I thought you might find this one of historical interest.
The Farrakhan Fiasco:
The UMass Amherst Reaction to Louis
Farrakhan’s Visit
Seven months ago, on
March 9th, Minister Louis Farrakhan came to speak at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst. An audience of roughly two thousand listened to a three
hour speech that was, according to most reports, lively, informative, inspiring, and
forceful.
The university
administration's reaction to Farrakhan's visit can charitably be described as hysterical.
A month before Minister Farrakhan was scheduled to speak, the Chancellor,
David Scott, assembled most of his senior administrators and a good many
faculty and staff at his home for a lengthy strategy session, after which he
issued a two-page statement in which he delicately balanced his commitment to the
Constitution and the ideals of free debate against what he described as the
ugliness of Farrakhan's message and the pain it could confidently be expected to cause among
what he tastefully referred to as certain "communities."
In the face of
Farrakhan's
visit, which it clearly viewed in roughly the way medieval Europe viewed the
approach of the armies of Ghengis Khan, the administration mobilized the entire
university. The March 4 issue of
the Campus Chronicle, under the headline "Programs, Workshops Pose
Counterpoint to Speech," described some of the defensive measures prompted
by the impending threat to the university community: A two-week video series on
the Housing Services Cable Network "spotlighting the Jewish and African-American
cultures"; a workshop for faculty, teaching assistants, residence
directors, and student leaders on "Leading Difficult Discussions"
guided by three representatives of the Social Justice Education Program; two
meetings at the offices of the university Ombud at which trained student
mediators from the Multicultural Student Conflict Resolution Team would provide "an opportunity to listen to concerns,
issues and feelings related to the Farrakhan speech [before the evening of the speech, note]; an afternoon
lecture entitled "Talking About Race, Learning About Racism,"; a session that
same afternoon on "Beyond Blacks and Jews: How Students Can Be Allies for
Each Other"; another session, the next afternoon, entitled "Anti-Semitism: What's It All About"; and
finally, on the night of Farrakhan's visit, a protest co-sponsored by the
Newman Center, United Christian Foundation, Episcopal
Chaplaincy, Hillel, and other groups.
Grant Ingle, director
of the campus's Office of Human Relations, described clearly and rather
revealingly the purpose of this extraordinary flurry of activity. "This
isn't simply
a controversial speaker coming that we have to suffer
through," he said. "It's also an educational opportunity." The question
explored at meetings he attended was, he said, "how can
we come together as a campus in responding
to a controversial speaker like Louis Farrakhan?" [Daily Hampshire Gazette, February 11,1994, p.9]
This image of the
members of a university
community facing a controversial speaker shoulder to shoulder, rather like wildebeest turning to confront a marauding lion, is rather startling,
to say the
least, as is the notion that controversy on a university campus is a trial to
be "suffered through." But that is not
the focus of my observations today. Nor shall I address the substance
of Farrakhan's remarks, inasmuch as I did not attend his lecture, and know about it only
through a partial transcript, the accounts of several
of my students,
and fragmentary newspaper reports.
My interest in the
Farrakhan affair can be summed up in two words: Why Farrakhan? Why was the university thrown into panic by the
prospect of a Farrakhan visit? Why did the entire administration, from the
Chancellor on down, treat an announced lecture as a threat to the safety, the sanity, the
integrity, the very life of the university community? What does this reaction
tell us, not about
Farrakhan, but
about those who run the university? And, inasmuch as the university's reaction to Farrakhan,
however bizarre, was of a piece with the
reaction of many other American institutions, officials, and individuals to
Minister Farrakhan, what does this affair tell us about significant segments of
American society?
The administration's answer to these questions can be
inferred easily enough from the opening lines of the statement issued by Chancellor Scott a month before
the lecture:
The messages from Mr.
Farrakhan's organization are prompting intense discussions and deep soul-searching not only among the communities which feel directly the pain of the hate and stereotypes from those messages but also among various quarters
of the African American community.
It is to be expected that
the same discourse and emotions would take place on our campus at the news of the impending visit
of Mr. Farrakhan at the invitation of students.
But this cannot possibly
be an adequate explanation of the university's reaction. It is a principle of
reason widely understood and well established that
what counts as a good reason in one case must count
as a good reason in all relevantly similar cases. Now,
there are many, many speakers whose messages cause pain to members of the university
community and prompt intense discussions in various quarters - speakers who defend the theses of
Sociobiology, for example; speakers who celebrate the fall of communism, or the virtues of the
free market, or
the Christian promise of salvation; speakers who call for "the end of welfare as we know it," or advocate the death
penalty; and speakers who insult the intelligence and mock the sufferings of the poor
by claiming that in a capitalist economy workers are paid a wage equal to their
marginal product.
All of these speakers, and many
more, prompt
intense discussions and deep soul-searching among
the communities which feel directly the pain of the hate and stereotypes from those messages, and yet the Chancellor is not moved by the prospect of their
appearance on campus to pull up the drawbridge,
lay in provisions for a siege, call emergency strategy sessions at
his home, and issue statements to the
university community.
My colleague, Michael
Thelwell, put his finger on the essential point in a follow-up article printed
by the Valley Advocate a week after Farrakhan's
visit. Thelwell was asked by the Advocate
reporter, "The basic question is, What is your response to the Farrakhan
lecture?", and his reply was, "What is your interest in writing about this? Why are you writing
about it?"
Michael was not merely
being puckish, though he is perfectly capable of that. His point was that the reaction of the entire university and newspaper community to Farrakhan's visit was so
disproportionate to the event as to call for an explanation. Clearly, there are
certain as yet unidentified differentia that distinguish Farrakhan's visit from
all others. What might they be?
The answer appears
quite simple: Farrakhan had in the past made statements
attacking Jews, among others, statements
which others considered ugly and exaggerated.
But that cannot possibly be the end of it, because countless
speakers make statements that others find ugly
and exaggerated.
There are in fact two reasons for
the special response to Farrakhan. One of them was perfectly well understood by
everyone involved in the affair, though it was not considered acceptable to mention it. The other is
equally obvious, though perhaps not so readily available
to the self-consciousness of most members of
the UMass Amherst community.
The first reason, of
course, is that there are well-organized groups of American Jews who have
succeeded in getting institutions such as UMass to treat their
personal concerns as politically important, regardless of any
actual threat to their legally protectable interests. Neither the Nation of
Islam nor any other African-American organization or grouping poses any real threat to the
interests of American Jews, regardless of what their representatives may say in public speeches. The members of the
UMass Amherst Jewish community who protested Farrakhan's visit have no grounds
to fear that his language will
be transformed into actions inimical to their interests. But they have succeeded in getting
others to treat their personal distress or outrage
as a fact of such
public significance that an entire
university campus must be mobilized to provide a context for their distaste for
Farrakhan's
Contrast this situation
with the reaction of those on welfare for "the end of welfare as we know
it." Those statements, uttered in quite socially acceptable language by
everyone from the Governor on up and down the political hierarchy constitute an
immediate threat to the well-being of welfare recipients. Mothers already
struggling simply to feed and clothe themselves and their children must daily
face the real and imminent threat of cuts in their support payments, or even a termination of support all together.
Since I am not myself a mother on welfare, I cannot pretend to speak for those
who are, but an abstract consideration of the matter suggests to me that at
least some mothers on welfare find such statements ugly and offensive. Would the Chancellor
mobilize a month of defensive seminars and training sessions in preparation for
a campaign visit from Mitt Romney or William Weld? I imagine not.
Lest it strike you as
too outré to take notice of the sensibilities of welfare mothers, consider an
example closer in substance to the Farrakhan affair - the sociobiological attempt
to justify the discriminatory treatment of African-Americans. The "pain
and the hatred from the messages" of the late Richard Herrnstein, of E. 0.
Wilson, of William Shockley, and of countless other socially respectable
academics, is felt quite as keenly in the part of the university community I
inhabit as any caused by Farrakhan's speeches, yet no strategy sessions have
been called at the Chancellor's house to counteract those effects.
The political power of
the official Jewish community in America is, of course, not unique. It is a
general fact about American public life that there is a sharp distinction between
those groups whose interests possess political weight, and hence are accorded
respect by governments, by universities, by media commentators, and even by the
courts, and those other groups whose interests, however intensely felt, fall
outside the realm of public acknowledgement.
The distinction is
dynamic and fluid, changing over time in response to political struggle. The
greatest victory any group can win in American politics is the fight to become
one of the officially recognized interest groups, whose private sensibilities and substantive interests are accorded political significance. One of the striking changes of the past fifteen years or so
has been the dramatic decline in the ability of the African-American community to win or
preserve political weight for its interests.
I said that there were two reasons for
the special response
to Farrakhan's visit. The second is that for a very long time in America, white society has found it
necessary, at any given moment, to demonize one or two Black leaders, as the price
for allowing the rest to enter the circle of social and political acceptability. Having enslaved,
oppressed, and exploited people of African descent, whites in America quite
reasonably fear an angry response. So they encourage docility,
submission to their laws, a willingness to
talk, and most of all a commitment to non-violence in those who emerge as
leaders in the Black community. Above all else, they cherish and celebrate those leaders
whose behavior, speech, and demeanor demonstrate that they look to the white
community for validation or approval. Nothing is more threatening than Black leaders who seem
more concerned with the approval of their own followers than with admission into
the clubs, restaurants, study groups, commissions, universities, or symposia of whites.
In each age since before the Civil War, we can find one or a few Black men and
women - more often men than women, interestingly enough -
who are seen as outrageous, unacceptable,
evil. One of the odder aspects of this familiar phenomenon is that a previous
generation's demon may, by a curious metamorphosis, join this generation's
pantheon of honored Black leaders. W.
E. B. Du Bois was demonized in this fashion during the time
when Booker T. Washington was the white man's favorite Negro. Malcolm X stood
in as demon during Martin Luther King, Jr.'s apotheosis. We remember faintly, with some bemusement, that King was
attacked both for his opposition to the Viet Nam War and for his unconscionable
attempt to transform a safely Southern voting rights struggle into a fight for
economic justice in the slums of Chicago. And in one of those extraordinary
miracles of self-conscious self-delusion, by which history is stood on its head, we now
make movies and television specials about Malcolm in which, through the very act of reminding ourselves how
thoroughly he was once vilified, we somehow tell ourselves that he was, all
along, a
tame, proper, acceptable Negro, fit for inclusion in syllabi of even the most inoffensive college
curriculum.
In the end, the
Farrakhan fiasco at UMass Amherst is a lesson not in language, but in power. It
is a lesson in the power of the Jewish community to win protected status for
its sentiments and sensibilities, and in the inability of the Nation of Islam
to win the same status for its concerns. It is, of course, also a lesson in the ability of excluded
groups to play on the phobias of those within the circle of acceptability, so
as to win a degree of attention they would otherwise be unable to command.
In addition, the
Farrakhan affair reminds those of us who need reminding of the effort by the
white community to deny to the African-American community autonomy in the choice of its leaders. Even such moral
monsters as William Bennett, John Silber, George Will, Pat Buchanan, Phil
Gramm, Newt Gingrich, and Pat Robertson, who, given their way, would inflict unimaginable
suffering on tens of millions of Americans, are treated with respect and
forbearance by the arbiters of American social acceptability. One cannot
imagine the University of Massachusetts mobilizing itself to "suffer
through" a visit from any of these gentlemen.
As always, speech is the garb
in which power conceals itself. And the charge of uttering offensive speech is
a disguised call for the repression of a group whose interests are a threat to
those with power.
Since the Farrakhan
affair was about power, not language, and since all politics, as the late Tip
O'Neill reminded us, is local, let me conclude with a wonderfully clear and
self-aware statement by one of the students
who invited Farrakhan to the campus. In the Advocate interview quoted
earlier, Mike Thelwell concluded with these
remarks:
[T]he students have a legitimate - and this
is the most saddening part - need. Those who
invited him do in fact feel marginalized
on this large white campus. At a public discussion before he came, I asked, "why do you do it?" One student
said, "there is this facade and rhetoric of cultural diversity, but there is no real discussion of conditions in our communities, and we thought
Farrakhan would do that. When we bring other
speakers no one
pays attention,
it's business as usual. We invited Farrakhan
and now the President returns our phone calls
and there is discussion in every area of the campus.
