RE: RE: Auburn follow-up

>>>>> "jack" == Jack Bornstein <[email protected]> writes:

  jack> BTW, I'm just playing a little bit of devil's advocate
  jack> here... 

In the spirit of confession, I don't have *tons* of patience for even
hypothetical advocacy on this issue. Just so you know. :>

        I really hope the courts rule in favor of Auburn (if
  jack> it ever even gets that far) and that this event heightens
  jack> public awareness of racism. They'll probably settle anyway.

Public awareness is pretty high; I'd like to hope it will help
heighten public (where that means "White") *revulsion* and disgust at
racism. More of that would be super helpful.

  >> I'm not sure what you mean by "valid case", but defamation is the
  >> (1) act of harming the reputation of another by (2) making a
  >> false statement (3) to a third person.
  >>
  >> The school did (1) and (3) but not (2).
  >>
  >> Speaking morally and politically, the school did a *good* by
  >> harming the reputation of these people. And legally if what they
  >> said of them is true, then it isn't defamation.

  jack> Agreed.  And legality is what I'm addressing, not morality or
  jack> politics.  The legality of it is what's "slippery" to _me_.

Fine. The extralegal arguments matter, probably more, in the long run,
but legal issues are certainly key now.

  >> Well, it depends. If the University said these actions were
  >> racist, that's one thing. If it said that the students in
  >> question are themselves racist, that's something else.

  jack> Exactly.  If we're talking about defamation, then we need to
  jack> know exactly what the school said about the students, and
  jack> whether it is true or not.

The statement I saw from the Auburn VP (of Student Affairs, I think)
didn't even use the word 'racist', nor did any other public statement
I could find on the Auburn site (which is a bad sign, imo); it did use
the phrase 'racially offensive', which, again, seems a complete
no-brainer to demonstrate. 

  >> It's pretty hard to imagine, under any reasonable definition of
  >> racism, that having a blackface lynch party *isn't* racist.

  jack> A matter of opinion on "reasonableness" (is that a
  jack> word?). 

No, I don't think it's a matter of opinion; it's likely to be a matter
of law, which will involve subject human judgments; but that's only
contingently, if at all, equivalent to it being a matter of
opinion. There are pretty much conventional definitions of racism in
various legal contexts.

I grant there is some circularity in my approach here; I would reject
any definition under which a blackface lynch party was not racist as
unreasonable. (I don't think much, if anything, interesting follows
from this circularity, since we're dealing, in my view, with a case
that is very clear cut and obvious. Definitions that exclude clear
cut, obvious cases aren't likely to be very good tools.)

  jack>That's what lawyers and judges are for. 

Well, yes and no. I think this is an opportunity for a wider debate,
and, despite not being a lawyer, I know how to read and most legal
stuff isn't exactly rocket science; it's not as hard as routine
technical material most of us read and assimilate daily, imo.

        If I were a
  jack> lawyer for the students, I'd want the definition to be very
  jack> narrow. From http://www.dictionary.com: "The belief that race
  jack> accounts for differences in human character or ability and
  jack> that a particular race is superior to others." 

If I were a laywer for the students, I'd be so ashamed of myself I
couldn't get out of bed in the morning. That having been said, that
dictionary.com definition sucks, but let's run with it.

Would you agree that lynching implies the belief on the part of those
who lynch (i.e., White folks) of superiority or supremacy over those
who are or were lynched (i.e., black folks)? 

Many interpretations of lynching as a social institution, including,
Frederick Douglass's (who's views in this matter deserve the
affordance of at least some authority), see lynching as a key
enactment (and maintainer and extender) of White supremacy and White
privilege; certainly insofar as lynchings were often tied directly to
sexual access on the part of black men to White women (and vice versa,
I suppose).

As Douglass said, in his "Why is the Negro Lynched" (1894)
(http://womhist.binghamton.edu/wctu2/doc21.htm),

  The presence of eight millions of people in any section of this
  country, constituting an aggrieved class, smarting under terrible
  wrongs, denied the exercise of the commonest rights of humanity, and
  regarded by the ruling class of that section as outside of the
  government, outside of the law, outside of society, having nothing
  in common with the people with whom they live, the sport of mob
  violence and murder, is not only a disgrace and a scandal to that
  particular section, but a menace to the peace and security of the
  whole country.

  ...

  It is commonly thought that only the lowest and most disgusting
  birds and beasts, such as buzzards, vultures and hyenas, will gloat
  over and prey upon dead bodies; but the Southern mob, in its rage,
  feeds its vengeance by shooting, stabbing and burning their victims,
  when they are dead.

  ...

  Now, what is the special charge by which this ferocity is justified,
  and by which mob law is excused and defended even by good men North
  and South? It is a charge of recent origin; a charge never brought
  before; a charge never heard of in the time of slavery or in any
  other time of our history. It is a charge of assaults by Negroes
  upon white women. This new charge, once fairly started on the wings
  of rumour, no matter by whom or in what manner originated, whether
  well or ill-founded, whether true or false, is certain to raise a
  mob and to subject the accused to immediate torture and death. It is
  nothing that the victim pleads "not guilty." It is nothing that the
  accused is of fair reputation and his accuser is of abandoned
  character. It is nothing that the majesty of the law is defied and
  insulted; no time is allowed for defence or explanation; he is bound
  with chords, hurried off amid the frantic yells and curses of the
  mob to the scaffold, and there, under its ghastly shadow, he is
  tortured, till by pain or promises, he is made to think that he can
  possibly gain time or save his life by confession-confesses-and
  then, whether guilty or innocent, he is shot, hanged, stabbed or
  burned to death amid the wild shouts of the mob. When the will of
  the mob is accomplished, when its thirst for blood has been
  quenched, when its victim is speechless, silent and dead, his
  mobocratic accusers and murderers of course have the ear of the
  world all to themselves, and the world, hearing only the testimony
  of the mob, generally approves its verdict.

  ...

  The great trouble with the Negro in the South is that all
  presumptions are against him. A white man has but to blacken his
  face and commit a crime to have some Negro lynched in his stead. An
  abandoned woman has only to start a cry, true or false, that she has
  been insulted by a black man, to have him arrested and summarily
  murdered by the mob. Frightened and tortured by his captors,
  confused, he may be, into telling crooked stories about his
  whereabouts at the time when the crime is alleged to have been
  committed, and the death penalty is at once inflicted, though his
  story may be but the incoherency of ignorance or the distraction
  caused by terror.

Surely -- surely! -- representing *that* horrifying legacy of White
supremacy is not innocent of all intention to re-present it in a
present context? Representing lynchings, recreating them, even if only
in the kind of grotesque pantomime the Auburn frats put on, is, if its
anything, the reinscription of White supremacy in their context. It's
as if to say, "look at what we can do to you!" It's hard to imagine a
socially inferior group acting like this about a socially superior
group, say.

        or
  jack> "Discrimination or prejudice based on race." 

That's a slightly better definition, but it also condemns the
blackface lynch party as racist, don't you think? The depiction of a
*specific* subset of the Auburn African American population -- the
White racists, in addition to re-presenting lyncing and the Klan, also
dressed up specifically like one of Auburn's black fraternities -- is
very telling; it surely was meant as a kind of discriminatory
intimidation or mockery, i.e., calling into question the basis upon
which those specific black men make a public claim to be treated with
an equal measure of respect.

(This specificity is also a further defeater, I think, to the lawyer's
claim that this was a *tribute*.)

        That's the only
  jack> defense I'd be able to imagine... i.e. that their party was
  jack> _not_ depicting one of those specific definitions. If they can
  jack> show that to be true, then they can't be defined as racist and
  jack> hence the defamation charges could be upheld.

Given the racial attitudes of White Southerners, I suspect the lawyer
will have a more than even chance of making precisely that case. I
hope he doesn't get the chance. From a legal point of view, I think
the defamation case is dead in the water. 

My suspicion, tactically, is that the defamation lawsuit was filed as
a way to prevent the expulsion; i.e., as a means of finding some kind
of leverage against Auburn.

  >> No, they should be expelled for the right reason. If Auburn
  >> expelled all its stupid students, it, like every other
  >> university, would have a hard time having any classes make.

  jack> Depends on how you define "stupidity".  I'm sure there are
  jack> plenty of low-IQ students who know better than to participate
  jack> in such an activity.  

That's not how I would define it. I meant something more like 'gross
social or moral idiocy'. It really has nothing whatever to do with
specific kinds of intelligence (which IQ is no measure of) and more to
do with the way White people act when they are around only other White
people. I've written about this on Monkeyfist, and I called it the
'creation of White company'; i.e., you can only have parties like
this, I suspect, because the greek system is absolutely segregated
and, thus, because social groupings of White people regularly commit a
range of displays of White privilege, all of which contribute to the
kind of atmosphere in which this kind of party gets planned and
organized in the first place; i.e., they tell lots of racist jokes,
engage in coarse or subtle racist stereotyping, toss around racist
invective and nomenclature casually and w/out being challenged.

In other words, these White people act racistly in countless "small"
ways, daily, habituatedly, without ever or only very rarely
encountering any social friction for doing so.

In short, this doesn't *just happen*, which is one reason why
responsibility is very widely shared.

        In this case, if the frat boys didn't
  jack> understand that their actions were offensive, then they are
  jack> simply stupid.

What they did goes *way* beyond offensiveness. Taking it to be just
offensive just mitigates their culpability by reducing the
harm. Likewise, thinking of them as merely stupid tends to distance
them from *us*, from we smart White folk, and that's also a
mitigating, reducing strategy (irrespective of intent, it does that
work).

  >> Auburn University will not tolerate discrimination against or
  >> harassment of its students. Any form of discrimination or
  >> harassment related to a student's race, color, sex, religion,
  >> national origin, age, or physical or mental handicap or
  >> disability is a violation of this policy and will be treated as a
  >> disciplinary matter." The policy includes a broad definition of
  >> harassment, including but not limited to "slurs, jokes or other
  >> graphic or physical conduct related to a student's race, color,
  >> sex, religion, national origin, age, or physical or mental
  >> disability."
  >>

  jack> Aha... and that's what gives Auburn the right to expel the
  jack> idiots. Thank you for finding that. If they find it not to be
  jack> strictly racist, then at least it was harassment.

Well, recall, the question of 'racist' arises, if it does at all,
because these dipshits have filed suit (or threatened to do so or
whatever). It's not strictly relevant to Auburn's decision to expel
them (hmm, that's not what I mean to say; rather, it's not the only or
primary grounds upon which Auburn *could* expel them).

Kendall
-- 
Jazz is only what you are. -- Louis Armstrong