Use/Mention distinction and ‘racist’ speech

This story is really amazing. I’m currently visiting at U.Va; believe it or not, there was a letter to the Cavalier the next day complaining about the fact that the *Cavalier* had printed the dread word. It strongly reminded me of the scene in the Life of Brian about stoning to death anyone who says the word ‘Jehovah.’ (The High Priest ends up getting stoned, because he utters the word in the course of outlawing it.)

Julian Bond is very smart, and these types of things are frequently misreported (“there go those liberal professors again! And look, this one’s black!”). I suspect that happened here.

Though I’m sure Yglesias and Tapped will be going after Bond once again, on the principle that you have to gaurd against associating yourself with those damn identity politics people somehow. It will be a real shame if Bond deserves it as much as the first take suggests.

First they outlaw consensual cannibal-murder; next thing you know it they’ll be outlawing homosexual sodomy!

John, the reason I’m confused is that Dan L intimated that your post would indicate that the word had been used in an offensive way. But it does nothing of the sort. If it was used in an offensive way then its use is ntohing compared with the scandal of what is a massive cover up. If the supervisor said what he is actually quoted to have said he did not use the word but mentioned it, and was not offensive, right? So I’m not confused by your post so much as being pointed to it as a counter to the Cavalier report.

The supsect quotation may be an after the fact explanation of the context of a more ambiguous usage.

Indeed. If the employees present were not offended, who were the “black employees of the UVa Medical Center [who] complained that their supervisor”? How does supposed incident of “hypersensitivity” connect to “other racially tinged incidents on campus in the past year, including an alleged racially motivated attack on a black student running for campus office”?

And what’s the literary term (apophasis?) for denying that you’re saying something as a way of saying it (like Mark Antony’s Friend, Romans speech) ?

And what’s so wrong with disavowing the mention of such words, the way that dashes or asterisks were used to indicate the name of god or swear words or whatever? On the contrary, I’ve known enough white people who take pleasure in “mentioning” certain Education
words wherever they can that I think a certain hesitancy would be salutary.

In short, I don’t think anyone should be fired for such usage regardless of what (s)he meant, but I’m skeptical about your readiness to turn this into a parable about political correctness. But hey, I rolled my eyes at the “(whom I greatly admire)” too.

Harry, I’ll try to make clearer the moral I draw from John R’s post. (BTW, from the time stamps I imagine that my earlier comment wasn’t up when you wrote yours.)
The sentence that you attribute to the employee,
“I can’t believe in this day and age that there’s a sports team in our nation’s capital named the Redskins. That is as derogatory to Indians as having a team called Niggers would be to blacks,”
was not actually uttered by that employee. It was uttered by R. Edward Howell, who said that the employee said “something like” that.
So I, at least, don’t know whether the employee actually used the word, perhaps with innocuous intent, or merely mentioned it.

I don’t think that it would necessarily be a sign of a coverup if the employee had used the word with innocuous intent, and Howell had paraphrased it to make it a mere mention. Howell might not distinguish between use with innocuous intent and mere mention; Bond might reasonably make that distinction.

Oops, meant also to say, tell more those who know more, my reading of what happened is as thin as the Cavalier Daily the day back from Thanksgiving, and I’ll stand by my conclusions even if the facts don’t match up because that’s how stubborn I am.

David:

“Or why liberals have such a need to distance themselves from identity politics?”

I don’t know…er…because ‘identity politics’ has become an absurd farrago of self-pitying wank? Because it gives the left a really bad name? Because it encourages resentment and ethnic factionalism on all sides? Or something like that?

On Bond’s intention to make a public statement on the issue or not, I suspect he had a good idea that, given who he is and what he was saying, that, if he sent it to a faculty email list, it would be leaked PDQ! If he’s been misquoted, I reckon we’d have heard about his demands for a correction.

A further instalment suggests that we’ve far from got to the bottom of the story.

Harry–
I agree that racial speech is a relatively small issue–but I feel that this story has become an urban legend that’s all over the blogosphere by now. Everyone seems to think that Bond called for the firing of the person who said the first thing you quoted, and that is not true.

From John Rosenberg’s site:
“Some black employees of the UVa Medical Center complained that their supervisor, in a conversation with them, referred to the Washington Redskins as ‘red n—–s.'”

So “red n—–s” seems to be the operative quote, not “that is as derogatory… as having a team called N—-s.”

As for the coverup issue, this sounds like a case where it’s not clear cut whether the term is used or mentioned, nor whether the use is offensive. That’s why I think it may be that Bond is not clearly wrong and that Howell is not deliberately covering up an offensive use.

(My campus may be whiter than yours, BTW, but I haven’t taught ethics here yet.)

Drape (if I may),
I intended the post as a much more light-hearted comment on the use-mention distinction than it has obviously been taken as — and I can see why you’ve taken it the way you have, so I regret the way I framed it. Also Matt’s points (now I understand them) seem fair to me. I don’t mean to be giving aid-and-comfort, and will be more careful how I pose things in future. It was almost an accident that I mentioned Bond, as I could have made the point I wanted to make without doing so, and I did not intend to make the other point — ‘look how silly these identity politics people are’. Both the Cavalier and, according to its report, Howell, make the mistake I was pointing to.

So, mea culpa.

That said, can I say two things which are incidental to my post but not to the discussion which emerged:

1) If my own campus had devoted the attention and time it has devoted to hate speech codes to finding ways of supporting African American students instead, it would be a better campus for African American students to be on. Even if it were just a matter of the professors involved devoting their own time to extra office hours rather than the extra committee work (on both the pro- and anti- code sides).

2) I’m always uneasy when professors call for disciplinary action for clerical and maintenance staff. We are (almost) the most privileged on campus; they are the least privileged. This person was a ‘supervisor’; but so is a MacDonald’s manager. On my campus even supervisory roles are low paid and low status. Bond clearly didn’t call for the employee to be fired, but compulsory sensitivity training is disciplinary action (and it varies enormously in the way it is carried out, ranging from something everyone should experience to a demeaning and offensive waste of time. Bond almost certainly knows how good it is on his campus, so I think its fair to presume it is high-ish quality there — but still, it’s a form of discipline). Not to say that it is never justified to call for disciplinary action, but in this case it doesn’t look justified.