• js mill conservatives stupid critique
• john stuart mill quote conservative stupid
• john stuart mill i didn’t mean to say that conservatives are stupid people
• i did not intend to suggest that all conservative people are stupid but i did intend to suggest that all stupid people are conservative.

There’s another cluster that doesn’t seem to be as historically informed:

• stupid conservatives
• why are conservatives stupid?
• conservatives are stupid jokes
• stupid things conservatives say
• every stupid person i know is a conservative

Like Obama said to Letterman, it’s silly season in American politics—it seems like we’re really outdoing ourselves this time. I’m guessing that’s the spirit behind most of those searches (I’m not sure what the spirit behind the search on “lawn guys are stupid” was, though). Nothing spreads election-season cheer like a discussion of the innate stupidity of the other side, especially when the theory is endorsed by a certified Great Thinker.

The long-winded googler was definitely wrong about what Mill intended to suggest, dumbing it down by exaggerating the relationship (and I’d be willing to bet the query didn’t come from a conservative). This quote, apparently from a letter Mill wrote to a Conservative MP, seems to be what the searcher had in mind (emphasis added):

What I stated was, that the Conservative Party was, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. Now, I do not retract that assertion; but I did not mean to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.

Mill was commenting on a tendency he observed in a political party in mid-19th-century England—capital-C Conservatives, who he considered not inevitably but generally stupid.

One objection I found to the philosophy professor’s wisecrack is that those Conservatives of yore were not conservative in the current sense of the word. And I found other suggestions, reading over that controversy, about what Mill probably didn’t mean to say. A recent New Yorker had an article by Adam Gopnik about Mill, and it has a fine paragraph about what Mill did mean to say (hat tip):

After Harriet’s death, Mill entered Parliament, in 1865, as a liberal backbencher, and did about as well as intellectuals usually do there. He was often hooted, and became notorious for having once described the Conservatives as “necessarily the stupidest party.” What he meant wasn’t that Conservatives were stupid; Disraeli, who was running the Tory Party then, was probably the cleverest man ever to run a political party, and Mill’s own influences from the right were immense and varied. He meant that, since true conservatism is a complicated position, demanding a good deal of restraint when action is what seems to be wanted, and a long view of history when an immediate call to arms is about, it tends to break down into tribal nationalism, which is stupidity incarnate. For Mill, intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one’s own case to consider it as one of many; a child becomes humanly intelligent the moment it realizes that there are other minds just like its own, working in the same way on the material available to them. The tribal nationalist is stupid because he fails to recognize that, given a slight change of location and accident of birth, he would have embraced the position of his adversary. Put him in another’s shoes and he would turn them into Army boots as well.

Applying that to the present is no trouble at all, which might mean that it’s not really Mill but Mill remixed according to Gopnik’s modern sensibility. Either way, our supposedly conservative president has just pushed through a massive public bailout of the banking system. Calling it “capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down,” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tx) sounds like the one demanding from his party some “restraint when action is what seems to be wanted.” And, turning from economic catastrophe to political farce, the nomination of a stunningly insular 44-year-old to be vice president—that looks like the problem of having “a long view of history [or anything else] when an immediate call to arms [or the pressing need to get elected] is about.”

And then there’s “tribal nationalism.” It’s not something that comes up in any of the passages I’ve read about Conservatives from Mill’s writings. But in Subjection of Women, he has this to say about stupidity and tribalism:

Stupidity is much the same the world over. A stupid person’s notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so those whose opinions and feelings are emanations from their own nature and faculties.

Whether it’s true to Mill or not, Gopnik’s line about the absurd significance given to an accident of birth captures my feelings about flag-waving, love-it-or-leave-it patriotism and a few other conservative staples. These days “stupid” is a vague and childish word, though—it’s a playground insult. If it’s replaced with “ignorant,” the ideas rings truer. And “tribal nationalism,” for the present, is as sensitive to internal red state/blue state borders as it is to international ones. With those caveats, I think the charge that “Barak Hussein Obama” is a closet muslim and that he pals around with terrorists—appeals to ignorance and fear as well as stupidity—are fine examples of the modern-day degeneration of conservatism into tribalism. It seems that it’s gotten so hot that it’s even burning McCain, and while he didn’t set all the fires, his campaign hasn’t shied away from fanning the flames—that’s what Palin is there for.

I have to admit that I get some satisfaction watching McCain struggle to tamp down the ugliness that he had apparently hoped to mobilize and then channel. But my side is quite capable of getting into the same kind of trouble—every so often the sans-culottes get riled up and want to chop off some Establishment heads. In the Duke lacrosse case—a pretty good microcosm of American culture-war politics—the strident, intolerant tone was set by zealots from the left, who went for a different part of Establishment anatomy (and if that doesn’t count as a stroke of sheer stupidity, I don’t know what would). Timothy Burke’s latest post, about how demoralizing he finds the “infinitely escalating spiral of spew from hardcore opponents of Obama,” drew a comment from a San Franciscan who keeps quiet about his support of McCain for fear of vandalism and ostracism. I wish I could think of a good reason to doubt him, but I can’t. The real problem, I’m afraid, isn’t conservatives, it’s people.

Focussing on that editorial makes a great deal of Johnson’s subsequent blogging seem redundant. Probably that has more to do with 20-20 hindsight and my poor opinion of DIW than anything else. The blog went on and on, though, accumulating a lot of detail but very little depth. I might feel differently if the editorial had been about the criminal investigation. In the three posts Johnson wrote for Cliopatria in April 2006—the start of what would become Durham-in-Wonderland—he touched on Reade Seligmann’s convincing alibi, the flawed line-ups, and Nifong’s political opportunism and the pandering that went with it. Those turned out to be good indicators of how the prosecution would go (how it would crash and burn, that is), and Johnson read the signs more accurately than many of the rest of us. The stakes were high, and there was every reason to keep a close eye on what Nifong was doing. But as the title says, the editorial is about “Duke’s Poisoned Campus Culture,” and the problems with the investigation are only mentioned to show how clouded and agenda-driven the judgment of many professors at Duke had been. Based on DIW, Johnson seems to have been as prescient about those professors as he was about Nifong. But within the frame of such a sprawling narrative, prescience and tunnel vision can be hard to tell apart, and when it comes to Duke’s campus culture, it’s tunnel vision that dominates in DIW.

Johnson was already blogging and editorializing about academic culture issues when the charges against the lacrosse team hit the news. The ideological skew of Duke’s faculty figured in a piece he wrote for Inside Higher Ed the previous summer. From it he recycles a bad joke about stupid conservatives told by the chairman of Duke’s philosophy department, giving it vastly overblown significance as stage-setting for the lacrosse case. His glaring evidence of poison, though—the foundation of his ongoing critique of Duke faculty—is the “listening” statement, which he’d written about for the first time about a week earlier. Along with the statement came the so-called “Group of 88” (his term, I believe) who endorsed it, professors he found so transparent that he casually extrapolates their collective thinking to its “logical, if absurd, extreme”—some lacrosse players should be convicted for rape just because of who they are, no matter what they did or didn’t do.

After the editorial, the only significant change I see in Johnson’s picture of Duke’s campus culture is his assessment of Brodhead and of the lacrosse players, which quickly becomes morally simplistic. In fact a key passage is different in the version of the editorial posted on DIW (overstruck words are on Inside Higher Ed and the italicized word is in the blog):

Few would deny that several players on Duke’s lacrosse team have behaved repulsively badlly [sic]. Two team captains hired exotic dancers, supplied alcohol to underage team members, and concluded a public argument with one of the dancers with racial epithets. Brodhead appropriately cancelled the team’s season and demanded the coach’s resignation.

As far as his trumped-up “Group” goes, things remain the same without even changing much. In the editorial, Johnson writes, “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, for [Houston] Baker and many others who signed the faculty statement, the race, class, and gender of the men’s lacrosse team produced a guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality.” It was hard for him to escape the conclusion, that’s for sure. Fast-forward to “Legacies,” his final post before putting DIW on hiatus in December 2007, and he highlights the “race/class/gender extremists” who jerked the administration’s chain and were “only too willing to advance their personal, pedagogical, or ideological agendas on the backs of their own students.” Another major legacy he chooses to reinforce is “the pernicious effects of academic groupthink,” a theme that he first brought up in DIW in late May 2006 (the legacy he doesn’t mention is DIW’s remarkable success at fostering its own little groupthink community, part of a gossiping network of like-minded sites).

On the face of it, it’s hard for me to see how a historian could spend a year and a half analyzing an ongoing controversy and find nothing that poses a significant challenge to his earliest firm impressions of it. It’s a record that suggests that the project isn’t really analysis, and in fact it turns out to be more like prosecution. There’s no denying that the most prominent and vocal of the faculty he criticizes did nothing overt to break the mold—they stuck close to their issues or were silent, so Johnson is fully justified in sticking to his guns as well. Still, there’s a lot of filtering out of things he apparently doesn’t want the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to be thinking about. And filtering alone isn’t enough to support the one-sided case he seems determined to make. It also requires quite a bit of what I’ve described as misrepresentation, manipulation, distortion, etc. Now I realize there’s a better word for all that, one that really captures the spirit of Johnson’s anti-academic crusade—bullshit.

It was a reader’s comment that got me thinking about how useful the word is (I’ll get back to the comment later), and then I remembered a little book I bought a few years ago called On Bullshit, written by Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. One of my favorite lines from it—part of a discussion of whether bullshit is analogous to “carelessly made, shoddy goods”—brings out the book’s quietly surreal juxtaposition of subject and style.

Excrement is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted, or dumped. It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly not wrought.

The “essence of bullshit,” according to Frankfurt, is a “lack of connection to a concern with truth—[an] indifference to how things really are.” That sets it apart not only from truth-telling but also from lying, because you have to consider the truth before you can tell a lie. In a helpful review of the book in Slate, Timothy Noah gives as an example the claim the famously surfaced in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, about Saddam Hussein’s efforts to buy nuclear material from Niger. The possible basis for that claim is murky enough that it might not be the best example, but assuming for the sake of argument that it was as bogus as Bush’s critics believe, it does seem more like indifference to the truth than like a conscious decision to peddle outright falsehood.

Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the way things are may become attenuated or lost.

Noah’s example brings out a limitation of Frankfurt’s schematic analysis, though. In many real-world situations even the most honest person can’t be sure about “the way things are.” What I think stands for “the truth” in those situations is honest, dispassionate analysis, even though it might lead different people to different truths. With respect to national security matters like the yellowcake from Niger, the uncertainty and inaccessibility of the evidence seems to be a standing invitation to bullshit—one that’s frequently accepted by politicians of all stripes. The Bush administration seems to find it especially irresistible, and even compared to other political machines they’re way out of the “normal habit of attending to the way things are.”

It isn’t just a matter of “what it suits one to say,” though. First of all, bullshit isn’t likely to work if it isn’t plausible and/or appealing to the intended audience. And it usually serves some purpose or furthers some agenda—justifying a war, for instance. Johnson treats the lacrosse case as a battlefront in the culture war, so even though he approaches the fight more like a prosecutor than a general his purpose isn’t so different from Bush’s. His analysis is thoroughly agenda-driven—scratch the surface, and you’re likely to find some bullshit. And it can be pretty easy to identify. He’s covered the scandal from a distance, drawing on essays, interviews, news reports, and the like. Often in DIW all you have to do is follow the helpful link to the original text. There’s a fair chance that it’s been manipulated to show that the person who said or wrote it has exactly the values and beliefs that you’d expect from a race/class/gender extremist, or else it’s been fudged to bring out the topsy-turvy irrationality of Wonderland, where the crazies and cowards are running the show. Some of Johnson’s bullshit is generated in other ways, but the end it serves is pretty consistent.

I made a list of some of the more obvious bullshit I’ve come across in DIW, but it’s gotten so long enough that I’ll post it separately, within a day or two. [Here it is.] Much of it comes from earlier entries, though: What Mark Anthony Neal supposedly hears students mutter at the beginning of the new semester, the persecution of Steven Baldwin, and just about everything Johnson wrote about Karla Holloway’s article “Coda: Body of Evidence.”

It’s one thing for a self-appointed pundit to churn out bullshit—it’s practically the job description. Even a moderate amount of bullshit from someone backed by the power of law enforcement is a much more serious thing. Nifong seems to have been a copious, shameless bullshitter, and the consequences were disastrous for the people who ended up under his thumb. The silver lining is that in the end it all came back to haunt him. In the first flush of news coverage he spent hours and hours feeding the beast what it wanted to hear. Speaking to N&O reporter Joe Neff, James Coleman starts off sounding a bit like Frankfurt:

“Either he knew what the facts were and misstated them, or he was making them up,” said James Coleman, a Duke law professor who has publicly requested that Nifong remove himself from the case. “Whether he acted knowing they were false, or if he was reckless, it doesn’t matter in the long run. This is the kind of stuff that causes the public to lose confidence in the justice system.”

A line of bullshit that was all too effective in rallying the Duke community and neighbors against the lacrosse team was the bit about how they were stonewalling. It seems to have been largely the work of Durham Police Cpl. David Addison. Among his deceptive statements was this one, to the Durham Herald-Sun: “Addison said police approached the lacrosse team with the five-page search warrant on March 16, but that all of the members refused to cooperate with the investigation.” In fact after the search warrant was executed co-captains David Evans, Dan Flannery and Matt Zash volunteered to be interviewed by the police at length and without counsel present.

In late April 2006, a headline in USA Today announced “A perfect storm: Explosive convergence helps lacrosse scandal resonate.” Behind the storm, according to the article, was the “national flash points of race, class, gender, violence, money and privilege.” (James Coleman’s pithy reply a year later: sure it was a perfect storm, “but we know now it was based on this false notion a crime had been committed…. That generated everything.”). Duke is a sprawling institution that tries to be a great many things to a great many people, and it’s my sense that the lacrosse team became a vessel not only for the reflexive shock and disgust tied to those “national flash points” but also for various smoldering frustrations with the university. From where I sit now the collective reaction of much of the community looks like a body ejecting diseased cells that had been circulating undetected. It wasn’t pretty, that’s for sure.

It was not only irresponsible but a remarkable lapse of common sense if, as alleged in one of the ongoing civil suits, the message from the Duke administration to the players was “you don’t need a lawyer,” and “don’t tell anyone this is happening, not even your parents” (McFayden et al v. Duke University et al, p. 129). And it’s true, as Tim Tyson recently noted, that folks around campus were reacting to information that came from people who were in a unique position to know—the police and the prosecutor. In different circumstances, though, if the accused had looked more like the people who are typical charged with violent crimes, the word of the authorities would likely have been taken with healthy skepticism if not disdain. It seems like that skepticism should cut both ways. All in all it was fertile ground for Addison’s misinformation. Some people, including a number of professors who really should have known better, took it as an excuse to indulge in a little high-handed vigilantism, for example by singling the players out in class or in private communications and exhorting them to fess up.

No one took up the invitation to vigilantism and ran further with it than the potbangers. It took some bullshitting to fit real-life events and people to their metanarrative—another dimension to the mirror-image parallelism between the potbangers and KC Johnson that I pointed out in my first post about the case. For both, “perfecting” and bullshitting seem to go hand in hand (that’s using—maybe abusing—a term that I continue to find very apt, introduced into the debate by Wahneema Lubiano). For the potbangers, the need to embroider went beyond just “perfecting” the offenders and the “survivor.” What stands out to me is the bizarre reasoning that took a form of protest from tight-knit but underpoliced third-world communities and dropped it into the middle of a first-world media feeding frenzy.

This is a good place to bring up the comment that got me thinking about bullshit in the first place, since it puts the potbangers into sharp relief. It’s from RRH, an attorney and also a mainstay of the DIW commentariat, part of an interesting exchange we had about how and why our perspectives on the case are so profoundly different.

Attorneys have heard—or heard from other attorneys—nearly every cockamamie story there is. Thus, we have developed internal “bullshit-detectors” that are so finely tuned that they are probably exceeded by only those of cops. Thus, when I heard the first reports about lacrosse case in 2006 (on ESPN), I was skeptical to the point just short of disbelief. The story is that several Alpha-male college students were going to risk reputations, diseases, paternity lawsuits, future careers, and family shame to put their most precious body parts into a party stripper? As we say in the legal business, that story already “strained credulity”.

And that’s even without the added allegation that the sex was involuntary. A party stripper with such fastidious morals and high standards of sex partners that she was going to turn down a chance for mating with such Alpha-males? Again, the bullshit-detector is sounding like an air raid siren.

I don’t understand how the “allegation that the sex was involuntary” could be in addition to the first reports, and the pop sociobiology doesn’t do much for me. But I don’t at all dismiss the bullshit detector he’s talking about, and it seems to me that there’s more behind it than just stories. “Perfecting” clients would surely be a great way to be a lousy lawyer. To be effective in the nitty-gritty of a criminal proceeding, it seems to me you’d have to be firmly in touch with the unvarnished and sometimes unpalatable humanity of everyone involved. That realization has helped me to clarify the nature and ethics of the choice that was made by protesters who felt they needed to shout slogans as if there was no question a rape occurred. Their perspective on the accuser—at the time not really “Crystal Mangum” but the heavily filtered impressions of her from the media and police—may be more palatable than RRH’s, but those protesters could and in my opinion did get things wildly wrong without experiencing any significant consequences.

It doesn’t take RRH’s crude realism to rein in the bullshit. It seems to me, anyway, that enough mental discipline to keep the accuser in the realm of everyday, imperfect human beings should be sufficient. I understand and respect the desire to resist dismissive and demeaning efforts to put rape accusers on trial in the court of public opinion and undercut them in the court of law. There is a big temptation to put a positive spin on the accuser, but it seems to be hard to do without getting into some euphemistic bullshit, even when it’s not nearly as idealizing as the potbanger’s rhetoric. For instance, Cathy Davidson, a professor of English at Duke, asks, “Who is that exotic dancer? A single mother who takes off her clothes for hire partly to pay for tuition at a distinguished historically black college.” Her main point is socioeconomic—in different circumstances she could have replaced “takes off her clothes” with “cleans toilets seven nights a week” or “serves as a guinea pig for grueling pharmaceutical trials”—so it may not be entirely fair to single her out. But I feel like I’ve seen a number of variations on the theme of student mom reduced to stripping to get an education, and they have a sanitized feel that calls to mind noxious Hollywood fairy tales like “Pretty Woman.” The rhetoric kicked up by recent news that Mangum graduated from North Carolina Central showed that she’s still little more than a rhetorical football for both sides. It was a starkly symbolic and ironic event that could have provoked some sharp analysis but didn’t.

My feeling is that one purpose of the critical analysis and writing we assign to our undergraduates is building up their resistance to bullshit. Whether or not that’s a common opinion, it seems like professors, of all people, should be bullshit detectors and not bullshit producers. And not just detectors pointed at the other side—as I’ve shown by example many times, that’s the easy part. I can think of only two at Duke who’ve stood out for their non-partisan bullshit detecting—James Coleman and Michael Gustafson. It’s a discredit to the professors on the Left—especially but not only at Duke—that they had nothing to say about the poor judgment and poor reasoning of the potbangers and like-minded protesters. (The one exception I’m aware of is Wahneema Lubiano, of all people. I wish her reservations about “perfecting” had been less equivocal and more forthright, but those aren’t the main reasons her critics were so insistent about misconstruing her.)

The main problem on the Duke side of the lacrosse case wasn’t bullshit, it was a callous and opportunistic attitude towards the students who were facing drastic legal consequences. But the Duke faculty definitely contributed some bullshit, too. Houston Baker’s histrionic letter is probably the standout. Parts of it—“And when will the others assaulted by racist epithets while passing 610 Buchanan ever forget that dark moment brought on them by a group of drunken Duke boys?,” etc.—are not only bullshit, they’re pretentious bullshit. It’s my impression that many liestoppers would put Cathy Davidson’s January 2007 editorial high on the bullshit scale. Taken as a whole I don’t see why it’s so offensive—a lot of it strikes me as honest and conciliatory—but she does start out with a whopper, claiming that in the rhetorical climate that motivated the “listening” statement, “defending David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann necessitated reverting to pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans, especially poor black women.” Not only had those three not been indicted when the “listening” statement was published, they hadn’t even been singled out from the rest of the team as likely suspects. For someone writing an editorial that purports to explain key events of the first few intense weeks of the scandal, this suggests great indifference to “the way things are” and a serious failure to “pay[] attention to anything except what it suits one to say.”

I imagine that the line that serves as Karla Holloway’s motto on DIW—“White innocence means black guilt. Men’s innocence means women’s guilt”—would also be ranked as prime bullshit by her critics. Understood in context, I think that’s debatable. It seems to me that it’s not with any particular statement that she most clearly lapses into bullshit, it’s her general failure to own up to her role in stirring up the bitter discourse that she found so onerous, and her tendency to place herself outside and on the receiving end of the university’s power structure. And then there’s the “listening” statement. For me it’s the first line—“We are listening to our students”—that stands out as obvious bullshit. They were listening to some of their students. It’s too much like the vacuous cliché about listening to the “will of the American people” that’s endlessly falling out of the mouths of politicians.

It’s a pretty good measure of the real purpose and integrity of DIW that, leaving aside Baker’s letter, which is pretty much a sitting duck, Johnson responds to most of this stuff from the Duke side with bullshit of his own. The DIW impression of Holloway’s infamous line is largely an artifact of Johnson’s bullshit. And after pointing out the factual silliness of Davidson’s mention of the three indicted players, he turns to the statement she surely meant to make, about rhetoric in defense of the lacrosse players generally.

In late March, when the idea for the Group of 88’s statement originated, who—either on Duke’s campus or in the media—was elevating the lacrosse players “to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism”? Certainly not the protesters to whom Davidson and the other Group members said “thank you”…. Between March 29 and the issuance of the Group’s statement on April 6, were members of the media or cable news network talking heads elevating the lacrosse players “to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism”?

He starts by asking exactly the right question, then gives a non-answer that’s really just an excuse to slip in one of his boilerplate formulas for denouncing the “Group,” and finally comes to rest on “media or cable news network talking heads.” It may be bullshit to claim that there was backlash against black students, and “[t]he insults, at that time, were rampant.” I can’t say for sure either way. But I’m confident that a great deal was said and felt by students walking across campus at night, say, or down a dorm hallway, that wasn’t picked up by any “talking heads” or even in the campus paper. No doubt it suits Johnson to believe that he was getting a complete and accurate impression of events at Duke as he was following the news from several states away. It’s self-serving bullshit, though, especially coming from a historian dabbling in journalism—people in both fields are supposed to have some sophistication about the way their evidence is mediated. He could have gleaned at least a hint of what black students experienced at the time from the comments quoted in the “listening” statement. But he never treats those students as if they’re worth listening to (he does suggest in an obnoxious reference to them as “alleged students [who] can testify as to what they said” that they’d be good subjects for an inquisition).

At least two Duke professors picked up echos in the lacrosse incident of institutionalized, open, and often violent racism of the old South. For both there’s a close connection to their scholarly work. Both allude to the unproven nature of the rape allegations and claim to be setting them aside while they consider other aspects of the students’ behavior that evening, but it seems to me that the impression of the brutality of the alleged crime still filters into their judgment (see James Coleman’s comment above about the perfect storm). Tim Tyson saw the “spirit of the lynch mob” in the crowd of young men at the party. William Chafe saw a continuation of the “poisonous linkage of race and sex as instruments of power and control” that’s integral to southern history. I know that for me and many others, the impression of a gang of young white men clustered drunkenly around a couple of half-naked black women had some very ugly resonances. But that’s a gut response, and it seems like neither Chase or Tyson gave it the critical consideration they should have before they said their piece. I’ve already described my reservations with Tyson’s lynch mob analogy. Turning to Chafe, how much context, really, does Emmett Till—brutally beaten and then shot, eye gouged out, barbed wire strung around his neck—provide for that party? In both cases, there is a bullshit gap, I guess you could call it. In fact the gap seems so obvious, especially in Chafe’s case, that I have to believe that, for better or worse, the point is sincere.

Mark Anthony Neal’s comments about “racialized sexual violence” pull the same general issues into a more contemporary context—relating the lacrosse incident not to old-fashioned lynching and brutality but to the present-day media-driven discourse that holds that “black women and their bodies have little value, little protection and are accessible to anyone who feels entitled to them.” It seems to me that this makes some contact with the spirit of the party. There was, for instance, the infamous parting shot: “Hey bitch, thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt.” (According to KC Johnson it’s “a tasteless rip-off of a Chris Rock joke”—a widely held opinion that I find entirely plausible, but it’s typical of the mountain of self-perpetuating verbiage that’s been left by this scandal that I can’t find a source pinning the joke to any particular Chris Rock show. I did find a thread on the TalkLeft forums initiated by someone wanting to know the same thing—after 200+ comments there’s no definitive conclusion.) Being more plugged into the here and now turns out to have its dangers—it leads Neal into some speculation about how the lacrosse team may have been “hoping to consume something that they felt that a black woman uniquely possessed.” That would be blatant bullshit if it wasn’t framed as speculation—perhaps it still counts, but it’s most problematic for other reasons.

Neal is capable of writing with style and insight about the “fo’ real,” as he calls it, but in this case the elision he makes between rhetorical violence and brutal physical assault lands him in bullshit territory. RRH’s caustic perspective is again an antidote, a reminder of how animalistic the alleged acts would have been, and the deeply ingrained barriers that would have had to be overcome. It seems to me that a more incisive point of reference is the typical scenarios for alcohol- and entitlement-fueled assaults involving college students, which usually involve some mutual socializing and perhaps mixed signals as well. It’s not hard to see how the inhibition is overcome in those circumstances, and it’s not far-fetched that there could be some acting out of the kind of rhetoric Neal highlighted.

The final step in RRH’s bullshit detecting is statistical—“Single-offender white on black rapes are so infrequent that they show up usually as asterisks in crime statistics, and white multiple offender rapes of black women are barely more frequent than carjackings by Amish farmers.” It’s grounds for skepticism, for sure, but it’s just a mindless number that could be hiding who knows what biases or artifacts. There’s little if any insight in it.

Proffitt’s simplifying frame tends to reduce accuser and accused to archetypes—Rapist and Survivor. Another level of abstraction is close at hand, though, in his list of discriminations that rape survivors are leading the resistance to (“violence, homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, and capitalism”) and Rajendran’s sweeping claim to be calling the lacrosse team to account for “the racism and the sexism and the classism” of what they did. Rapist and Survivor become Oppressor and Oppressed. In an essay “Perfect Offenders, Perfect Victim: The Limitations of Spectacularity in the Aftermath of the Lacrosse Team Incident”, posted a month after the lacrosse party, Wahneema Lubiano, a professor in Duke’s Department of African and African American Studies, critiques the habit of “perfecting” the protagonists so that the role of oppression or prejudice in an incident is blatantly obvious and therefore “spectacular.” The inevitable resistance sets up a polarizing dynamic:

I hear desire on the part of various constituencies for the comfort either of being able to construct a perfect offender and a perfect victim, and, therefore, some kind of resolution, or the converse position—the comfort of saying that the impossibility of constructing a perfect offender and a perfect victim means that nothing happened and that nothing needs to be resolved.

Lubiano urges like-minded activists responding to the lacrosse case to get off this treadmill, since it causes “[w]hatever is routine about this incident [to be] marginalized while a desire for the incident to live up to its most horrific possibilities fights it out in public discussion with its rhetorical other….” A good description, I think, of the lacrosse-case version of a culture-war shouting match, and her description of the dynamic as a “desire… for comfort” is apt. She describes it, in sympathetic terms, as the comfort of an “understanding [that is] complete, coherent, and visible” but I’m inclined to put it in less benign terms, as the comfort of simplistic moral certainty or, in some cases, the fastidious, egocentric comfort of piling all the dirt on those people over there. And it seems that it’s more comforting to be on the side that’s constructing perfection. It was the discovery of a crime against the team committed by an eminently perfectible collection of Duke faculty that grabbed KC Johnson’s attention. With total dedication to ferreting out the “most horrific possibilities” in everything they’ve done, he’s constructed a perfectly skewed Wonderland, using the so-called “Group of 88” as a sponge to blot all the stigma off his side and spread it on the other. Among the most perfect of his many offenders is the one who “gleefully labeled the players the ‘perfect offenders’” (or so Johnson would like you to believe) in the course of telling anyone who would listen, and without a trace of glee that I can find, that such “perfecting” was a bad idea—Wahneema Lubiano. (I’ll reinforce what I said in my introduction to this series, though: I’ve never communicated with Prof. Lubiano. She’s not responsible for my opinions and interpretations and I’m not responsible for hers. If anything I say about her work bothers you, please complain to me and not to her.)

It seems to me that the controversy has revealed not so much the limitations but the dangers of spectacularity, or at least the dangers of actively “perfecting” in order to achieve it. Doing so tends to put an bloated frame around the incident, call up broad characterizations, and debase the language. In the MSNBC interview, Rajendran’s frame is “a nation… wrestling with a long legacy of institutionalized racism and a whole culture of sexual violence… with centuries of oppression,” which, she suggests, the community outrage will help to undo. That’s a hell of a lot of baggage for one incident to carry. In the show as a whole (Rita Cosby Live & Direct), Rajendran ends up as one act in a many-ring circus that includes an epic shouting match about an incident in which a man was shot 50 times by the police, another high-speed chase that ends in an explosion, and a woman who looks like a man interviewed from jail about how she supposedly kidnapped her own kids. This must be what Lubiano has in mind when she mentions “the spectacle that is news and the news as spectacle,” perhaps trying to suggest that activists should avoid feeding the beast. Then there’s Houston Baker’s temper tantrum—his open letter to the administration at Duke peppered with “privilege,” “white,” “male,” “athletic,” and “violent” in various combinations. His concern over the “horrific” incident seems to be based more on type of people involved than the nature of the acts alleged. A word like “privilege,” which should have real meaning in an incident that begins with two women’s bodies being ordered up like $400 pizzas, turns into a bludgeon (I think “entitlement” is more to the point, anyway). This kind of thing opens the door for the wholesale dismissal, on DIW and elsewhere, of virtually any criticism of the lacrosse team that invokes race or gender and to the parodies that lurk a step or two behind it—“reverse racism” and the like—which thrive on language debased by careless, reflexive “perfecting.”

To “perfect” is also to dehumanize. The way the lacrosse players were treated as clones of a generic “privileged white male” has been widely observed, and it was no credit to those who, in other contexts, would be quick to denounce the cheap generalizations of racists. But idealizing the accuser was even more integral to the thinking of the activists I’ve quoted, and it seems to have compromised their ability to think sensibly and realistically about events and issues they care about. No matter how much sincere concern was involved, the perfected accuser was little more than a comforting fabrication that made it easy to judge and to act, and do so rashly. I suppose such a thing might serve a cause or a community in some situations. But it seems more likely to undermine than to help a woman bringing rape allegations, since she will almost certainly look bad and the accused good relative to their perfected stand-ins. The effect was stark as the lacrosse case progressed, but it seems to me that in any rape case “perfecting” the accuser can only add fuel to the legal scrutiny of her character, and likely to any public scrutiny, as well—the last thing she needs.

The “listening” statement—the basis of an endlessly distracting controversy—shows in practice, I believe, what Lubiano was getting at when she advised others to “move from the specific harms associated with the incident alleged at the house on N. Buchanan Blvd. in order to look at the more difficult to ‘see,’ the less spectacularly visible harms of more generally structured and distributed sexism and racism.” The ad is built around a collection of quotes that gives a kaleidoscopic impression of the state of mind of a group of minority students in the wake of the rape allegation. The three comments about “self-segregation” and generic indignities of parties and classes, taken from an article in the Independent Weekly, most clearly convey the “generally structured and distributed” experience. Most of the other quotes show the students feeling anxious or at odds with the community or the institution in the heightened atmosphere post-allegation. Notably missing, especially in comparison to the protests and to statements like Houston Baker’s, is any direct comment about the lacrosse team’s behavior, guilt, or character. The closest contact with “the specific harms associated with the incident” is by way of one woman’s anxious imagination (“If something like this happens to me…”)—not a factual statement about the party but a representation of how vulnerable she felt. Whether or not it was it a good idea to put that quote in the ad without explanation or qualification is an excellent question—one of many about how effective or appropriate or representative the ad was. In principle they’re worth discussing, but not in a climate where those most interested in the ad insist on treating it as nothing more than a smoking gun. Questions like that are off track for me at the moment, anyway—all I’m trying to do here is explore the connections between Lubiano’s “Spectacularity” article, the listening statement, and the potbanging protest.

The reading that pulled the ad into the swirl of controversy dwelt especially on two lines—the mention of “what happened to this young woman” near the top, taken to indicate a firm belief that a rape occurred at the party, and the nod to “protesters making collective noise” near the end, which serves as a versatile link between the ad and anything a protestor has done or said about the lacrosse case. The central message of the ad as I see it doesn’t need a reference to protestors and doesn’t require the rape allegation to be true, so I don’t think either line is necessary as written. The mention of protestors seems especially superfluous, and it’s on that point that I’m most sympathetic to the criticism of the ad—it’s hard to reconcile the blanket endorsement of protestors followed by a long list of faculty signatures with the crowd on the sidewalk at Buchanan Blvd. holding a banner that says “Castrate” and hounding out the lacrosse team as rapists. I find it odd and disappointing that those who signed the ad and continued to speak out and editorialize didn’t meet the issue head on. Is all collective noise really good collective noise? The one line in the “concerned faculty” statement issued last January—“We do not endorse every demonstration that took place at the time”—was worse than nothing, I’m afraid, since all it did was to acknowledge that the issue was being dodged.

With the image of that crowd on the sidewalk in mind, it’s hard to reconcile the mention of protestors with an intention to steer clear of spectacularity. I have no way of knowing what image “protestors making collective noise” brought to mind for Lubiano in early April 2006, though I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that one. What is more clear is that even though the ad and the potbanging protest come from the same general political mindset, they are worlds apart in purpose and tone, and in exactly the way Lubiano articulates in her essay. The protest is addressed to “the most horrific possibilities”—a brutal gang rape—while, based on the student quotes she selected, Lubiano seems to be pushing for a day-to-day life at Duke in which African American students feel fully secure, confident that their perspective and experience won’t be dismissed when it’s inconvenient or challenging, and that they’re not marked as threats or colorful sex toys. If nothing else, the gulf between intention and interpretation makes a fascinating study in non-communication, and maybe there’s even something to be learned from it.

There’s another, more fundamental difference between the discourse of the protestors and the text of the ad, one that was aggressively sidelined when the latter became a rhetorical football: in the ad there’s an attempt to deal with people. It’s pretty successful, too—the quotes mesh with my experience of students at Duke, at least. The potbanging protest was, as I see it, conspicuously not about people but rather about pawns. My strong impression is that those who see the ad as rank prejudgment of the team read the quotes as the words of puppets. The reduction of people to pawns and puppets is a constant of ideologically polarized debate, whether you think of it as spectacularity or as culture war. There’s often a Hollywood semblance of humanity in the portrayal of the good side, but whether it’s the activist’s sanctified survivor or the bland but perfectly polarized sympathies that structure DIW, it’s something less than human. I think everyone involved knows and expects that they’re dealing with pawns (knows and expects it, that is, from the other side). The ad put humans on the favored side and leaves the other side open, to be filled in by the imagination of the reader. Considered in isolation, it’s an improvement on angels and fiends, but maybe not much different in context—readers sensitized by the broad-brush rhetoric directed at the team naturally drew on that to fill in the blank.

The first and perhaps the most admirable line of the ad—“We are listening to our students”—was another humanizing touch that may have had an unintentionally divisive effect, since it was only the favored group of students who were actually heard. I accept the implicit explanation of the choice of students to highlight—in general “the most vulnerable among us” because least well established, most likely to be alienated or marginalized or misunderstood. At that moment, though, among the most obviously vulnerable students were the ones under investigation by an unethical prosecutor. A less obvious group of students who might have been feeling especially vulnerable were the ones who were being stretched across the fault lines of race or gender or whatever. The point is that listening, of all things, shouldn’t and needn’t be selective, and it doesn’t seem like a good idea to give the impression that it is at a time of high tension and polarization. It’s a shame that the response of those who were offended by the ad has never, as far as I’ve seen, been to try to listen more closely and more broadly.

The legacy of the potbanging protest is not pretty. Rendering facile, sweeping judgment on 40-some young men they knew little about did a great service for the crowd on the other side that’s packaged the incident and its aftermath as a “hoax”—a story as comforting in its one-sided simplicity as in it’s perfect harmonization of justice, decency, and good sense with the good old social pecking order. It’s a position that needs a diametrical opposite in order to thrive—you have to have a lie in order to have a liestopper—and as the Liestoppers page I linked in earlier shows, the “Castrate” banner has a place of honor in the shrine that gives their project meaning and urgency. It’s not just that the protest left priceless relics for the other side’s endless re-incitement, though. It was in effect a conspiracy with the “rhetorical other” to make war on ambiguity from both sides. The only way for a case like this to shed useful light on the real, everyday harms of social or racial or gender inequity is to put it in a frame that’s wide enough to contain the ambiguity of real everyday people. Otherwise it’s just another cheesy comic book.

Speaking of that, the next stop is Wonderland…

How did protesters espousing an end to not only sexual violence but all violence convince themselves that it was a good idea to stand in front of the lacrosse players’ house on Buchanan Blvd. with a banner screaming “Castrate!!”? Even given the rally’s aim of confronting the lacrosse team to get them to talk, it’s hard to see what purpose such a vile but empty threat could serve, and also hard to imagine that no one involved realized how much it made them look like hypocritical, bloodthirsty zealots. Of course that’s all ridiculously easy to point out in retrospect. I don’t at all discount the genuine concern for victims of sexual assault—a terrible, debilitating crime—that motivated most if not all the protestors. I expect that some of the outrage came from brutally real personal experience of assault, something that far too many women have to live with. I can only go on what I can see and read, though, and in that the action is represented not only as a denunciation of the team but also righteous support for the woman alleging rape and for other assault survivors. The “Castrate” banner, which was likely the work of only a few of those present but was apparently tolerated all around, shows how much the action was ultimately defined by what was opposed rather than what was supported.

Behind the rally was a spirit of vigilantism. The call to protest that went out the night before (see below for a link) describes the alleged rape as a fact and says the lacrosse team has to be confronted because they’re “maintaining a strict code of silence.” The “Castrate” banner as well as the other slogans like “You can’t rape and run” and “It’s Sunday morning, time to confess” were apparently meant to break down the team’s resistance. The decision to shout down the team as rapists was based on incomplete, highly filtered, second- or third-hand information, or, in the case of the “code of silence,” misinformation. It’s all depressingly consistent with vigilantism’s bad rap. I get a whiff of mob psychology from the videos of the event on YouTube (especially the second one), which doesn’t mean I have any truck with the knee-jerk geniuses who imagine the potbanging crowd as some kind of lynch mob—it’s like saying a headache is the same as a brain tumor. I can’t blame activists acutely aware of sexual assault as a largely unacknowledged, unpunished crime for having an intense urge to do something. But I wish they’d treated the story the police were telling about a “wall of silence” with even a fraction of the skepticism they would have treated a story from the same source that was unfavorable to the accuser.

Provocative as it is, the “Castrate” banner didn’t attract much attention until months after the protests. A quick LexisNexis search finds only one mention of it immediately after the rally, in the next day’s Durham Herald-Sun—not something that found a lot of eyeballs, especially around Duke. My best guess is that the banner became a fixture in discussions of the case after the picture was included in an account of the protests posted on Liestoppers in Nov. 2006 (the post, which quotes the call to protest in full, is fairer and more informative than you’d think from all the bric-a-brac of grudge-nursing around it). It isn’t mentioned on DIW until Jan. 2007 (the single instance that seems to be from 2006 is misdated). Both the banner and the typical liestopper reaction to it perfectly follow the culture-war logic that pumping up your own indignation and hurting the other side trumps all else. While I was searching for background on the protest I stumbled across a post from John In Carolina, who took it to comic extremes by writing a letter to the editor complaining that The News and Observer didn’t even mention the “Castrate” banner for more than a year—imagine how many decent citizens were deprived of their full portion of moral outrage!

Speaking soon after the event in an MSNBC interview, Manju Rajendran, one of the protest organizers, describes the confrontational tone as an end in itself:

Women in Lima, Peru, initiated this as a way of surrounding the houses of women who were being assaulted by their husbands or by their partners. And it was a very confrontational way of saying, We demonstrate solidarity with the women who are being attacked in this way or by anyone who’s being persecuted in this fashion. We challenge the racism and the sexism and the classism implicit in these actions. We want to shame the attackers, and we want to invite the witnesses to step forward and come clean.

A little googling makes it clear that the cacerolazo is a common form of protest in Latin America, but I can’t find any examples that fit Rajendran’s description. In principle, especially in a place where incidents of sexual assault or domestic violence generate little attention (if not unhelpful attention) from the authorities, it sounds like a fine idea. But she transferred wholesale to Durham a response to a very different sort of rape, one involving intimate partners, from a very different context, the social framework of a tight-knit third-world neighborhood (that’s my inference, of course, but I can’t think of a plausible alternative), where among other things the effect of shame would be both more pointed and more contained.
The fact she was talking about the protest a few days later on nationwide TV shows how uncontained the shame and everything else was in her version. That the protest would send words and images ricocheting out of control around the media and the web seems utterly predictable (though I may just be indulging 20-20 hindsight).

One discrepancy is especially revealing. Unless there’s some kind of women’s brigade in Lima that responds to distress calls from here and there, the intervention Rajendran describes would have to be organized by women familiar with both the victim and her abuser. It seems to me that Rajendran wasn’t differentiating between her connection to the parties of the lacrosse allegation and the connection she’d have if, say, a friend or neighbor in an abusive relationship came to her for help (in which case a lot more deliberation would surely be involved before gathering a crowd to chant on the sidewalk). But knowing the accused and accuser by type and role—gender, race, class, titillated viewer or demeaned hireling, etc.—was apparently enough familiarity to call out the pots and pans on Buchanan Blvd.

An essay written by Durham-based activist Brian Proffitt in the wake of the protests and the negative DNA results is another window onto the reduction of the lacrosse team’s accuser to a type. In it he stresses his “commitment to believing those who come forward with stories of survival first.” His perspective is different from Rajendran’s, in that he’s writing as an advocate for assault survivors rather than a scourge of assaulters, but he and Rajendran both have ties to Ubuntu, a group founded in reaction to the lacrosse accusation, and my impression is that, whether or not he was involved in the potbanging protest, he is speaking from the same general perspective. Even when I disagree with him, I admire his forthright efforts to explain his position without rancor. He’s at his best writing as an advocate about the debilitating effects of sexual assault and the bleak prospects survivors have for a fair hearing, much less justice and resolution.

Proffitt also makes a couple of good points in support of his “commitment to believing.” One is that, for a woman going through the grueling process, simply being believed can make a big difference. The other is that bringing a charge of rape is typically a punishing and humiliating experience for the accuser—a natural deterrent to false allegations. Just how much of a deterrent is a matter of psychology and socialization, though—I don’t doubt that it’s enough to many women who have really been assaulted that they choose not to press charges. But there must be some who would be much less bothered, especially in our fame- and notoriety-driven culture. But Proffitt’s blanket faith is so ironclad that, in his writing about the lacrosse case there is no “accuser” (and no “allegation”), only a “survivor”—one of a sanctified class that’s “creating the path forward… [by] resisting violence, homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, and capitalism.” It’s a belief that would tend to short-circuit the difficult questions that should be asked before standing on a sidewalk and very publicly denouncing people accused of a serious crime, like whether the case fit the scenario in which false allegations are highly unlikely.

Coming up next, the dangers of perfection…