To the Editor: We have two concerns about the remarks from members of the school community, students and faculty, that have appeared in this paper in the wake of Spike Lee’s visit. First, we question a rhetorical move, specifically an appeal to the dictionary. This appeal has already diluted the potency of Mr. Lee’s message and threatens to fetter our academic discourse. Second, we lament the tone that has characterized this discussion. Language matters. The words we use to describe and make sense of our shared human experience are important, and they are not neutral. In any context, we must be sensitive to the range of meaning that words possess. Individuals cannot make up new definitions willy-nilly, even invited guests at All-School Meeting. To have a productive dialogue, individuals, on some level, must agree on the meaning of words. If not, the two parties will talk past each other. It is here that philosophical questions arise: how do we know what words mean? How do we choose what definitions to use? The prevailing approach thus far has been to seek recourse in the dictionary, a source appealing for its apparent objectivity. To understand the meaning of racism, this line of thinking goes, let us consult Merriam-Webster’s. This method, however, misses a central point about the function of a dictionary: it is to provide a descriptive account of the ways in which people use language. But in an academic environment, however, the dictionary is too basic to be definitive; it is a beginning, not an ending. For example: if we wish to understand karma, the best place to look is not the New American Heritage dictionary. Why not? Because it will only tell us how twentieth-century American non-Buddhists use this word. If we wish to understand the religious, moral, and soteriological significance of this word, we need to appeal to a different authority: the tradition of thought that has interrogated and studied this term and its meaning over time, the Buddhist tradition. So it is with race. Our tenth graders should understand this point particularly well, having just watched Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X.” The famous dictionary scene, in which Malcolm Little first becomes aware of the pernicious effects of linguistic definitions and connotations, is one of the film’s most vivid scenes. A mechanical turn to the dictionary demands that we accept “white” to mean “innocent,” “pure,” “favorable” and “fortunate.” “Black” means “dirty,” “soiled,” “thoroughly sinister” or “evil.” Shall we accept these meanings unquestioningly because we have imbued the dictionary with unassailable authority? Shall we deny that power can be transmitted discursively? To cling with literal fidelity to dictionary definitions of racism, prejudice and oppression is to assert that the most sophisticated thinking on matters of race in the past fifty years has been done by Merriam and Webster. We reject such a move. Spike Lee’s comment that black people cannot be racist, while perhaps surprising to some individuals in the audience, draws from a body of global scholarship linking race and power. For example, in RACISM AND SEXISM, Paula Rothenberg writes, “Racism involves the subordination of people of color by white people. While an individual person of color may discriminate against white people or even hate them, his or her behavior cannot be called ‘racist.’ He or she must be considered prejudiced against whites and we may all agree that the person acts unfairly and unjustly, but racism requires something more than anger, hatred, or prejudice; at the very least, it requires prejudice plus power. The history of the world provides us with a long record of white people holding power and using it to maintain that power and privilege over people of color.” This understanding of race and power is not limited to American thinkers. In I WRITE WHAT I LIKE, South African anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko asserts, “In other words, one cannot be racist unless he has the power to subjugate.” Related examples abound, and the lineage of this sophisticated engagement with the meaning of racism can be traced through individuals of prodigious scholarship: Cornel West, Michel Foucault, Henry Gates, Glenda Gilmore, Antonio Gramsci, Howard Winant, Deborah Gray White, David Roediger and many others. An understanding of certain terms and the historical and political contexts for the usage is of the utmost significance. To reduce racism to a dictionary definition of personal dislike or prejudice is to minimize – to ignore – the ways in which racist attitudes have permeated and poisoned American society: slavery, disenfranchisement, segregation, steering housing practices, bank redlining practices, police brutality and the unequal funding of public schools, to name a few. These practices were systematically enacted by whites against non-whites. This behavior was racist because it combined individual prejudice with power: the power of the courts, of the police, of the law, of the social order, of physical force. We live in a society that cannot be separated from its history. White individuals still benefit, however unwillingly or unwittingly, from the legacy of these practices, and non-whites are still harmed by them. To reduce racism to whatever tepid stuff is in American Heritage empowers complacency toward social inequality and the entrenchment of white privilege. In addition, this approach supplies poorly informed critics of progressive social policies with blunt weapons to strike down reform. Since the 1960s, opponents of civil rights legislation have pointed to the dictionary definition of racism and invoked with appalling sacrilege Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” before demanding an end to any policy that might address the oppression of non-whites. Finally, incivility has plagued much of this discussion. While this could easily turn into a semantic sideshow, the need for a rigorous, respectful and thoughtful intellectual exchange is imperative. The highest levels of critical thinking to which we hold students in their academic work must not be cast aside when it comes to the more emotionally fraught arena of political and social discourse. Let us return to a conversational model in which listening should balance our need to argue a point. And let us be careful of rigid polemics, which honest scholarship cannot long countenance. While Mr. Lee’s visit has revealed surprising fissures in our faculty and student body, rather than take sides we should imagine a conversation where students and faculty talk with each other, rather than at each other. -Stephanie Curci -Andrew Housiaux -Christopher Jones To the Editor: As a member of the faculty, I hesitate to submit a letter to the student newspaper, but last week’s staff editorial, “Stifled Discourse?” deserves a response. The members of The Phillipian Editorial Board neither invited Spike Lee to campus nor paid his speaking fee, and they make an erroneous assumption that “we brought Mr. Lee to address the community not because he is a filmmaker, but because he is an activist.” Unfortunately, other students have accepted this vision of Mr. Lee’s visit, a vision fueled by his portrayal in the popular media—ET, E! News, TMZ, the blogosphere—and by either a misreading of his filmography or an ignorance of it. Mr. Lee is among the most influential filmmakers of the last twenty years. Given film’s dominance of the art world, it is safe to say he is among the most influential artists alive today. So why invite Mr. Lee to speak on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day? That’s a fair question, but one I do not recall being asked of physician Benjamin Carson or writer-musician Chris Abani. We invited Mr. Lee to campus because among his 35 films, some of the most technically sound and thematically significant deal with the same issues to which Dr. King devoted his life: understanding the truth of history, seeing the world from another’s point of view, and sparking everyone to do the right thing. Mr. Lee’s work also connects to our curriculum; in fact, he accepted our invitation because we use his work in our courses. While the autonomy afforded individual instructors means classes engaged with Mr. Lee’s films in varied ways, the goals of bringing him here were to give large groups of students a shared experience, to ground discussion in this core experience, and to thereby create informed and thoughtful conversation. If some students fail to see that Mr. Lee’s films provoke critical examination of fundamental, contemporary philosophical and social issues, it is our collective failure. It is also fair to question the format of the All-School Meeting. As someone who helped select the questions for the panel, I know scores of students as well as dozens of faculty and staff members posed questions to Mr. Lee. These questions ranged from his biography, to his filmmaking, to his ideas about Dr. King and the role of race in contemporary America. When combining Mr. Lee’s responses to the selected questions with his preceding remarks, by the end of ASM, he had addressed more than 90 percent of all submitted questions. I am not a numbers guy, but that does not seem like “stifling discourse” to me. While our identifying questions beforehand limited a student’s chance to ask Mr. Lee for an internship, it did ensure that we heard from as many students as possible during our short time together. I commend the members of the Board, all of whom are willing to share their ideas with the public each week, but many—perhaps the majority—of members of our community shun that spotlight. Many students were grateful that they could engage with Mr. Lee under the protection of anonymity. To me, empowering those whose voices are rarely heard is appropriate for a day marking Dr. King. I, too, am glad students had a chance to ask additional questions directly of Mr. Lee, and I understand why affirmative action—notably, not a topic broached with Dr. Carson or Mr. Abani or the true scholar-activist on campus last week, Barbara Ehrenreich—continues to resonate: it connects to our own perceived self interest. Affirmative action is a wonderful topic for study and conversation, combining history and ethics with contemporary social policy. I hope we will engage in it, but too many of us have reduced our time with Mr. Lee to this one issue. Rather than adhere to the lessons of Dr. King, rather than listen, rather than understand another’s worldview, rather than transcend personal assumptions and beliefs, even for a moment, many are focused exclusively on this “controversy.” But that, too, is our collective failure. Those of us entering the Chapel last Monday expecting an “activist” to be “controversial” have actually been hoodwinked and bamboozled. We have allowed shoddy and uninformed thinking—from accepting blindly the mass media’s portrait of Mr. Lee, to accepting blindly our friend’s gut reaction to a Spike Lee Joint—to sabotage our experience. We are the student who comes to class with his one obligatory question already spelled out, who spends the entire class period waiting to ask the question rather than listening to what is being said, and who rather than questioning his own thinking simply reinforces it. Finally, I suggest that in writing “Stifled Discourse?” the members of the Board violated a principle of good journalism: they praised their own staff without revealing to the reader that they were doing so. Sincerely, David U. Fox Instructor in English and in Art
