Karla FC Holloway, Professor of English and Law and African and African American Studies at Duke, is a prominent leader of the Group of 88 faculty group that convicted Duke lacrosse players in the court of its own opinion, and through them the white male racist sexist culture of Duke and the western world of which they were the perfect emblem. No matter that they were innocent, which is merely a legal technicality.
In his post a year ago on “The Travails of Karla Holloway,” KC Johnson actually engages in a bit of understatement when he says that she writes “in a style suggesting a parody of academic jargon.” In one article that he describes, she “dismisses the significance of the legal process; denounces all men’s sports; and assaults women athletes whose behavior has been beyond reproach.”
Read Johnson’s whole post (and this one), but here’s a taste of what he provides:
“Justice,” claims Holloway, “inevitably has an attendant social construction. And this parallelism means that despite what may be our desire, the seriousness of the matter cannot be finally or fully adjudicated in the courts.” Therefore, since the presumption of innocence “is neither the critical social indicator of the event, nor the final measure of its cultural facts,” judgments about the case “cannot be left to the courtroom.” In a sentence that captures Holloway’s obtuse writing style, she asserts, “Despite the damaging logic that associates the credibility of a socio-cultural context to the outcome of the legal process, we will find that even as the accusations that might be legally processed are confined to a courtroom, the cultural and social issues excavated in this upheaval linger.”
Got that? Good. Evidently the editors of the Orlando Sentinel were taken with her keen analysis and scintillating style, for at their invitation she has moved on to bigger game. Gunning for Bill Cosby in this recent OpEd, she warns him to “lay off talk about race.”
Cosby’s criticism of black parents, she claims, with a logic and in a style that will be familiar to those who followed the Duke case, “only serves to solidify our biases about privilege, potential and race.”
“A critical dimension of his storytelling,” she claims, is “problematic.”
When, for example, Cosby tells stories of how studious and responsible black children are teased by peers and accused of “acting white,” he validates the associations made by those who do not consider the charge a specious association. Because he fails to critique the presumption of this insult, he solidifies the ridiculous notion that education, poise, standard grammar and ambition are properties of a particular racial identity.
Cosby and co-author [Harvard psychiatrist Alvin] Poussaint beckon “come on people” to black folk without jobs, black folk who are drug addicts, black folk who are poor parents or black folk who are simply poor. The racial associations that structure their examples disallow our engagement with troubled individuals and urge instead our attention to race. In offering no contradiction, the anecdotes encourage the notion that failure and success are reasonably bound to racial identity.
Holloway thus equates criticism of blacks by a black with race treason, because it “validates the associations” of all those who do not think the criticism specious.
Oddly, and wholly unpersuasively, Holloway here attempts to argue that a large part of what is “problematic” about Cosby’s “storytelling” is that he makes too much of race.
…. To consider the success and troubles of our children through the filter of race encourages us to dismiss the complex social realities that construct each child’s potential in favor of the ease of racial judgment. This is true whether we measure their success, their potential, their failure or our heartbreak.
One incontrovertible fact of our nation’s history is the lingering damage of racial stereotype. Differentiating ourselves by race allows, and encourages, the same lack of interest and differential values that make racism so pernicious.
I look forward to reading Prof. Holloway’s criticism of all those admissions officers and employers and government contracting officers everywhere who perniciously insist on “[d]ifferentiating ourselves by race.” I’m sure she must have written such criticisms of this “problematic” behavior, but so far I haven’t been able to find it.
