Re:harmonized

The funny thing about the broadside KC Johnson fired in my direction about two months ago (yes, I’m finally getting around to it) is how noncommittal it is. Sometimes his defense is solid, other times not so much. For instance, urging Duke to conduct an “impartial investigation” may not “strike [him] as the response of someone unwilling to engage in ‘critical self-reflection’,” but the usual idea of self-reflection is that it’s done by, you know, the self, not a committee. What’s weakest, though, is his blustering offense. There’s an attack on my blogging ethic that looks strong but turns out to be largely illusory, and at the end of the post there are some strong words about a number of things I’ve written and one thing I failed to do. It has all the makings of a counterattack except for the actual attack. He’s left it up to the reader to figure out exactly what I’ve done wrong, and as a reader myself I’m happy to oblige.

After connecting the dots, it looks like the unspoken complaint behind all that vehemence is that I’ve been terribly unfair to KC Johnson. And I thought it was about me! Or, if not, it was about students who were hounded by an unethical prosecutor and betrayed by their professors. But no, when Johnson strikes back at my criticism, the issue that comes up again and again is how harsh and unfair I’ve been to him. It’s an unseemly complaint, especially coming from a man who regularly puts other people down for acting like they’re “the victim.” So he writes around it. In the past he’s played up what he sees as an unreasonable discrepancy between my criticism of him (too strong) and my criticism of other more villainous figures (too mild). This time he invokes the whole lacrosse-case catastrophe in its tried-and-true Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW) packaging — students railroaded by a rogue DA while a rush-to-judgment faculty thanks protestors, etc. In relation to the points of mine he was responding to, it’s like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. But that tableau has always been a weapon, and he’s used it so many times against his enemies that it really has become little more than a flyswatter. It seems that at this point no purpose is too trivial or self-serving to give it a whack. That makes me feel just fine about criticizing him so harshly.

Before I get into Johnson’s weirdly self-centered way of dealing with criticism here’s a quick and more current example of his habit of flirting suggestively with facts and issues without taking a stand. The bulk of his post about “‘Diversity’ and Duke Admissions” is a table of data collected at Duke, from an academic study relating to affirmative action. Johnson takes no position on the significance of the numbers in his handy table, but he does urge readers to “Recall that under federal law… private universities (such as Duke) that receive federal funds cannot use racial quotas in admissions policies.” Given a study attempting to shed some empirical light on the subtleties of a complex and thorny issue, it’s impressive how Johnson whittles it down to some “quite striking totals” that he leaves uninterpreted and a mealy-mouthed suggestion that Duke is breaking the law. It’s a textbook example of partisan hackery and also a warm-up for the exposé on Duke’s Campus Culture Initiative (CCI) that he recently finished. He has a cache of documents that he apparently picked up on the sly, and he’s been grinding them through the mill of his willful ignorance. Every now and then he packs the result into a little poison pill marked “in other words” or “Translation:” or “i.e.” (1). The CCI warrants close, critical scrutiny and the assumptions about diversity that informed it should absolutely be fair game for debate. Johnson has nothing constructive or intelligent to contribute on either level, though.

What Johnson writes about the CCI might, conceivably, have some real-world impact. What he writes about me, on the other hand, is inconsequential, and Johnson seems to put even less thought into it than he puts into the hatchet jobs he does on the bigwigs of the so-called “Group of 88.” It’s reflexive and so, I think, quite revealing. Since my post goes on way too long, I’ve divided it into sections. Hopefully that will make it easier to scan and to browse. And I’ve moved some of the digressions into notes (2).

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As I’ve watched things appear on Durham-in-Wonderland lately I’ve been thinking that KC Johnson must finally be running out of material. Tonight’s post seemed to be more of the same, another episode in his recent fixation with Wahneema Lubiano, apropos of nothing. But then he totally outdoes himself by tacking on an impressive bit of third-hand scurrilous gossip.

It comes by way of Bill Anderson, based on “a conversation with a prominent Duke faculty member the other day.” According to Anderson this source heard Karla Holloway express a continued belief in the guilt of the three indicted lacrosse players, and she supposedly followed the claim up with some nonsense about “guilt as a social construct.” A long time ago I wrote that criticism flowed in and out of DIW like gossip, but this is ridiculous.

[Update: I’ve just received an email from Karla Holloway. In it, she says that Anderson’s claim is “an absolute and patent falsehood,” that he’s “reporting a conversation that could never have taken place” and that it “misrepresents [her] views.”]

It isn’t the first time that Anderson has claimed to be privy to the inside scoop on Holloway, either. He floated a rumor a couple of years ago (more recently, I’m sorry to say, he slipped it into my blog, too) that she “fixed” a sexual assault charge against a colleague. The two rumors are quite a combo—they make Holloway out to be an ultra dogmatic leftist feminist who’s also an utter hypocrite. Stranger things have happened, so I won’t claim it’s impossible. I don’t find either the new or the old claim to be credible. Even if I did, I can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would circulate such a story as hearsay.

I’ve had some long go-rounds with Bill Anderson. He can seem like a reasonably intelligent, thoughtful, and even gracious person at times. He’s also capable of passing wild judgments on the people he sees as ideological enemies, and of convincing himself that they’ve thought or said things that he’s in no position to know. The most jaw-dropping example I know of is a wild post on the Liestoppers forum last July, asserting, based on his understanding of the way those kind of people think, that local African American leaders had a supremely callous attitude towards the murder of Eve Carson.

Let us be honest here. There is a portion of Durham—and that includes Irving Joyner—that has an underlying approval for what was done to Eve Carson. I am not saying that Joyner approved of her murder, but he has said nothing that goes to the heart of the situation. He sees himself as a guardian of African-Americans in Durham, and I would not be surprised if he was hoping for an act of jury nullification so Atwater and Lovette could be set free.

Let us not forget that Joyner, McSurely, and the NAACP held that the biggest threat to Durham was the Duke lacrosse team. They desperately wanted these young men railroaded to prison, and in their minds, if Lovette and Atwater are acquitted despite the evidence against them, it will be a “fair trade” to the AA community for the lacrosse players not going to prison. Don’t kid yourself; this is how people like Joyner, Barber, and others think.

With respect to the latest claim about Holloway, Anderson assures us that his source “was not exaggerating, and he is an accomplished academic and not given to loose talk.” I don’t find that very reassuring.

ANOTHER UPDATE

There’s an update on KC Johnson’s post that registers the message I got from Karla Holloway. He also left a comment here, proving himself yet again to be a petty demogogue whose answer to any question or criticism is to point at someone else.

He starts the comment with a classic of sleazeball journalism à la O’Reilly—the “invitation” given out to someone whose been trashed, kindly allowing them to explain their side and get trashed some more. Then he takes up two questions I recently posed in a comment on the Duke Chronicle. True to form, he has no real answer to the first one except packages his denial with the non sequitur suggestion that the “Group of 88” did worse things. On the second question, he points to the other guy (formerly the “towering figure”)—it’s his fault.

Q: Did Johnson end our exchange of comments on DIW with a moderator’s veto? A: He doesn’t know He didn’t, “to the best of [his] knowledge,” but never mind that—the Group of 88 hasn’t defended anything they did, and Zimmerman is a public apologist for them.

Q: Why didn’t Johnson engage any critical reflection after Jim Coleman criticized him? A: It was up to Coleman, apparently, to translate the criticism into chapter and verse in DIW or UPI. Since he didn’t “corroborate his claims,” Johnson can do nothing but wonder why on earth would say such things.

Finally, he adds a paragraph about me, the messenger. In the lacrosse case, he says, the DA was trying to “railroad three innocent students at Prof. Zimmerman’s own institution. During the time those students were in harm’s way, Prof. Zimmerman… was silent about their fate, while 88 of his colleagues signed a public statement which… thanked protesters who had presumed the students’ guilt.” A year and a half ago I pointed out his habit of responding to challenges by pulling out that the formulaic indictment of the 88. He’s still at it. In this case it’s pure ad hominem—a lazy and cowardly response that discredits the messenger in order to deflect the message. And it’s especially effective with the thoughtless and bigoted.

Speaking of cowardly, his first order of business in the update on DIW is to pigeonhole me (“Group apologist Robert Zimmerman reports that he has received an email from Karla Holloway….”), but then he doesn’t have the guts to link to my post. It certainly calls for a link, and there’s even some bullshit in his comment here about public service I’m doing by revealing the (fictional) Group’s thinking. It won’t do them any good if they can’t find me.

The comment is down here. [Further comment/clarification from Johnson is here and here. My reply to the last of those sums up this incident of an uncleared comment, as I see it.]