Critical Mass

Victim of resemblance

Via Amardeep Singh comes this report of a racially motivated attack in Chapel Hill:

A Sikh student at UNC claims he and his friend were beaten by a trio of teenagers on Franklin Street after one of them called him Osama bin Laden.

Chapel Hill police charged each of the teens with assault inflicting serious injury and simple assault after the student identified them shortly after the assault Sunday morning. Although police categorized the assault as a hate crime, they did not charge the teens with ethnic intimidation -- the state statute that covers hate crimes. Chapel Hill Police Chief Gregg Jarvies said the charge of ethnic intimidation was not filed because it was not clear whether the assault occurred because of the victim's race, clothing or religion. The charge of ethnic intimidation would have to be provable, Jarvies said. "You may believe one thing, but we can't prove it," he said.

Gagandeep Bindra, who has a short beard, brown skin and wears a Patka, a scarf wrapped around his hair, said that it is not uncommon for people to call him and others with brown skin Osama bin Laden or a terrorist.

"This is like a normal occurrence after 9/11," Bindra said Friday. "Every night when I go out to Franklin Street, someone shouts out bin Laden." Bindra's parents emigrated from India, and Bindra attended middle school and high school in Raleigh. He is a senior economics major at UNC.

People who have brown skin get harassed all the time, he said. "They don't know I'm from India and I'm a Sikh. They think anybody brown is Middle Eastern. Anybody brown is a terrorist."

The incident began shortly after midnight Sunday as Bindra, 24, and a couple of friends were walking from East Franklin Street to a restaurant on West Franklin Street, the student recounted.

As the group of friends walked along West Franklin Street near the intersection of Church Street, they crossed paths with three young men, he said.

"Basically, they shouted bin Laden to me," he said. "I wasn't too happy."

Bindra said he replied, "Your mother."

One of the young men began asking him, "What did you say? What did you say?" Bindra said, but he and his friends kept walking west on Franklin Street. At the intersection of Mallette Street on the north side of Franklin Street, the teens caught up to them and one of them, who was about six feet tall, pushed his face one inch from his face, Bindra said.

"He was trying to look at me to see if there was some sort of fear," he said. "I didn't really care that he was so close to my face, so he just threw a punch." The blow landed on Bindra's jaw, he said.

One of Bindra's friends, Sean Michnowicz, told the other two teens not to join the fight, and they began to hit him, Bindra said. "They started beating him, and they all started beating me. It was gang mentality at that point. After they got done with me, I saw Sean. He was down, and there was blood pouring from his face," Bindra said. "He has hemophilia, and blood was gushing out from a laceration."

The attack was unprovoked, Bindra said. "I didn't hit them. Sean didn't hit them," he said.

Read the whole thing.

I report a lot on fake hate crimes on this site. One reason I find them so repulsive is that they detract from the credibility of people like Bindra, who really are targeted by bigots, and who really do suffer the absurd and terrifying violence born of ethnic intolerance.

Singh knows the victim personally.

Polish conference on PC

Here's the most interesting call for papers I've seen in a long time:

Call for papers: Political Correctness - Mouth Wide Shut?

Ustro=F1 (PL), September 17-20 2004

See evil, hear evil and therefore speak no evil. The spectre of the Dead White Heterosexual Male is hanging over the world: biased, prejudiced, discriminative ways of perceiving and representing reality resulted in widening the gap between the dominant "traditionalists" and a multiplicity of undesirable others. But enough is enough. The underdog has now invented a weapon to secure his/her/its/their rightful place in culture and the long-silenced voices have a chance to be heard. Thus, Political Correctness or PC seems to have the function of safeguarding the principle of equality, which is a cornerstone of democracy. The many tongues of multicultural discourse speak all the more loudly since the potential opponents, having been successfully bound and gagged, dare not express any contradictory opinion. As democracy's policeman, however, PC raises concerns about the possible limitations of radical pluralism. While ensuring (enforcing) compliance with basic human rights, does it not breach some of them, such as the right to free speech? While upholding the legacy of the Enlightenment with its ideals of rationality and progress, does it not undermine the role and position of prejudice, so powerfully vindicated in the 20th century? Is PC a utopian goal, or is it merely a historically necessitated but short-lived inconvenience? The unceasing dispute over PC hardly ever does justice to the theoretical concerns it raises, and not the least of them is its self-reflexive twist: if to interrogate PC is to interrogate the western idea of democracy, let us not flee from our own gaze in a mirror and take up the challenge before the academe becomes declared a reservation for realistically challenged.

Please, send proposals of papers with brief abstracts (up to 200 words) to the organizers by May 31, 2004 to:

Katarzyna Ancuta kancuta@ares.fils.us.edu.pl
Jacek Mydla jacekmydla@idea.net.pl

Or by post (diskette, Word 6.0/7.0 + hard copy) to:

Katarzyna Ancuta / Jacek Mydla
Institute of British and American Culture and Literature
ul. =AFytnia 10
41-205 Sosnowiec, Poland
fax +48 (32)2917417
tel. +48(32)2917322; +48(32)2691892

Thanks to Warren Moore for sending this on.

What's in a name?

The games have begun at Scribbling Woman and Crooked Timber. My contributions are as follows:

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Lady: Stephen Dedalus creates the uncreated conscience of his race by dressing up as Henry James in drag

Goodnight, Moonstone: bedtime stories of theft, deception, and detection

My Mother, My Antonia: self-help guide for Cather addicts

Our Bodies, Our Town: touching drama about communal erotic awakening; ideal for school productions

Uncle Silas Marner: he kills Eppie and then weaves her hair into golden cloth

One Flew Over the Mockingbird's Nest: Scout loses her mind after Harper Lee's book gets banned for being racist

House of Mirthful Spirits: upbeat magical realism about turn-of-the-century social climbing

Atlas Ate My Gymsuit: libertarian teen fiction

The Wizard of Ozymandias: sonnets of the "there's no place like home" variety

Corelli's Kool-Aid Acid Test: sex, drugs, olive oil

Remembrance of Things Fall Apart: eating cookies sparks meditation on African colonialism

Their Eyes Were Waiting for Godot: after running away to Florida to escape the advances of Lucia Joyce, Beckett seduces Janie by plying her with tea and cake

Paradise Lost in Translation: Satan falls into a karaoke bar in Tokyo, is forever damned to croon temptingly in iambic pentameter

Charlotte's Weblog: spider discovers Moveable Type

That's a start. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

Modest proposal

While schools such as UNC-Wilmington, Bucknell, and UNC-Chapel Hill tie themselves in knots trying--ever unsuccessfully--to reconcile their stated commitments to free inquiry (and, in the cases of all but Bucknell, their obligations to uphold the First Amendment) with their well-meant but ultimately misguided desire to ensure that no one on campus is ever exposed to views that might offend them or make them uncomfortable, others recognize that it is the obligation of a vibrant intellectual community to embrace the friction that arises when ideas are freely explored, tested, and debated.

Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren--whose name will be familiar to those who followed the Michael Bellesiles Debacle--sends an exemplary excerpt from the University of Chicago's Faculty Handbook:

The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society.  A university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and institutions. By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.

Lindgren's opinion is that instead of adopting speech codes and other policies that suggest students have the right not to be offended, universities should formally declare that no one has the right not to be offended:

Universities should adopt explicit policies rejecting the right not to be offended. As a current graduate student in Sociology at the University of Chicago, I was offended by the way that some of Marx's ideas on economics were taught, particularly the labor theory of value--as if Marx's critique was sound economics, as if we hadn't had fifty million people killed by the collectivism of agriculture alone (a modest estimate not including the tens of millions dying in collectivist wars). 

The idea that I had a right not to be offended in class never even occurred to me, and would be one that I would find offensive to be offered.

I love this idea--not just for itself, but for what it implies. For a school to adopt such a policy, that policy would have to be consistent with existing policies elsewhere on the school's books. Speech codes, overbroad harassment policies that define "offensive" expression as harassment, and other such directives would have to go if a school were to credibly reject the notion that it is acceptable to seek to punish and silence students who express unpopular views. Speechcodes.org designates the University of Chicago as a rare "green light" institution--one whose stated commitment to free expression is not undermined by policies restricting constitutionally protected speech.

UPDATE: A law student at Chicago writes:

As a regular reader of your blog, I often find myself reflecting on how fortunate I am to be a student here at the law school at the University of Chicago. The institution's commitment to free and open debate has been refreshing these three years. I was happy to see the school mentioned in your most recent post, and it reminded me of an email that we received in February and that I meant to send along to you at the time as evidence that not all was hopeless in academia. Although it's unfortunate to think that intelligent college students would have to be reminded of the importance of respecting the expressive rights of others, it's heartening to see the administration taking a pro-active stand in this way.

----- Forwarded message from Steve Klass -----
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 20:28:47 -0600 (CST)
From: Steve Klass
Reply-To: spklass@uchicago.edu
Subject: Interference with Freedom of Expression
To: All Students

----

Dear students,

Below follows a statement from the Provost, Richard Saller, and me regarding a long-standing University policy prohibiting the interference with freedom of expression at the University.

If you have questions or concerns related to this policy, please contact your dean of students or the Office of the Dean of Students in the University.

Steve Klass
Vice-President
and Dean of Students in the University

*****************************************************************************

With the upcoming elections and increasing interest in local, national and international affairs on the part of many in the community, it seems appropriate to remind ourselves of the special privileges and responsibilities that come with membership in a great university that is committed to the free pursuit, testing, and dissemination of knowledge.

Each of us here enjoys a freedom to study, think, write, advocate, and associate. Yet within our community that freedom also obligates each of us not merely to tolerate but to welcome and promote these freedoms for all. In the public or commercial world, it may be legitimate to seek to vanquish or weaken one's adversaries. In great universities such as ours, however, serious opposition is not only welcome; it is essential to what we are about.

These principles are enshrined in University Statute 21, which prohibits "conduct disruptive of the operations of the University, including interference with instruction, research, administrative operations, freedom of association, and meetings." The prohibition includes heckling speakers, and defacing, removing or obscuring announcements, fliers, posters, or other publications to prevent them from reaching their intended audiences. Interference with freedom of inquiry, teaching, and debate are viewed as particularly destructive to the University.

The University achieves its mission not by the subtractive process of silencing opponents, but by the additive process of contestation.

Awesome.

UPDATE UPDATE: Ralph Luker observes, "Perhaps Chicago can be free precisely because no one has ever doubted that it was serious about higher education. Not many of our institutions are undoubtedly serious. Many of them, therefore, feel the need to restrict speech."

Too close for comfort

Many a campus "conservative" is born in the crucible of the ideological double standard. As students of campus politics well know, conservatism in the ivory tower is a very different creature than conservatism beyond it; outside the ivory tower, if you are pro-choice, anti-death penalty, pro-gun control, and pro-gay marriage, that pretty much certifies you as a liberal. On campus, it's not that easy: you can be all these things on campus, and yet still be labelled "conservative" if, for example, you question the logic or practice of affirmative action, if you think religious and Republican students should have just as many expressive rights as liberal agnostics and atheists, or, even more strangely, if you believe in a traditional curriculum that emphasizes mastery of a defined set of skills and a defined "canon" of content. Bottom line: if you depart from a widely accepted set of institutionalized norms, you are a problem whose name is, in the lexical oversimplifications that define the messier pockets of campus life, "conservative."

Mike Adams is, in campus terms, a conservative thrice over: an institutional gadfly who also happens to be a Republican and a Christian. For the good people at UNC-Wilmington, where Adams is a criminal justice professor, that's just more conservatism than others should have to stand. People were offended by Adams' views; some of his colleagues even found that his open, public expression of those views made them feel "uncomfortable." So Adams' administrative superiors did what they apparently do best: they solved the problem not by reminding Adams' colleagues that he has a constitutional right to express his beliefs, but by forbidding Adams to talk about anything that might make his colleagues uncomfortable while he is at work.

How did they rationalize this? By invoking political uniformity as an institutional ideal. “Not everyone sees things the way you do, Mike,” they told him; in other words, those who "see things" the way Adams does should keep their visions to themselves. There's that pesky little problem of liberal bias, again. You know, the one that doesn't exist?

Details are here, along with a list of the things Adams' colleagues have said that make him personally uncomfortable. Those of us who have been the recipients of similar administrative directives will feel a certain sympathetic thrill at how Adams unmasks the righteous hypocrisy of his local feel-good censors.

Adams is hoping that the administration will honor his discomfort as swiftly as it honored those who complained about him. After all, since UNC-Wilmington admins have undertaken to violate the law in order to provide the comfiest workplace possible, they should at least take care to violate it in a fair and non-partisan manner.

Thanks to Todd Hartch for the link.

UPDATE: Ralph Luker has more. Don't miss the comments, wherein is discussed an emerging trend in college syllabus creation: the inclusion of an "offensive material" disclaimer. So far, no one has addressed the hypothetical in which a student, colleague, or administrator is offended by the offensive material disclaimer.

Bucknell and the harassing vagina

As long as we are on the subject of how speech codes create the problems they are ostensibly designed to resolve, don't miss the current issue of the Bucknell Conservatives Club's publication, The Counterweight. On page twelve, you will find a telling little piece on how Bucknell's annual production of Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues"--which this year was promoted with vagina-shaped candy and t-shirts that read, "Eat it. Sleep it. Love it. Live it. Bucknell vagina"--amounts to a staged, institutionally endorsed violation of the school's very own speech code. The piece is a fair-minded and effective one; its point is not that Ensler's play, or the in-your-face chocolates and clothing that advertised it, should be banned, but that Bucknell's speech code should be repealed.

The Bucknell Conservatives Club has been campaigning against the school's speech code all year, and has been doing so from a resolutely non-partisan standpoint. Last fall, BCC president Charles Mitchell sent a letter to all incoming Bucknell freshmen advising them of the existence of the code, explaining how that code restricts their free speech rights and chills their educations in advance, and urging all students, of all political persuasions, to take seriously the fact that their school is openly in the business of using censorship to quell debate and to inhibit free inquiry.

I admire the BCC's free speech campaign. And I humbly suggest that their next salvo in defense of free speech on campus include tongue-shaped chocolates and t-shirts that read something like, "Read it. Write it. Say it out loud. Bucknell free speech." You go, you guys.