Why I Reject the Gospel of Objectivity

Intellectual rigor benefits from emotional investment.

(TanyaJoy / Getty)

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My classes for the semester ended this week. One of them, called “Diversity in Black America,” explored a variety of histories and experiences that fall under the banner “Black America”; ethnicity, sexuality, disability, class, multiracialism, and region are among the themes we examined this fall. In our final session, I told the students that I’ve struggled with this class in the past. Some courses are great ideas in theory but pose a challenge when it comes to making them gel. This was one such course.

But I decided to do something different this year. Rather than have the students read ethnographies or social-scientific data or works of history, each week’s course material was organized around a memoir, a work of historical fiction, or a film (and, in some weeks, around all three).

The class worked this time. There was something about the intimacy of the narrative form that resonated with students. Our discussions were lively and probing. They were also detailed. I worried we might lose track of the social, historic, and political factors that shaped the lives of our subjects, but in fact, the opposite was true. Students were remarkably attentive to context, even as we read about particular lives. Moreover, they were emotionally invested.

I reflected on my own education, in which the gospel of objectivity was often preached to us. If you’ve read this newsletter in the past, you’re well aware that I’ve rejected that concept. We are rarely, if ever, objective about anything, no matter how much we pretend to be.

A consequence of the fiction of objectivity is often a dispassionate disposition. Sometimes, dispassion is appropriate. But I think that for today’s students, who are forced to confront a world in crisis on so many registers, we would do well to create space in the classroom for emotional engagement with intellectual matters. There is value in learning to feel as well as think, to be emotional even as we continue to pursue questions with rigor. I do not mean to suggest that we turn the classroom into a therapy session, but rather that therapeutic or social contexts should not be the only places where students can admit that they feel.

At the conclusion of the term, I usually feel a sense of relief. By December, the pace of parenting, teaching, commuting, and living has worn me down, and I’m tired. Although this week, I do feel some relief, I also feel a bit of sadness. I’ll miss the weekly ritual of gathering with my students to delve into a particular facet of Black life, discussing, debating, disagreeing, and, most of all, allowing ourselves to be expanded by a particular experience.

A single life contains an entire world. And we witnessed that together every week. I’m reminded of one of James Baldwin’s most famous quotes, from a 1963 interview: You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

Imani Perry is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Unsettled Territory. Perry is also the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, and her most recent book is South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.