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Naomi Wolf just went on BBC Radio to defend her recent article calling for mandatory disclosure of the identities of people who bring rape complaints. The interview provoked a firestorm of criticism on Twitter as it was happening — it was the latest in a series of public statements by Wolf that have shocked and disappointed her former feminist allies.

Much of what Wolf said today repeated things she’s said in the past, but some of it was new, and worth examining. A few random thoughts follow, and then some conclusions.

She said on several occasions that the policy she’d advocating is a “Western” one, and wouldn’t necessarily be applicable to countries in the developing world where the stigma of rape is greater. But certainly the stigma of rape varies greatly within Western societies as well as non-Western ones. Her suggestion that her proposal should be tailored to local conditions directly contradicts, it seems to me, her insistence that it should be adopted throughout the West.

Another oddity was her decision to double-down on her widely criticized comparison of the stigma attached to rape to that which attached to homosexuality and abortion in the past. It was only, she said, because people came out of the closet as gay or as women who had had abortions that those stigmas began to fade.

The obvious rejoinder to this is one that has already often been made — that those people came forward voluntarily, and that those who were forced to disclose against their will often suffered mightily for it. But there’s another, deeper way in which this argument fails:

The same process has occurred, and is occurring, with regard to rape.

To have been sexually assaulted is seen as far less shameful now than it was in the past, and a major reason for that is the willingness of women and men to come forward and describe their experiences. The cultural process that Wolf takes as her model in the case of abortion and homosexuality has an exact analogue in the case of sexual assault, and it argues for a policy that is the precise opposite of the one she’s put forward.

So why is she advocating this change, in such a huge break from standard feminist policy and her own past views? A telling moment came when she described reporting a rape to the police as “a public act which should have major consequences.” Such a decision has major consequences today, of course. It’s not an easy or inconsequential thing to do, by any means. But Wolf is arguing here that it should be harder.

This is, I think, a fundamental weirdness of her position. Over and over again, she’s confronted with contradictions in her stance, only to brush them off. She concedes that rapists target people who have been raped before, for instance, but rejects the idea that publishing the names of complainants could expose them to danger. She offers no hard evidence to support the idea that shielding complainants’ names provides comfort to rapists, while conflating the salutary effects of voluntary and mandatory disclosure. She veers wildly between arguing that mandatory disclosure is possible because our cultural attitudes toward rape have become more enlightened and arguing that it’s necessary because they’re so backward.

But at no point does she articulate any argument that connects up to the one she alluded to in the statement I quoted above — that rape reporting “should have major consequences.”

She can’t acknowledge this, of course, because to acknowledge it would be to acknowledge that her concern here is not for those who have been raped. But remember where this all came from — remember what incident drew her, at the age of 48, to adopt a position that she herself describes as a break from her past beliefs.

The spur to her new position was an accusation of rape that she believes to be false and frivolous.

I hate to say it, but once you understand that, everything else starts to make sense.

Update | In her BBC interview today, Wolf acknowledged that her first published essay on the Assange sexual assault case was based on incomplete and inaccurate information. In that piece, “Julian Assange Captured By World’s Dating Police,” published at the Huffington Post on December 7, Wolf declared that Assange was “accused of having consensual sex with two women,” and proceeded to malign his accusers’ character and motivations in a variety of other ways.

That essay was published exactly thirty-one days ago. As Wolf notes, its falsity was exposed by a thorough report on the charges that appeared in The Guardian ten days later. And yet Wolf has neither pulled the essay nor posted any correction to it in the intervening three weeks.

As a sometime blogger at the Huffington Post, I know that it’s not only possible but quite easy to edit your submissions to that site after they appear. So why hasn’t Wolf done so in this instance?

Yesterday I put up a post about the challenges of teaching the history of race as a white professor in classrooms that are mostly populated by students of color. In it, I discussed the fact that white people — particularly white progressives — are given far more guidance and encouragement about how to listen when other people speak about race than about how to talk about race themselves, and noted that when a white professor is put in the position of teaching people of color about race, it can be uncomfortable, even scary.

I closed yesterday’s post with a promise that I’d talk more today about my own classroom experience, and I’d like to start by telling a story out of history.

George Wallace is best remembered today as a fierce segregationist. A four-time governor of Alabama and two-time presidential candidate, Wallace defined white opposition to racial integration for many Americans in the sixties. It was Wallace who, in his first gubernatorial inaugural address in 1963, coined the phrase “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” It was Wallace who physically blocked the door of an auditorium at the University of Alabama later that year to prevent two black students from entering to register for classes.

But when Wallace first ran for governor in 1958, it was with a very different approach. Then, Wallace emphasized economic improvement — better roads, better schools — not white supremacy. He supported segregation, as every major white politician of his time and place did, but did not make it the centerpiece of his campaign. In 1958 Wallace received most of the few black votes cast for governor, while the Ku Klux Klan threw its support to his opponent, a virulent and vocal racist.

Wallace lost that election by a wide margin. When a supporter asked what he thought had turned the tide against him, he said simply, “I got out-niggered. And I’ll never be out-niggered again.”

This is an important story about race and politics in Jim Crow America. It’s a story about the ways in which racism served as a calculated tool for motivating white voters. It’s a story about the pressure that public figures felt to exaggerate and intensify their own attitudes. It’s a story about the ways in which black Southerners, stripped of their legal rights, became pawns in the white community’s political disputes — political disputes with profound and vicious consequences for blacks’ safety and well-being.

This is an important story. And it’s a story that can’t be told without uttering a racial slur.

I’ve thought a lot about this. I’ve thought about whether you could say that Wallace said “I’ll never be out-n-worded again,” or whether you could say “he said ‘I’ll never be out -blacked again’ — but he didn’t say ‘black.'” But you can’t. The word itself is central to the story. The word itself — the use of a racial epithet not as a noun, but as a verb — gets to the heart of how white supremacy operated in the segregated South. At that time in that place that word wasn’t just something you were, it was something that was done to you.

I don’t include this story in my standard lectures on American history. But every once in a while there comes a moment in the classroom when — in response to a question, or a comment, or the flow of a particular discussion — it comes up. At that moment, there’s something relevant, something important that I have to say about our American past and this story is the best way to say it. At that moment, doing the work I’ve been hired to do as fully and honestly as I know how involves telling that story.

So do I tell the story?

There are good reasons not to. I know the power of that word coming out of a white person’s mouth, and I know the power that a professor has in any classroom — a power that is heightened and magnified when the professor is white and the students are mostly not. I don’t want to lose any of my students, I don’t want them to mishear or to misunderstand — or to legitimately disagree with my choice — and not be able to speak up and make the wrong that they see right.

But at the same time, the power of that word isn’t a unique power. The dilemma it poses isn’t a unique dilemma. The trauma that it causes isn’t a unique trauma.

I’m a historian. I’m a historian who believes that most Americans have no idea how vicious, how brutal, how pervasive the horror of American white supremacist violence was in the era of Jim Crow. And I’m a historian who believes that you can’t really understand American history without understanding that horror. So that means that I have to talk about a lot of stuff that’s really hard to talk about, and even harder to hear about.

I have to talk about what was done to Emmett Till’s body, and why. I have to talk about public lynchings in which black men were tortured in front of white parents and their smiling, laughing children. I have to talk about WEB DuBois’ discovery that the charred knuckles of a man who had recently been flayed and burned alive were on display in a storefront window in the city he lived in.

I can’t take any of that lightly. I can’t just talk about that stuff like I was talking about the Taft-Hartley Act.

And I can’t talk about that stuff without recognizing that I, like the perpetrators of those atrocities, am white, and that most of my students, like those targeted, are not.

The internets have been abuzz this week over a small publishing house’s plans to print a version of the Twain classic Huckleberry Finn in which all instances of the word “nigger” have been replaced with the word “slave.” A representative of the company in question defends the decision as one intended to get the novel into more classrooms — too often, he says, schools and colleges are unwilling to assign Huckleberry Finn because of that word, and that word alone.

I’ve posted on Twitter about this controversy a few times, mostly to mock the idea of bowdlerizing the book, but a response I got from Parker Ross, who tweets as @PRossibly, brought me up short:

@studentactivism In high school my teacher read Huckleberry Finn out loud in class and said the slurs really loud. Super uncomfortable.

Ross doesn’t say, but I strongly suspect that the teacher in question was white.

As a person who teaches American history on the college level, I address the country’s traumatic racial past in my classrooms on a regular basis. And as a white person who teaches American history in classes made up primarily of students of color, I come to such moments with a particular perspective and a particular set of challenges.

You can’t teach American history in any serious way without talking bluntly about lynching, about slavery, about anti-immigrant sentiment, about malign policies toward Native Americans, about the deployment of racism as a tactic of terrorism and a instrument of social control. But for a white professor in a mostly-not-white class, such blunt talk can be not just awkward but perilous.

I had a student a few semesters ago who was training to become a teacher, and student-teaching in a middle school classroom. The class she was assigned to was made up entirely of black boys, and the teacher was an older white man. When he got to the point in the semester when he was to discuss slavery, he stuck his nose in his notes, read them verbatim — and as quickly as possible — and then moved directly into a quiz. No discussion, no engagement, no opportunity for his students to address their intellectual and emotional reactions to what they had just heard. My student — a black woman — was appalled. She said that for the rest of the class session, the anger and the confusion the students were feeling was overwhelming. They were, she said, traumatized.

I was of two minds, hearing this story. On the one hand, I shared my student’s anger. If you can’t handle that kind of a discussion, you have no business teaching history in such an environment. Period. On the other hand, I could identify with the teacher’s fear.

Most white people are anything but comfortable talking about race in mixed-race settings, particularly in circumstances in which they are occupying a position of authority. As a white person, to get up in front of a classroom of students of color and tell them about how race works? It’s weird. It’s frightening. It’s uncomfortable.

Even weirder, even more frightening, even less comfortable is to then open up the floor to discussion. Will you be contradicted? Will you be attacked? Will you be revealed as ignorant? Called a racist? Lose control?

It’s scary.

And it can be particularly scary for a white progressive. We’re encouraged to listen to the perspectives of people of color. We’re reminded to allow people to speak for themselves about their own experiences. We’re taught to take our privilege seriously, to acknowledge the gaps in our knowledge and our experiences, to take in, to absorb, to defer.

In my experience, we receive far less guidance — in either academic or organizing milieus — in how and when to construct our own autonomous identities as white people engaged with issues of race in multiracial environments, white people who are working not just as mentors to other whites or as allies to people of color, but as independent anti-racists with the experience and confidence to broach hard questions in potentially difficult settings.

As I say, I’ve had quite a bit of experience with this. I’ve taught dozens of classes that dealt with the history of race, including several in which I was the only white person in the room. In the second part of this post, I’ll be talking in more detail about my own experiences as a professor, giving specific attention to the problem that prompted the new edition of Huckleberry Finn — the use of racial slurs in academic discussions.

Update | Part Two of this series has been posted here.

Naomi Wolf has written an essay at the Guardian in which she argues against laws and policies that protect the anonymity of women who have gone to police (or other authorities, such as campus officials) with allegations of rape. The practice is, she argues, “a relic of the Victorian era” —  a “bad law and bad policy” that impedes the fight against rape and should be abandoned.

I left what appears below as a comment on her essay at the Guardian website. Because of its relevance to campus sexual assault policies and recent conversations on this blog, I am reposting it here.

One note: I framed this response in the context of women who had been raped because that was the context of Wolf’s original essay, and because of the analogy to abortion. Everything I said applies at least as strongly to men who have been raped, however, and I’ve posted a follow-up comment to that effect.

Naomi Wolf writes:

And I do, yes, believe that long term there would have been less stigma — like with abortion, that used to be so shrouded in shame and secrecy. That begann to change women Gloria Steinem and other feminists in the seventies began to say, ‘I had an abortion.’ You saw it happened in all kinds of circumstances, not just to ‘sluts’ or ‘bad’ women.

Yes. Certainly. But as you note, these women came forward voluntarily, which is not what you called for in your original piece.

The abortion analogy is an apt one, though perhaps not for the reasons you think. What would have happened if, in the wake of the legalization of abortion, a law had been passed mandating that the name of every woman who obtained one be made publicly available? Would that have reduced the stigma of abortion? Perhaps. But it would also have sent many women underground, driving them to back-alley abortionists because they feared the consequences in their families, among their friends, in their workplaces if the fact of their abortion had become known.

So too with rape. Yes, it can be a powerful and valuable thing when a woman comes forward to talk publicly about her experience. Absolutely. No feminist I know would dispute that. But the moral force of that choice comes from the fact that it was a choice.

What would happen if women were forced to disclose rapes, if their names were disseminated without their permission? Some good things. But also some horrible things.

Some women would refuse to go to the police out of fear of stigma. Their rapists would be allowed to continue to act with impunity. Other women, raped by friends or family members, would be shamed or rejected by their loved ones. Some would be the targets of retaliation by their rapists’ supporters.

These dangers are all real for women who have been raped, and they stand as barriers to effective prosecution of rapists. Your policy of mandatory reporting would raise those barriers higher.

You want women who have been raped to be treated as “moral adults.” But isn’t the essence of moral adulthood that we each have the freedom to choose when and under what circumstances we talk about our own experiences? Shouldn’t someone advocating moral adulthood encourage women to come forward on their own, rather than advocating for women to have that decision taken out of their hands?

In a previous comment you told us that your mother was raped when she was twelve, and that she agrees with your position on this issue. But you also said this:

She gave me her permission to say so and to disclose her experience.

You asked her for her permission, and she gave it. If she hadn’t, wouldn’t you have respected that decision? Wouldn’t any decent human being do just that?

What follows is the full text, translated into English, of an article by Jessica Balksjö which appeared in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet on August 21, 2010.

The article, titled “Thirty-Year-Old Woman: I Was Assaulted” and subtitled “Discusses Charges Against Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange,” constitutes the only detailed public discussion of the allegations against Assange yet offered by either of his two accusers. It has never before been published in English.

This translation was prepared by a Swedish-speaking friend of StudentActivism.net, and lightly edited by myself. I’ll be putting up a post discussing the article’s significance tomorrow.

•          •          •

Aftonbladet has spoken with one of the women behind the rape charges against Julian Assange.

When she met a woman who said she had been raped by Assange, both decided to go to the police.

The 30-year-old woman is going public with her story here in Aftonbladet to explain the specifics of the accusations and to correct a number of errors in a story published in Expressen this morning.

Assange met both women during his visit to Sweden. He was first charged with raping one of the women, charges which were dropped by the chief prosecutor, Eva Finné, but he is still charged with molesting the second woman.

Considers Herself the Target of a Sexual Assault

The women met Assange during his stay in Stockholm. Neither of them had previously met Assange or the other.

The 30-year-old woman says that she considers herself the victim of a sexual assault or molestation, but not a rape.

The police report had its origins last Friday, when a second woman contacted the first with a similar, but worse, story. This second woman was between 20 and 30 years old.

Gave a Detailed Statement

Because of the ongoing police investigation, the 30-year-old woman has chosen not to provide details of her allegations at this time, but she gave the police a very detailed account. The other woman has also made a detailed statement to the police.

“I believed her right away since my experience was so similar to hers,” said the woman to Aftonbladet.

The two women decided to go jointly to the police to make their statements.

“I Don’t Feel Threatened”

“It is completely incorrect to say that we chose not to file a report with the police because we were afraid of Assange,” said the woman. “He is not violent, and I do not feel threatened by him.”

In both cases, the sex was initially consensual, but subsequently became abusive.

“The other woman wanted him to be charged with rape. I filed my report as a witness statement in support of her account and to support her. Both of us stand behind our accounts,” the woman told Aftonbladet.

“Charges Not Orchestrated”

The 30-year-old woman dismisses the conspiracy theories currently flooding the web.

“Neither the Pentagon nor anyone else orchestrated these charges. The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who has a warped attitude toward women and is incapable of taking no for an answer.”