Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Why isn't college opening Lillie Wade's mind? Plus: Seeking the truth about Marilyn Monroe; Pat Buchanan's party switch is about winning, not principles.
Nov 18, 1999 | What did I say?
BY LILLIE WADE
(11/10/99)
Sadly, Lillie Wade is not alone in being uneducated and yet smugly confident in her opinions about race and gender. I just found out last week that my 19-year-old cousin, who is black and a freshman at a small private university, thinks in many of the same ways that Wade does. Both of these young women seem to have bought into the all-too-popular belief today that it is people of color who are hung up on race. The party line for this generation is that if those pesky black, brown, yellow and red ones would stop carrying those chips on their shoulders, they would realize that race is no longer with us and we could get on with the serious business of just being human -- that the real racists today are people of color and their liberal white sympathizers.
As I told my cousin this past weekend, there are major problems with this line of thinking. It makes anecdote (my best friend didn't get into Harvard because of affirmative action) and feelings (black women hated me because black men found me attractive) into theory. Such an approach makes intelligent, rigorous analysis impossible. It is a set of narrow-minded blinders that prevents us from thinking about interracial marriage in anything more than the most worn-out "isms."
If Wade came into my office hours for assistance, I would encourage her to look into the historical, geographical and political usages of the term -- for starters. I would also encourage her to stop "barely listening" and shutting out what boggles her mind and try to understand why someone might compare her ideas to Nazi notions of miscegenation. But I have a feeling that she just might stare back and see me -- a black anthropologist who studies Asian-American families and who is married to a Jewish man (how's that for identity politics?) -- as just another one of those angry black women who still has an ax to grind about Nicole and O.J.
-- Jacalyn Harden
I find it amazing that all Lillie Wade could find to discuss about interracial marriage was the hostility of nonwhites to the topic. What about the lynchings and home bombings done by white men "hostile" to the notion of interracial marriage? Hostility might make you "feel bad," but at least you have the opportunity to live another day.
-- Deborah Taylor
In answer to Wade's question, "interracial" marriage does cause a great deal of conflict for the most bigoted and emotionally constipated members of society -- black, white and otherwise. The Civil Rights movement also provoked much conflict between the "races," in that the most racist members of the "white" group mobilized against it. The Allied armies and anti-Nazi resistance fighters of World War II provoked conflict with the Third Reich; if they had not resisted the forces of tyranny, there would have been a "peace" of sorts. The point is that the conflict is more than worth the just peace and freedom that follows.
-- A.D. Powell
Wade says that her professor, when asked where she could find writings supporting her position, said, "There is, but it's old, and a lot was racist. You could read Nazi literature." Wade then interpreted that she was "being compared to a Nazi," which is something of a stretch to begin with. The article's subtitle, however, referred to "having a professor call you a Nazi." So "You could read Nazi literature" became "You're a Nazi!" While this transformation may have made the episode seem a little more dramatic, it was a rather serious distortion of what actually occurred.
As a graduate student, I can testify that "political correctness" on campus is neither the universal plague that those on the right imagine, nor the complete and utter myth that those of us on the left committed to freedom of thought and expression would hope. Occasions when students are truly prevented from expressing their beliefs should be noted and critiqued, but this was plainly not such an occasion.
-- Paul Waldman
Lillie Wade missed the point in her article about having her views dismissed by her professor. The professor did his job by telling her what current academic thought on the subject of interracial marriage was. Wade did not even listen to the professor's viewpoint. She had already dismissed him as a reliable source because he used "clichid jargon about giving center stage to the marginalized." She writes that she barely listened because she was trying to find a way out of the conversation -- because he did not agree with her.
One of the purposes of college is to experience new points of view. Wade had the perfect opportunity to have a dialogue with this professor and understand the complexities of the issue. Instead, she chose to ignore research that contradicted her and search for research that validated her own hypothesis, which was admittedly based on anecdotal evidence. If her paper was to have any merit she would have had to address that contradictory research. Basically, Wade needs to grow up and realize that she's in college now.
-- Tim Sherman
Get Salon in your mailbox!