Category Archive

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.”

In recent days, Julian Assange has been making the media rounds to give his account of the events that have led him to be investigated for rape and sexual misconduct. Assange’s two accusers have been silent throughout this wave of media attention, but one of them — the woman known as Ms. A — gave an interview to the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet last August, telling her own version of the story.

A few details from the Aftonbladet article have been reported in the English-language press, most notably Ms. A’s statement that she does not fear Assange or consider him violent — a statement that reads quite differently in its original context than it does in some second-hand accounts. Other aspects of her account have, however, received virtually no attention.

The interview Ms. A gave Aftonbladet is consistent with the version of events contained in the Swedish police reports that leaked last month, but includes more detail on several important elements of the story, particularly regarding the aftermath of the alleged assaults and her own perspective on Assange’s actions.

There’s nothing particularly explosive here, but the interview does address some questions that have been asked repeatedly in the press and on the blogs, and it’s worth reviewing for that reason:

• Ms. A told Aftonbladet that although she considered herself to have been sexually assaulted by Assange, she did not go to the police on her own behalf. Rather, she accompanied Ms. W — who had decided independently to make a police complaint — to offer support and corroborating testimony.

• She characterized both her encounter with Assange and Ms. W’s as ones in which consensual sexual relations became abusive, and attributed the alleged assaults to his inability to accept no for an answer.

• She stated that she did not regard Assange as a violent person, and that she did not — at the time that she spoke to the reporter — feel fearful or threatened by him. At the same time, however, she characterized Assange’s attitude toward women as warped and described his actions toward her as sexual assault.

• She denied that her actions and Ms. W’s had been orchestrated by any government or other outside agent.

The Aftonbladet article has never, to my knowledge, been translated into English. This summary is based on a Google translation, with a few ambiguous passages clarified by a Swedish-language speaker. I of course welcome corrections and additions.

Update | A full translation of the Aftonbladet article is now available here.

Wow.

So last week someone leaked an extraordinary letter to the San Francisco Chronicle. A group of three dozen top administrators at the University of California, writing to the UC Board of Regents, claimed that they were owed millions in new pension benefits, and threatened legal action against the university if they didn’t get them.

The dispute arose out of an obscure provision of federal tax policy that capped the administrators’ pensions. The group claim that the Regents promised in 1999 to boost their benefits if the IRS granted a waiver — that waiver was granted in 2007, but the Regents haven’t acted.

In ordinary times such a disagreement would go unnoticed by the wider public, but these are no ordinary times. California’s state government is in full meltdown, and the UC system is seeing huge budget cuts, slashing staff, and raising tuition to astronomical levels. To raise pensions by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the system’s highest-paid executives — the provision only applies to those making salaries above $245,000 — would be both a fiscal and a public relations disaster.

So it’s not surprising that UC hadn’t acted on the request. It’s not even surprising that they’ve rejected it again today. What is surprising is the language they’ve used in doing so.

The public statement, released jointly today by Board of Regents Chairman Russell Gould and UC President Mark Yudof, says that the Board’s action a decade ago wasn’t “self-executing” — that it gave the Regents permission to raise pensions on the group, but didn’t obligate them to do so. Given the state of UC’s finances, it would be imprudent to do so now. And here’s the kicker:

Months ago, the Board retained counsel to assist the University in the event this position should need to be defended in the courts. While those who signed the letter are without question highly valued employees, we must disagree with them on this particular issue.

Translation: We’re lawyered up. Do what you gotta do.