A professor is forced to resign after making a racist remark: Is he more likely right-wing or left-wing?

"A political science professor at Murray State University has resigned after telling an African American student that she didn't show up early to class because slaves were always late."

I see that the first commenter there says: "Another asshole, undoubtedly a Republican/TeaPartier."

My guess is exactly the opposite. What would possess a professor to say something like that? From my long experience with  professors, I think it is the left-wing professors who: 1. Feel confident in their own goodness on racial issues, 2. Analyze events in terms of race, 3. Think up "critical theory"-type explanations that explore ideas about racial difference, 4. Imagine that it's clever to express these ideas out loud, and 5. Are capable of making the mistake of thinking that the students will know that they are good people who do racial critique that is supposed to be understood as an attack on white people.

A "Republican/TeaPartier" is much more likely to be strongly committed to color-blindness. Ironically, that's something that, in academic circles, can quite easily get you called a racist. (Try asking a lefty lawprof about Chief Justice Roberts's statement that "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.")

Anyway, the professor in this incident is named Mark Wattier. The school is Murray State University. I haven't checked into what his actual political propensities are or what he really had in mind when he said whatever he said that is being reported the way you see it in the linked article. My motivation to write this post was the commenter's reflexive assumption that Wattier displayed right-wing ideology. That is absurd.

***

I noticed that story because John McWhorter and Glenn Loury are talking about it on Bloggingheads. Their discussion centers on whether the student is "lowering" herself by requesting an apology.

"Indeed, there is an internal logic to Santorum's remarks that represents the exact opposite of racism."

Concedes Joe Klein, who supports abortion rights.

ADDED: James Taranto:

Klein ... misses the point.... What makes it racially invidious is not the underlying argument or the rhetorical inelegance with which Santorum makes it. It is the implication that because Obama is "a black man," he is obliged to agree with Santorum.

The notion that the range of acceptable opinion is narrower for a black person than for a white person (or for a woman than a man, or a homosexual than a heterosexual) is a pernicious form of bigotry. It is usually heard from left-wing multiculturalists, as when they attack Clarence Thomas for being black and taking the position that racial preferences are unconstitutional....

"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government..."

The part of the Constitution that by accident was not read in the House's Constitution-reading ritual. Somebody turned 2 pages at once. Intentionally left out was the Three-Fifths Clause. Obviously, the accidental omission was unfortunate, but was the intentional omission wise?

You can read some of the debate on that question at the link. I think it's quite interesting that we list the amendments after the original document instead of integrating them into a new, amended document. Considering how much shame we now feel for the parts about slavery and how much we want to revere the document, you might think we'd have changed our approach to formatting by now. But our traditionalism about the Constitution extends even to the placement of the amendments.

What item of sports memorabilia sold for $4.3 million — a sports memorabilia record?

The original rules of basketball.

The two, signed typescript pages that set out the 13 rules were drawn up by the sport's Canadian founder, James Naismith, in 1891....

Naismith had written the rules to set up a new winter sport for boys at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he was a physical education teacher.

The school had given him two weeks to come up with a new sport and he finalised it the day before the deadline, pinning the rules on a gym bulletin board.

Oh, and by the way...

At the same auction, President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the freedom of slaves held in southern states during the Civil War and was owned by ex-Senator Bobby Kennedy, fetched $3,778,500.

But that's not the original handwritten proclamation, which is in the National Archives. The Bobby Kennedy document is "one of 48 printed copies signed by Lincoln." Bobby paid $9,500 in 1964 for $9,500. Who knows how much of the $3,778,500 comes from the infusion of Kennedyosity.

Also at the auction, this guidon:

"If I invoked the Insurrection Act against her wishes, the world would see a male Republican president usurping the authority of a female Democratic governor by declaring an insurrection in a largely African American city."

"That left me in a tough position. That would arouse controversy anywhere. To do so in the Deep South, where there had been centuries of states' rights tensions, could unleash holy hell."

I was struck by that passage in Bush's memoir, "Decision Points." Bush, of course, ended up getting criticized for seemingly not "car[ing] about black people," so it's interesting to think that his delays — at least as he presents them now — had to do with the history of the South. But look closely as the 2 concerns that slowed Bush's imposition of federal authority in New Orleans:

1. Gender. Bush didn't like the image of the male pushing the female aside. He thought he'd be criticized for that.

2. "States' rights tensions." That's a strange way to evoke the history of racism in the south if you want to convey that you cared about the suffering of black people. "States' rights" was the cry of those who resisted federal efforts to advance integration. Bush was, in fact, being deferential to the Southern governor.

Bush, sensitive to potential criticism about sexism and states' rights, exercised restraint, which exposed him to criticism about race.

There was rapper Kanye West who told TV viewers: "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Jesse Jackson compared the plight of some survivors with being trapped in the "hull of a slave ship".

"Five years later, I can barely write these words without feeling disgusted. I am deeply insulted by the suggestion that we allowed American citizens to suffer because they were black... The more I thought about it, the angrier I felt. I was raised to believe that racism was one of the greatest evils in society," Bush writes. "I faced a lot of criticism as president. I didn't like hearing people claim I had lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was a racist, because of the response to Katrina, represented an all-time low. I told Laura at the time that it was the worst moment of my presidency. I feel the same way today."

He feels bad about this criticism and is contemptuous of those who expressed it, but: 1. His own words indicate that he put racism third on a list of 3 things he was worried he'd be criticized for, and 2. Jackson and West were speaking emotionally at the time when the suffering was going on.

Meanwhile, Kanye West cracked under pussycat questioning from Matt Lauer.

This is the most egregious example of wilful misunderstanding I've seen in a long time.

John Amato must really think his readers are stupid. Shameless.

Rush Limbaugh says there will never be equality because:"some people are just born to be slaves"

How dare you say there's racism in the Teabircher movement? I'm so offended by that notion. Isn't what Rush Limbaugh says just soooooo true?

Amato pretends to wring his hands over the slavery in American history, as if he doesn't know the ways in which we who are free behave as if we were slaves. I can't make myself read the comments over there, but, please, somebody tell me if anyone is smart and honest enough to understand Limbaugh's point.

"Wow! Jimmy Dean. He was pretty cute when he was young!"

What I exclaimed, after seeing that Jimmy Dean had died and Googling "Jimmy Dean" and seeing this...



... and it took me a couple seconds to recover from the dazzle of male beauty and realize the essential stupidity of Google.

What I was really looking for was the old TV show, "The Jimmy Dean Show." What passed for entertainment in 1964:



Was Rowlf the Dog the original Muppet? He was the first Muppet star!

I remember watching that show. I don't have much to say about Jimmy Dean. He seemed like a nice man — I've heard otherwise, but I won't pass the story on. He's dead. Here's a piece about whether, now that Dean's dead, Dean's song "Virginia" ought become the Virginia state song:

Virginia is one of the few states that has no official tune. It's been without one since 1997, when the General Assembly retired "Carry Me Back to Old Virginia," because its lyrics were deemed racist. 

"Deemed racist"? "Virginny" was "where the old darke'ys heart am long'd to go."

The state has repeatedly tried to choose a replacement, notably by appointing a 12-member committee that sifted through 400 suggestions and whittled them down to eight finalists.

One of those finalists was the appropriately titled "Virginia." It was a ditty played for legislative committees by its composer, song-writer and Varina resident Jimmy Dean.

Is the song any good? I can't find an on-line video rendition of it, and apparently neither could the author of the linked column. There's video there, but not of the song "Virginia." It's a video of Jimmy Dean singing his hit song "Big Bad John." Which he didn't write. (It's by Dean and Roy Acuff.) [CORRECTION: Dean co-wrote the song. Somehow I managed to read "Dean and Roy Acuff" as referring to Roy Acuff and some other guy named Dean Acuff! Ha.] And it's a big, big song. I love it. I listen to it every time it comes on "60s on 6" (my favorite satellite radio channel). Go listen to it. I don't think there's a better storytelling song. 

Do I have to mention the sausage too? (NSFW:)

"The art with which 'Dreams From My Father' is constructed to serve his deepest personal needs shows how ludicrous is the charge of Rush Limbaugh and others that he did not write it."

That laughably incomprehensible sentence is written by Garry Wills in his NYT book review of David Remnick's new book about Barack Obama (inanely titled "The Bridge").

I mean, really,the book serves Obama's interests — excuse me: deepest personal needs — so therefore he must have written it himself. Absurd!

Remnick rightly sees that memoir as a bildungsroman in the specifically black form of a “slave narrative,” a story of the rise from dependency to mature self-possession. 

Oh, for the love of God. How does a privileged modern American get to style himself as a slave?

In order to place himself in that tradition, Obama darkens the early part of the story and lightens the concluding sections. He trims the facts to fit the genre, just as he trimmed the events in his Selma speech to fit the black sermon format. 

Trims the facts, eh? Some would call that lying. Or just bullshit.

Obama was not literally a slave in his youth...

Now there's a concession!

... but he was in thrall to false images of his father, fostered by his mother’s protective loyalty to her husband. 

You see the similarity? He was "in thrall" — etymologically, enslaved — to... to what? To nothing. That sentence just says that Obama's mother presented him with a positive image of his absent father. That's nothing like slavery. It's insensitive to slaves to make that analogy. Hell, it's insensitive to common sense!

Since Obama comes to a later recognition of his father’s flaws, the story is crafted to show him shedding false idealism to become a pragmatic realist. 

Which has nothing to do with slave narratives.

The narrative protects him from claims that he is an ideologue or peddler of false hopes.

Yeah? How?

"The proclamation issued by this Office designating April as Confederate History Month contained a major omission"

"The failure to include any reference to slavery was a mistake, and for that I apologize to any fellow Virginian who has been offended or disappointed."

Governor Robert F. McDonnell reacts to criticism with a nonapology: Sorry if you were offended — if you didn't get it.

Top 10 Worst Bible Passages.

Perhaps you will disagree:

1. "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She must be quiet." (1 Timothy 2:12)
2. "Go, now, attack Amalek, and deal with him and all that he has under the ban. Do not spare him, but kill men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and asses." (1 Samuel 15:3)
3. "You shall not let a sorceress live." (Exodus 22:18)
4. "Happy those who seize your children and smash them against a rock." (Psalm 137:9)
5. "When the men would not listen to his host, the husband seized his concubine and thrust her outside to them. They had relations with her and abused her all night until the following dawn, when they let her go. Then at daybreak the woman came and collapsed at the entrance of the house in which her husband was a guest, where she lay until the morning. When her husband rose that day and opened the door of the house to start out again on his journey, there lay the woman, his concubine, at the entrance of the house with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, 'Come, let us go'; but there was no answer. So the man placed her on an ass and started out again for home." (Judges 19:25-28)
6. "And the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity." (Romans 1:27)
7. "Jephthah made a vow to the Lord. 'If you deliver the Ammonites into my power,' he said, 'whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites shall belong to the Lord. I shall offer him up as a holocaust.' ... When Jephthah returned to his house in Mizpah, it was his daughter who came forth, playing the tambourines and dancing. She was an only child: he had neither son nor daughter besides her. When he saw her, he rent his garments and said, 'Alas, daughter, you have struck me down and brought calamity upon me. For I have made a vow to the Lord and I cannot retract'." (Judges 11:30-1, 34-5)
8. "Then God said: 'Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him up as a holocaust on a height that I will point out to you'."(Genesis 22:2)
9. "Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord." (Ephesians 5:22)
10. "Slaves, be subject to your masters with all reverence, not only to those who are good and equitable but also to those who are perverse." (1 Peter 2:18)

"As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion."

The Freedom From Religion Foundation appropriates Butterfly McQueen to proselytize atheism.

"If there is a law that is outdated, impractical, and/or immoral, people should have the right to challenge it."

"Socially, I'd like people to understand that there is a difference between what is right and what is just... Remember, slavery was considered legal at one point. I consider the world’s current modus operandi a modern slave system. I intend to challenge it in any way I can."

Legal philosophy from Henry Matyjewicz, an artist who — it may seem — operates by cutting up and rearranging the posters in the New York City subway stations, an illicit activity for which he was recently arrested.

You can see him in action here and here:



There's some question as to whether Matyjewicz is the real Poster Boy or perhaps only an artist who is using the Poster Boy method and reputation in the gallery setting. In any case, by going public, he got the police to arrest him, which, I note, is a damned effective publicity move. And now, there can be a "Free Henry" movement and complicated arty cogitations about identity and authenticity:

“Henry is one of many individuals who believe in the Poster Boy ‘movement,’ ” [somebody emailed the NYT.] “Henry’s part is to do legal artwork while propagating the ideas behind Poster Boy. That’s why it was O.K. for him to take the fall the other night.”

He added, “Henry Matyjewicz is innocent.”

And there can be the usual protestations about police abuse:

“The police came into a private event,” [said Moni Pineda, who was involved in staging the gallery event.] “They didn’t show a warrant to me or anybody. And the next thing we know, our friend is walking out with a bunch of guys we didn’t know.”

How private was this event? Did the cops ask to come in and get consent? The NYT doesn't say. That would be key if you're going to try to say they misbehaved.

Anyway, here's Poster Boy's photo stream. Basically, it's collage with other people's property. Obviously, it's criminal to destroy the advertisements businesses have paid for — paid the city, by the way, so the citizens who are entertained should see that they are in fact being forced to pay for the entertainment.



That is one of the more juvenile efforts. Here's a pretty good effort at mocking pop culture:



I love the broken compact fluorescent bulb. Yes, much as I hate crime, my sympathy is tweaked when you hit an issue I am passionate about. There's some slightly political stuff in there, but not much, really, unless you count vaguely anti-consumerist material as political.

I lived in NYC and rode the subway a lot in the early 80s when the artist Keith Haring was drawing in the subway stations. He was much less destructive, confining his work to the plain black panels that filled the poster spaces when the city had no ad to display. He wasn't wrecking an ad somebody gave money to the city for. He used chalk — white chalk — so his markings were impermanent. And he was also much more original, creating a distinctive style of drawing and inventing a whole catalogue of symbols. I remember seeing these drawings and feeling slightly nauseated by his appropriation of public property for self-promotion — though the fact that he was completely anonymous at the time made it more acceptable. Who was he to decide that his images were more important than the nothingness of the black panels? Is there never to be any visual quiet? But there was a simplicity and charm to his gift to the city. A sweet, elegant vibe — a light touch — that is missing from Poster Boy.