Oh no, she asked the students to discuss?
Oh for god’s SAKE, people.
Professor who discussed James Baldwin in class allowed to keep her job:
Laurie Sheck, the poet and professor who was investigated by her university for quoting James Baldwin’s use of the N-word in a graduate class, has been cleared of charges of racial discrimination.
After assigning Baldwin’s 1962 essay The Creative Process to her class at the New School in New York, Sheck had asked the students to discuss how the 2016 documentary about the writer and civil rights activist, I Am Not Your Negro, altered Baldwin’s actual quote, in which he had used the racial slur. A graduate student, who, like Sheck, is white, had objected to her language.
TWO WORDS. THAT’S ALL, JUST TWO.
Use. Attribution. Mention.
That’s it. End of story, end of fuss, end of student’s idiotic objection.
Imagine a teacher attempting to discuss The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a class.
That too, by the way, is mention as opposed to use. Twain didn’t use the word in his own voice, he put it in Huck Finn’s mouth because it’s what a Huck Finn would have said at that time in that place.
PEN America, stressing that there “is a distinction to be made between a racial slur wielded against someone and a quote used for pedagogical purposes”, warned that Sheck was protected by the principle of academic freedom.
Indeed there is, and it even has a name: it’s the use/mention distinction.
I have discussed the use of the word “cunt” many times, for reasons quite radically different from the reasons of people who call women “cunts” in anger.
That complaint should never have happened. That student needs remedial classes.
Quine called it use versus mention, but yeah.
Oh that makes more sense. Ima tweak it.
And it was a complaint from a white person offended and outraged on behalf of others.
I say this with sincerity: I think it’s a good thing that people want to stick up for the marginalized and the powerless. I think compassion and empathy are noble virtues. Indispensable virtues.
But so is reason.
I suspect it’s because the lessons taught to the privileged (such as myself) about doing better on issues of race and sex and so forth are often about form rather than substance. We are told not to use certain words, or do specific actions; but there’s very little attempt to teach the underlying principles of WHY such things shouldn’t be said or done. Thus, context is abandoned, and we think that the words or actions are, themselves, the issue, rather than the thoughts and systems that led to them in the first place.
In well-meaning progressives, this leads to the sort of nonsense above; in malignant conservatives, it usually leads to cases where they say something horrid, then apologize for the language used, but not the underlying sentiment.
#3 – the complainant may have indeed have wanted to stick up for the marginalised and powerless. Altruism is not to be ruled out as a motivation. But then neither is malice, or a desire to make trouble for its own sake.
#4 – we should perhaps remember that there exist also both malignant progressives and well-meaning conservatives. There’s no shortage of bullies among people who claim to be on the left, as Ophelia demonstrates daily. Calling yourself progressive shouldn’t give you a free pass for noxious behaviour.
Eric: I agree with your #4, but not that it applies to this situation as much. IME, both malignant progressives and well-meaning conservatives tend to avoid the language entirely in the first place. The malignant in an effort to be seen as blameless, the well-meaning because they didn’t understand the connection between what they are doing and what they think the outcome will be.
Who better to deliver the remedial lesson than Tom Lehrer who deftly smuggled the use/mention distinction into the second grade classroom? All together now from “Silernt E”: “He turned a ‘dam’ into a ‘dame’, but my friend Sam stayed just the same!”