political correctness....

[sail]

Mandelstam:

…let’s not forget that our own sitting Attorney General has said some dubious things in some dubious places and seems to have managed to occupy one of the highest offices in the land.

“No offense, but…cite, please?”

Yes-cite please? (I am curious what you are talking about. I suspect it will give us another example of political correctness-holding a conservative to hypersensitive standards)

[Mandelstam]

**IzzyR **: “A classic example of political correctness. Mandelstam is bending over backwards and twisting every which way to mitigate (though not excuse) the Black bigot as much as possible.”

Izzy, I always judge people by their acts or speech in context; not by their skin color or their genitals.

I said and I’ll say again: Jeffries is not a good historian; he has or had an ungrounded view that qualifies as a theory of racial superiority; and he has made remarks that suggest he is also anti-semitic. He is an Afrocentrist and his practice of Afrocentrism is not to my liking. As I do not admire him or his work, I’m not sorry that he seems to have been reined in by public criticism but a) I do believe there was exaggeration, b) I don’t believe he ever said or meant to say that all whites are evil and c) I don’t believe he’s typical of African-American faculty in the US. If that strikes you as political correctness, so be it.

“Meanwhile Ashcroft, who has surely not said anything remotely approaching Jeffries’ statements, is held up as a comparison. How very appropriate for this thread.”

Judge for yourself whether I exaggerated when I said that Ashcroft has said “some dubious things in some dubious places”

The dubious things he said:

*“Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You’ve got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and [Confederate President Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I’ve got to do more. We’ve all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we’ll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda.”

–John Ashcroft, Southern Partisan magazine interview (Second Quarter/1998) *

The dubious place he said it:

"When Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft praised the neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan, he was endorsing a publication that defends slavery, white separatism, apartheid and David Duke; a publication that celebrates the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, while delivering a “mixed review” of Lincoln’s assassin (Southern Partisan, Second Quarter/1990). "

Some quotations from Southern Partisan:

““Slave owners . . . did not have a practice of breaking up slave families. If anything, they encouraged strong slave families to further the slaves’ peace and happiness.”
–First Quarter/1996”

“Abraham Lincoln is a “consummate conniver, manipulator and a liar.”
–Southern Partisan cited in Legal Times, 2/26/1996”

*"On John Wilkes Booth: “His behavior was not only sane, but sensible. His background, loyalties, beliefs, and experiences had led him to that end.”
–Mark Brewer, Second Quarter/1990

"The Ku Klux Klan’s first Grand Wizard, Civil War Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, cited as evidence that “the Confederacy was full of super heroes.”
–Fourth Quarter/1996

“Newly arrived in New York City, I puzzled, ‘Where are the Americans?’ for I met only Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans.”
–Patrick Brophy, Second Quarter/1991"

“What Southerner feels at home in Miami these days, a city 56 percent Spanish-speaking that includes not only Cubans but numbers of cocaine-pushing trigger-happy Colombians?”
–Allan Charles, Summer/1982 "*

Source:
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/southern-partisan.html

I think it’s rather odd to find the Attorney General of the United States writing in strong praise of such a publication. I suspect that no were any African American attorney general to make statements in a controversial black magazine, that we’d hear more about it. IMO Lani Guanier got a much harder than Ashcroft and, of course, she was dropped.

Gentlemen, (or perhaps one or more of you is a lady), that’s it for me as I’m super busy. I’ll try to drop in to see what you have to say on the matter, but I doubt I’ll have time to post.

[Redhawke.the.bard]

Again, points well taken.

I understand your desire to avoid defending Dr. J (or any one particular academic). It’s daunting (as I found out in trying to accept your initial challenge). I can only challenge your assessment of campus life with the response that, absent an ability to read sail’s mind, I didn’t read his initial comment that way. I read it that a hypothetical black professor would take less heat for racist teaching than a white one would (or that a hypothetical female teacher would take less heat for sexist comments than a male one would). Sitting here, having spent the last five years out of school (but the previous nine in it), I must say that my experience has been that the above statement is, generally, true. Many exceptions exist, I’m sure, on both sides of that statement. I suspect you would disagree.

I also suspect that we both base our viewpoints predominantly on our political outlook. As a conservative, I see it more readily, and gravitate towards information sources that would do the same. That’s my bias. I would respectfully suggest that you may do the same (just not to conservative sources).

For instance,

From what I see on the Web, Jeffries has toned his act way down.

Is that because he HAS, or because media have given up on the story? I don’t know the answer. I suspect it’s not as cut-and-dried as either of those alternatives.

[Pulling out his bat for the dead horse] I DIDN’T give you one name. I gave you four. And that was what I could pull up with one search on a known name (Dr. J). I have no more desire in sacrificing work time that my boss wants to go off looking for them, either. Just because I only found those FOUR names, doesn’t mean that there aren’t more. I assure you, I could regale you with stories of the Black Separatist movement I saw at Penn State in the early '90’s. I just didn’t want to take uup the entire page with them.

BTW, I will say that I do not subscribe to the notion that our hypothetical professors ALL get a COMPLETE pass. But I don’t think it’s that off-beat to say that they get MORE of a pass. Not to wear out my bat on this horse, but ask yourself, in all honesty, if a white professor tried to teach, at a major university, that melanin was a neurotoxin that killed brain cells, and that’s why blacks average lower on the SAT’s, would he still have a job? More precisely, would he be as celebrated in his community as Dr. J is?

But I do think it’s worth saying that before we assume that black racism is given a free ride, let’s not forget that our own sitting Attorney General has said some dubious things in some dubious places and seems to have managed to occupy one of the highest offices in the land.

I don’t know your Attorney General. From context alone, I would guess he’s a white politician, who’s made some racist comment(s). Good. Fry him. Or at least, remove him from office. From context alone, I have no idea the relationship to your point. In honesty, please educate me.

I do think you’re misunderstanding her extremely difficult prose, which is intended for legal specialists.

I am not a feminist legal specialist, but I AM a lawyer, and for two years I was a prosecutor. I can’t do better, but I don’t think it takes more than that to parse her statements.

As to the first quote, (I’m not going to start cut-and-pasting quotes, it’s just too long), I think I take your meaning. However, I believe that, taken in the context of the rest, one cannot divorce the two points of view. Ms. MacKinnon’s definition of rape (which I take from the rest of her writing, especially the third quote) is extremely broad. Thus, it matters not that “Rape is construed as normal sex,” when most everything normal about sex is, to her, rape. See:

Perhaps the wrong of rape has proved so difficult to define because the unquestionable starting point has been that rape is defined as distinct from intercourse,’ while for women it is difficult to distinguish the two under conditions of male dominance."

We cannot break her writing down so much that it loses its context. That last quote, in the context of the passage, leaves us with the conclusion that Ms. MacK believes that the difference between rape and “normal” sexual behavior is at best, beside the point. You refer to it as “controversial.” Please. It is close enough to the point that controversial doesn’t cover it.

Well, as for citations, MacKinnon is famous enough that she’s the person to cite, so I have no problem there.

Uh-uh. No. Even Einstein had to show his math. There is no point at which any “expert’s” statement is taken without proof (unless their expertise is the Roman Catholic Church, and their title is “Pope”). Tell me I read that wrong.

Hers is an analysis based on certain conditions; it’s an interpretation–it’s not based an actual numbers of rapes. How could it be when she’s arguing that there are more rapes than would ever count as rapes; that women themselves may not know if they’re actually victims of rape.

I believe the term for this is “tautology.” It is circular reasoning. Boiled down, you’re saying that Ms. MacK’s interpretation is sound, solely because she defines it to be so.

Personally, I don’t agree with the more onerous of her statements. I do agree that rape is hard to prove, and that people sometimes are fatally unable to agree on what is rape. And I think some women put up with a lot of abusive behavior and think of it as “normal” for men.

Mandelstam 1, Straw Man 0

Yes, it is hard to prove (trust me). Yes, reasonable people disagree as to the precise definition. But they have a range. At a certain point, it is rape, and at another point, it isn’t. Ms. MacK can’t even identify in her own work the difference between rape and sex. She conclusively refuses to do so:

Perhaps the wrong of rape has proved so difficult to define because the unquestionable starting point has been that rape is defined as distinct from intercourse,’ while for women it is difficult to distinguish the two under conditions of male dominance."

To me there are more helpful ways of describing what gets in the way of male-female relations.

To that, we agree.

Sorry, Redhawke. I found D’Souza too ridiculous to take seriously 10 years ago, and he seems more that way now.

And in that we are different. I find certain feminist thought to be ridiculous, but I refuse to dismiss the thinkers out of hand as it sounds that you have the other side. It’s a sign of respect, and who knows? I might just learn something…
[with a bow to Dennis Miller}
But that’s just me, I could be wrong…

[IzzyR]

*Originally posted by Mandelstam *
I always judge people by their acts or speech in context; not by their skin color or their genitals.

Quite possibly so. Nonetheless, it would seem that you are biased in your judgements, so that you will look to interpret a black bigot in the most favorable possible light, & a white conservative in the worst possible one, until they seem somewhat comparable.

I think it’s rather odd to find the Attorney General of the United States writing in strong praise of such a publication.

I don’t see anything wrong with most of the quotes. Beyond this, it is likely that Ashcroft was not familiar with every line ever written in the magazine (which is, I believe, rather obscure).

I suspect that no were any African American attorney general to make statements in a controversial black magazine, that we’d hear more about it. IMO Lani Guanier got a much harder than Ashcroft and, of course, she was dropped.

Nonsense. Lani Guanier got a hard time for proposals that she herself had written advocating quotas (& race weighted voting IIRC) and the like.

[Mudshark]

I think political correctness can be both good and bad. It can be a good thing, like when you are talking about races, sexual preference and religion. It is more of common sense and decency here.

When political correctness reaches the point that we have to call maids “household engineers” and call a secretary a “personal assistant,” that is going too far.

[Demosthenesian]

Mud: like many other theories of its kind, it’s supposed to be a guideline, not a law. The basic idea behind it, “how you describe people matters”, makes a lot of sense. It needs to be mitigated with some common sense, though, and a sense of proportion. That can be difficult to find with academia at times.

(I still stand by the belief that the popularity of the term is due mostly to asses trying to justify being an ass by shouting “PeeSee!!!” at everyone who calls them on it.)