Erin O’Connor has been following (very perceptively, as usual) the disturbing controversy at Emory over an unfortunate remark uttered by Prof. Carol Worthman. From Erin’s first post:
On September 15, Emory University’s anthropology department held a panel discussion to celebrate its 25th anniversary. Afterward, Emory anthropology professorCarol Worthman was overheard describing how marginalized sociobiologists like herself are within a discipline that is reluctant to consider the possibility that there are biological explanations for human differences between sexes and across races. Emory’s biological anthropologists are regarded by cultural anthropologists outside of Emory as “six n—–s in the woodpile,” Worthman said. Her comment was heard by Tracy Rone, an assistant professor of anthropology at Emory who also happened to be the only black person at the panel. Rone filed a complaint with Emory’s Equal Opportunity Programs office….
From there the episode, and the conflict over it, escalated in all the usual ways with accusations, apologies, investigations, required sensitivity training, etc., etc. See Erin’s second post for more details.
Today Erin reprints a long section of a fascinating letter from Melvin Konner, another senior emory anthropologist and thirty-year friend of Worthman’s, that is a remarkable mixture of self-flagellation (he was at the meeting where the offense was committed and blames himself for not speaking up), criticism of Worthman for making it, and defense of Worthman because she is not a racist, etc.
All of this is very much worth reading if you’re interested in this sort of thing, but what really caught my attention was this part of Erin’s comment today on Konner’s letter:
Konner’s account of the comment is interesting for its well-meaning doublethink. On the one hand, he says he did not react to Worthman’s comment because he knew it was not racist and he knows Worthman is not a racist. On the other hand, he condemns himself for not reacting to the statement as if it were racist and condemns Worthman for making a comment that could be construed as racist. In between the lines, one can read a troubling message: for Konner, Worthman’s error was not racism, but making it possible for someone to convincingly accuse her of racism; his own error was not to condone racism, but to fail to condemn a comment that could, if taken out of context, be construed as racist by a would-be accuser. As a white witness to Worthman’s comment, Konner accepts full responsibility for anticipating and protecting the sensibilities of the one black woman in the room; his mistake, as far as he is concerned, lies not in his understanding of Worthman’s comment as essentially not racist, but in his failure to apprehend in the moment that of course a black person would see the comment in this way, and that of course, as a consequence, he ought to have spoken out in defense of black people’s sensibilities. It’s a strange and disturbing logic, part chivalric self-flagellation, part racial condescension.
Reading this, I felt a shock of deja vu, for it called another letter to mind. In the late 1960s I received a letter from the Illinois Bar Association with some questions about a friend and former college roommate who had just gradudated from law school and was applying for membership. One of the questions was (this is not verbatim but it is very close and in fact may well be verbatim): “Has Mr. __________ ever done or said anything that may lead a third party to believe that he is sympathetic to communism or totalitarianism of any kind.”
I did not want to cause my friend problems by responding in such a way that some “third party” might suspect that friendship with me was suspicious, but I certainly found, and still find, that question absurd. But the standard of behavior it assumed was not really so different from what racial etiquette now requires.
The tone and content of Konner’s letter is horrifyingly familiar to those of us who have read anything about Soviet Russia and Communist China. During the purges, the intelligentsia were forced to produce similar documentation of self-examination and confession of personal failings.