres more closely to the Freytag model. The Beginner’s Guide, meanwhile, is an entirely linear interactive narrative that offers the player little control. It also has a clear climax and endpoint–falling action–during which Coda finally confronts Wreden and the game ends abruptly.

Naomi Clark writes that Gone Home‘s stripped-down, almost anti-climactic storytelling techniques make players uncomfortable because they exploit players’ expectations that the game will be a first-person adventure (or shooter?) in a haunted house. By depriving players of such pleasures associated with familiar horror tropes and replacing them with a spare story about two young women falling in love, Gone Home enacts a kind of betrayal through its bait and switch. Other scholars like Merrit Kopas have written poignant personal reflections on Gone Home‘s insights about coming of age as a young queer woman, and praises the game for attracting heretofore untapped audiences.

The Stanley Parable, on the other hand, is easier to digest. Existential and dreary though it is at its core, Wreden tempers the darkness with levity, and players are lifted up as a result. Our struggle is Stanley’s struggle because we live that darkness–we ask ourselves whether we’re just biding our time until our reality expires–and a cubicled office is the most apt symbol to illustrate that collective despair. The Beginner’s Guide, by contrast, offers no such lightness, opting instead for a linear and oppressive meditation on artistic obsession and ruthless ambition. Many of us find ourselves–as I and most of my students did–identifying with both Wreden and Coda, even if we want to distance ourselves from their more harmful impulses. But Gone Home conforms to no such universalizing pretense, hopelessness, or dread. Simple though it is, Gone Home mounts a far more specific and challenging cultural critique of the ubiquitous patriarchal gaze (embodied in Katie and Sam’s father, Terrence) that imprisons LGBTQ+ people in the closet once they have bravely exposed themselves to the world. That re-closeting effectively erases their identities, and in a way we’re all responsible for reinforcing those systems in our refusal to confront them. It makes sense such themes would cut some so deep, so we don’t confront them. Instead, it is easier to dismiss Gone Home as not a game, or narratively cliche.

I begin my Introduction to Ethnic Studies class with the following simple questions: “What is race?” and “what is racism?” Students spend five minutes composing their definitions, during which I enjoy the awkward silence in the room that’s punctuated by the sounds of pencils or pens scratching binder paper. I can see some students squinting their eyes (which I fear signals resentment that this be their first challenge), heads turned toward the desk, one or both palms pressed against their wrinkled foreheads. As with previous semesters, most of my white students had never asked themselves these questions, and I can tell this is so by their body language and the audible silence that settles over the cramped classroom. Those silences speak volumes. There is apprehension in those silences. There is uncertainty in those silences. And why shouldn’t there be? Race is a moving goalpost. Its definition has never remained static because it’s a structure built on shaky foundations, and it can only remain stable if society reinforces it.

Some students don’t always accept this logic. Most eventually admit that race is biologically fictional and culturally real, but a small fraction of them argue that it’s white people, not people of color, who are unfairly maligned as racist actors, and as a result are the true victims of racism. The objections aren’t always so explicit, however. Occasionally they come in the form of questions, or appeals to class struggle, or subtle reversals of misfortune. These objections are challenging to confront without unfairly exposing resistant students to scrutiny from the rest of the class.

Below is a short list of anecdotes describing some challenges I’ve faced teaching Ethnic Studies to groups of mostly white students. In the stories that follow I make a number of mistakes. After covering those examples, I’ll discuss what I think I could have done differently.

• On the first week of the semester we define race, racism, colorblindness, and ethnicity as a class. The definitions aren’t straightforward and at first this feels counter-intuitive to them. I explain that racism, the belief that certain phenotypic traits reveal something about a person’s inborn and unchanging character, worth, and ability, is an effective way to illegitimately distribute social power along racial lines, and that white people benefit from that unfair distribution. A white student raises his hand to object to my definition of racism. I call on him but don’t yet know his name (I will learn it within a week). “I’m going to play devil’s advocate,” he begins. He sounds nervous: “there’s one thing I don’t understand. Why can black people be proud of their race but white people can’t?” He radiates the same energy and anger that I feel from students a few times every semester when I teach this class. I tell everybody, including those who have disapproving looks on their faces, that this is a fair question, and secretly I am thankful the student was brave enough to ask it. I pose his question to the rest of the class. Nobody speaks so I ask the student what he thinks, but before I can finish he interrupts me. His nervous tone now replaced with unwavering confidence, he continues, “for instance, I’m proud of being white.” This is an invitation to sate his curiosity, so I oblige. “But let’s interrogate this idea,” I say, “what is defined as culturally white?” He shifts in his seat, “Oh, I see what this is all about. I see what you’re doing.” Red-faced, he grips his desk and stares at the particle board. I don’t externalize the panic I feel. “That’s a serious question,” I promise, “we should define what ‘culturally white’ means before moving forward.” The silence that confronts my serious question is an occupational hazard that I have no talent for enduring, so I relent for now. “We don’t have to answer that question today. What we learn about race and racism in the weeks ahead may provide some answers.”
• A white male student writes his mid-semester diagnostic response paper on the question “how does identity shape one’s social experience?” He spends the entirety of the paper arguing that racial hierarchies are not real, yet maintains that people of color have it worse in America than white people. He garnishes his response with the claim that the academic left silences him, but offers his reader no examples. We speak after class one day and I express curiosity for his position. He has trouble offering specifics, so I invite him to elaborate whenever he wishes. He never elaborates.
• A white male student writes his weekly journal on privilege, a concept I strategically hadn’t yet covered. In it, he claims people of color, women, and women of color aren’t oppressed in America because he grew up poor with a single mother who worked a factory job to support his family. In a marginal comment I explain that while class inequality is a major problem in American culture, it’s only a special aspect of privilege, not its sole variable. A week later, he disappears.
• Two days after teaching my students about Project Implicit, Harvard University’s two decades-long effort to collect comprehensive data on the psychological dimension of race, a white male student approaches me after class to tell me he hopes I’m not offended that he “passed the test” and is not racially biased. I ask him why he thinks that would offend me, and explain that it’s not a test one can pass or fail. He says he feels it undermines my point that implicit bias is real, and thought I would interpret his challenge as disrespectful. I can tell my response surprises him: “I’m not offended. You can feel free to challenge me whenever you like. Just keep in mind that you can test one way and the overall data will still tell a different story.”
• A white female student asks to do her final creative project on the lives of police officers. People in blue uniforms, she argues, are the underappreciated minorities who put their lives on the line every day, yet they receive the ire of an uninformed public that only witnesses those exceptional moments when men and women of color are murdered by corrupt police. I agree with her that officers must have a difficult and dangerous job, and that we likely don’t get the whole story, but I remind her that being a police officer is an occupational choice, not an ethnic or racial identity. I ask her to change her final project to fit the course. She turns in her original idea and I have to give her a low grade.
• In her response to Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of Anger,” a white female student who had throughout the semester endorsed most of the course material and was vocal in class suddenly dismissed Lorde’s critique of white academic women on the basis that she’s never witnessed or herself participated in marginalizing black women and other women of color. She further accused Lorde of promulgating inequalities by eroding coalitions between black and white women and artificially stoking resentment. My long-form comment (inexplicably far longer than her weekly response) summarily dismissed her argument and requested that she read Lorde’s work more closely to engage with her central thesis that black women’s claims are too often made invisible, or rejected as irrationally angry. I fear my bluntness inspired her silence for the rest of the semester.

These moments are a challenge for both me and my students, but for different reasons. My privilege as a white male instructor of Ethnic Studies with control over the direction of the course and assignment grades means my white students are likely to write or say what they think I want to read or hear, even if, secretly, they may find what I’m teaching reprehensible. But the occasional revelations above present sudden and unavoidable obstacles. No matter how confident I am in the course material and its natural social justice bent, I have to confront the reality that teaching is not a matter of spewing facts and data, or changing minds, or transforming students. They have to make those decisions on their own. Some change. Many become indignant. All are shaped by their private histories. And in the end I have no clear answers for how to confront these challenges.

But I am willing to make some tentative proposals. For the white students who have never had to confront these issues seriously, I suggest the complicated interplay of anger, frustration, confusion, and fear evidenced in these small acts of resistance signal what Robin DiAngelo calls white fragility, which is defined and countenanced by whites’ refusal to recognize how they benefit from a racist society. It is the process whereby white people respond either with fury or offense–both subtle and overt, passive aggressive and aggressive–to perceived attacks on their claims to individuality or objectivity. As Barbara Applebaum has argued, those who expose themselves as fragile often do not know they are doing so; their obvious anger is, instead, a reflex of the very privilege they tend to claim does not exist. So how do the examples above fit this definition of white fragility, and what are some protocols for confronting it?

In the first scenario, the student runs the gamut of emotions, from fear, to confidence, to outright anger, to confusion. And truthfully, I didn’t know how to respond in the moment. Reflecting on it now, I believe I did the right thing, though I suspect I could have been less comforting. I could have allowed myself to marinate in the silence of the room after I extended his question to the rest of the class. Since I view teaching as an invariably iterative process where students do half the thinking and I moderate discussion, my deferring the question to a later date when we had more tools available to confront it seemed the only logical option. It was also a risk. A deferral can easily be misinterpreted as a cowering act of subservience. A weakness. A confession that I lack the confidence to deliver the goods. A direct and concise response, on the other hand, betrays the complexity of the objection and teaches the wrong lesson that coming to quick conclusions is preferable to asking provocative questions. That is not how the world works. It’s a lesson I’d never want to teach.

But scenario one is rare enough that I caution against treating it as anything other than the exception to the rule. Most instances of white fragility resemble the other four scenarios in their private secrecy. If the second student objected to George M. Fredrickson’s definition of a racial hierarchy, I only knew about it because of his paper. And anyway, discussing it in person yielded no fruit. Yet I left the classroom blaming myself for going too easy on him. I wondered if it wouldn’t have been a better decision to push on his preconceptions, to show him that hierarchies are part of the human condition, and that the project is to critique the power that emerges out of those hierarchies. How, then, does one draw such objections out of students in the moment? What is a viable strategy for giving them permission to confront those thinly-veiled prejudices? What is at stake for these denials?

The third student invoked a familiar refrain that confuses systemic injustice with particular experience. If poor white people exist, the argument goes, then clearly white people aren’t privileged. Had he remained in attendance, he would have learned that “white trash” covers a specific subset of poor white people who, sociologist Monica McDermott observes, are called trash because they’ve perceptibly fallen short of the arbitrary ideals of whiteness. The natural byproduct of this stereotype is that black people–seen only as part of their group–have already been discarded like their white trash counterparts. But teaching such a set of social scientific facts and cultural analyses is unlikely itself to spark a dialogue. Rather than graffiti his short paper with blunt criticisms, I should have been kinder in writing and later pulled him aside to ask him how the class made him feel.

The scenario with the student who participated in Project Implicit commits a similar fallacy. Project Implicit is not a standardized test. Getting results of “moderately biased” or “heavily biased” carries no social consequences. One result is a data point among a sea of data points. It’s that sea, and the instructive distributions within that sea, that matters. Were it not, then it would make little sense for the project to span two decades. Not only did I not feel offended by his choice to telegraph the results, I interpreted that choice as a respectful need to seem anti-racist. That desire to perform anti-racism through an unwillingness to see, well-meaning though it is, is a problematic deferral to colorblindness. While we had already covered colorblind racism as a class, that doesn’t ensure understanding, and I should have seen that. As legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow, colorblindness is the standard American social model adopted in retaliation against the gains of the Civil Rights Movement that refers to the refusal to discuss the systemic racism that surrounds us like a fog. Colorblindness is so intrinsic to American culture that, for some, talking about race is the same as confronting a core belief. It’s partly an individual problem, but really it’s so ingrained in American politics and culture that even noticing it for some can feel like adopting the perspective of a two-dimensional organism thrust suddenly into three-dimensional space. Had I recognized that in the moment, I may have instead connected project implicit with colorblindness, thereby abstracting it as an intellectual–rather than personal–problem and reaching beyond my guarded response that amounted to “your understanding of Project Implicit is flawed.”

The fifth student had perfect attendance and turned in all her assignments. She did the reading. She earned her A. But she lived her whole life up to that point among a family of white police officers. Any reference to the reams of sociological and psychological evidence supporting the narrative that officers shoot people of color at higher rates than white people she interpreted as a blanket condemnation of her family. And despite my assurances that the evidence isn’t a condemnation, she wouldn’t budge. So I did the only thing I could and let her feel uncomfortable. What I should have done was express my curiosity about her family, rather than merely bombard her with evidence that she no doubt read as a concerted attack on those she loved. After all, when students raise these objections openly, they’re signaling an openness to debate, to having their core beliefs challenged.

The final student likewise earned her glowing marks. But she was unique in that her objections arose only toward the end of the semester during the week when I introduced another variable–intersectionality–to our analytic toolbox. In her view intersectionality was a red herring, neither adequately representing women of color nor confronting real inequalities between groups of women. Thinking about my response to her in retrospect, I could have expended less energy on challenging her reading of the material then and there and instead allowed class discussion to complicate her preconceptions. On the contrary, I, a white man with presumptuous authority, tried to head her off at the pass, thereby potentially placing her on the defensive and silencing her. When I teach this course and others like it in the future, intersectionality must become a central pillar of my pedagogy. The discomfort my white students feel must extend throughout the semester so I can communicate the complexities behind how institutions use identity to distribute power unevenly. Intersectionality cannot become an end-of-semester concept shoehorned into the class during week twelve.

Ultimately, I have to let all of the students feel some discomfort. Discomfort is a natural byproduct of discussing race and gender in a colorblind society, so some white students have developed ways to avoid talking about it. In fact, most of these white students included assurances in their writing that they reject racism and would never perpetuate it knowingly. Yet these assurances ironically lay claim to a version of individuality that’s been confiscated from people of color. Implicit in each of these assurances is an unspoken request that I consider their emotions and experiences first and foremost. But wouldn’t doing so be tantamount to ignoring the grievances of those genuinely affected by racism? Applebaum suggests centering white emotions and offering comfort “allows for the suffering endured by the marginalized to continue without outrage and without a second thought” (869). So I’ve decided to center vulnerability as a virtue in my pedagogical practice. Doing so gives students permission to live in ambiguity. It directs them away from the desire to protect themselves from uncomfortable social realities. It encourages them to accept that there are no simple answers in an ineffable world.

In late 2013 I packed a small fraction of my belongings into a Toyota RAV4 and drove across the country from my hometown of Sacramento, California to Bowling Green, Ohio to begin graduate school. For four days I gazed through a rearview mirror reflecting a half-foot space between cardboard boxes and the road intervening between me and home. By the time I passed through Utah into the sprawling emptiness of Wyoming I had already been using the time to think about what I’d left behind, and I couldn’t reflect on those objects or people with any equanimity. I felt little about the trivial comforts–Tempur-Pedic bed, books, video games, the recliner I sat in every day. The twenty-eight years of accrued sentiment was more difficult–the bedroom door covered with badly-drawn caricatures of my friends, old recorded VHS tapes of the films I loved and hated, the gaming magazines I collected over a five year span during my teens, friends who I feared would forget about me, animals that would die while I’m away, my lonely dad who never took care of himself.

The house was built on short tempers and constant criticism.

A black cloud moved in from the east and settled over the verdant Wyoming hills. Rain smeared it like gray paint running down a canvas. Some of that blackness swirled and despite the windless calm I imagined a tornado touching down on the land around me and sucking me up into it. My family and friends wouldn’t find out until days later when my body would be discovered miles away in the mangled car my dad gifted me alongside shredded books and the gnarled innards of what used to be a hand-me-down television. My friends, my family, my animals, my home, the personal possessions I mistook for memories–I would never see them again. It was only by day three, halfway through Nebraska on what turned out to be an ill-advised eleven hour drive, when city lights polluted the skies and offered a comforting sense of familiarity. For a little while I let go of my anxieties.

I reached Bowling Green by mid-afternoon on day four, collected my key from the landlord, and set my belongings on the tattered carpet of the small living room. The nearby Goodwill sold me a crusty green couch with a floral pattern for just shy of forty dollars. Small amount, yet the spending dipped into my savings accrued over a year of working at a used bookstore in Sacramento. Seats still down, the RAV4 swallowed most of the couch while a bungee cord held the back door shut. I remember pulling the couch out of the back by myself, dragging it down the stairs, and pivoting it into the basement dungeon while my back sent fire down the nerves in my legs. I inexplicably set the ugly green abomination in the center of the living room and let my legs dangle over the edge. The dim orange Halloween lights I brought from Sacramento and pinned to the wall turned out to be a bad choice that only made the new place feel less like a home. I fell asleep, exhausted and bored and scared, in a strange town with no friends.

A lot changed in five years. I stay in that same apartment–furnished, a partner, and a cat. I got better at making a home out of elsewhere, yet I’d always had the nagging suspicion choosing to visit Sacramento every Winter and Summer was the biggest mitigator of my homesickness. It was home. A constant. The apartment that warmed and cooled me during the six years in Bowling Green felt transitional and temporary by contrast.

Mom is alive. She’s a ghost. Dad’s hand ungrips her. She turns to fog. Floats down the hall. Through the living room. Into the kitchen. Past the family room and utility room. She touches every object and wall and carpet fiber and speck of dust on her way outside. She stretches her spectral arm, translucent white, through the doorway. It turns to black smoke.

On June 24, two days into one of my short visits back to Sacramento, I was too busy grading student papers to care that my father was struggling to get his animals to calm down at what I thought was the sound of a wood chipper cutting into tree limbs. Then I heard my dad yell expletives. He ran past the sliding glass doors in the backyard to grab a garden hose. I went outside and around the side of the house to see a fire engulfing the neighbor’s roof and kissing the fence linking our homes.

My father sprays a limp stream toward the blaze. Drops the hose. Runs through the smoke. The dogs inside, frightened, shivering. Melted shingles burn holes into my dad’s shirt. He desperately lets the black smoke envelope him. Life and home corrode emphysemic lungs. He breathes mom’s neck, exhales the memory of it flying down the stairs at me like a heat-seeking missile…

I call emergency (thank goodness our cat’s in Ohio). Grab both dogs under each arm. None of the cats in sight (did they run away?). Neighbors scoop the dogs into their truck and drive off. I in my pajamas, on the grass, crying out to the house as if it decided this. My partner retrieves the laptops. Sirens in the distance.

Mom arrives to watch her absence burn away.

The flames had already crawled along my dad’s fence to the roof and cut halfway into my childhood home to burn away all of what I was afraid of leaving behind five years ago. By the time the fire engines arrived my dad stood in shock on the neighbor’s lawn across the street. I asked him if he had homeowner’s insurance, but trauma colored his face red as he stared through me at his life’s work disintegrating before him. His shirt was destroyed. Black globules of tar had hardened into the white fabric between gaping holes. Smoke and wires and melted paint permeated the hundred degree air. My seventy-six year old father had aged ten more years in that moment, and I could tell then he thought his life was over.

News crews arrived to document and commodify our tragedy. My neighbor clamored to be on television while my dad paced around to avoid the anchor. I could see why. Strangers cautioned my family to keep an eye out for opportunistic scavengers in the weeks ahead. Apparently news reports have a way of advertising the location of valuable items left behind by displaced families. Those scavengers scoop up goods before the families can return to claim them. I would call it monstrous were it not for my suspicion that their bad behavior is bred not out of their indifference to us, but a kind of capitalistic desperation for all of what we may have forgotten we owned.

As water quenched the blaze firefighters took the time to comfort my unresponsive father. They apologized for his loss, and I knew they meant it. I could see them carrying out what they must have been trained to treat as important in a crisis: old photo albums, family videos my dad and sister and I had converted from VHS to DVD, cheap jewelry that an untrained eye could easily mistake as authentic, boxes of the kids’ high school assignments I thought had been thrown away years ago, my father’s nearly unusued desktop computer, consolation trophies from the year I bowled in a league–two-handed and terribly–alongside my siblings and strangers, and random articles of clothing that had been left on the living room floor. All of this was leftover material culture that had been hidden away deep in the house and discovered by strangers who had never set foot inside the place before or since. These artifacts didn’t matter enough for me to remember them. I would never have known they’d been incinerated with all of what I imagined during those long, stressful hours had been destroyed by water and black smoke.

I watched the firefighters cut holes into the roof as the structure sank. I could only think of all that might be saved. What might be lost that I did remember. Almost everything. When they finally let us into the house hours later it smelled like industrial waste. Opportunistic flies buzzed around the wet soot piles on the laminate flooring my dad had just installed months ago. His new couch, huddled into a dark corner of the family room, absorbed water still dripping from new holes in the ceiling. Popcorn ceiling dangled and sometimes fell to the floor around us. Down the hallway the bedrooms were untouched save for areas blackened around the vents from billowing smoke. My bedroom acted as a storage closet for all the smoke-damaged items firefighters managed to save from getting waterlogged. All of those personal belongings absorbed settling dust and particulate matter. Most of them were too putrid to justify saving. The insurance adjuster later told us that they would dispose of what we couldn’t carry.

That house was always burning. Over those five years I was away my dad stripped the place of what he decided didn’t belong. Year after year I would return and find some new development or project to improve the house, some new item or object recycled or donated, some of my memories missing. The fire was the end result for me and a tragedy for my dad. A disaster that had already been taking place long before smoke claimed the material culture left behind.

Trophies collect rain on the muddy backyard lawn. A cardboard box degraded into moist soil. The contractors thought we’d miss them after they’d stripped the siding.

After the insurance company informed us that the trace amounts of asbestos discovered in the ceiling precluded them (and us) by California law from salvaging anything or entering the home without hazmat suits, we grabbed what we thought mattered to us, left the rest behind, and made countless mistakes along the way. Our insisting on entering the home in the weeks intervening between the fire and the home’s gutting made us minor criminals in California. We were aided and abetted by insurance agents and construction companies that feigned ignorance at our self-destructiveness. Suddenly, the state told us, all of what used to be ours wasn’t ours–it was dangerous garbage. I took some of it and stored it in my brother’s garage. The rest I let go. I abandoned most of my games collected since the age of five, old consoles that had long been collecting dust in plastic containers, out-of-commission electronics from yesteryear, old gifts I sentimentally hoarded for fear that disposing of them would mean I never really appreciated the labor that went into acquiring them, close to four hundred books that cost me countless hours of minimum wage labor to purchase and rarely read, clothes dating as far back as middle school, art work that had been hanging on the wall of my bedroom for over a decade, and eight years of notes from my undergraduate career. I needed to stare at each object, turn the especially important ones over in both hands, and wipe the dust away. Two months after they shipped all our belongings off to a warehouse to catalog and eventually convert into a dollar value, the home is now only studs and space without the illusion of privacy.