Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
“Are you afraid? Are you fearful today?”
“You know, I’m not. We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of protesters over the course of the last several months. Our office corner has really become an area where the Tea Party movement congregates. And the rhetoric is incredibly heated. Not just the calls, but the emails, the slurs. So things have really gotten spun up. But you gotta think about it. Our democracy is a light, a beacon really around the world, because we effect change at the ballot box, and not because of these outbursts — of violence in certain cases, and the yelling, and it’s just … you know, change is important, it’s a part of our process, but it’s really important that we focus on the fact that we have a democratic process.”
“I think it’s important for all leaders, not just leaders of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party … community leaders, figures in our community to say, ‘Look, we can’t stand for this.’ I mean, this is a situation where people really need to realize that the rhetoric, and firing people up, and even things … For example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is, the way she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. And when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there’s consequences to that action.”
“In the years that some of my colleagues have served, twenty, thirty years, they’ve never seen it like this. We have to work out our problems by negotiating, working together, hopefully Democrats and Republicans.”
–Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, March 25, 2010.
Update | Comments closed.
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.
studentactivism.net 
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