Black Harvard law prof urges students to not invent racism out of thin air

When black tape showed up on the pictures of some (but not all) black professors at Harvard Law School, black activists were quick to see it as white racism.

Other observers said the “defacement” was more plausibly done by black activists themselves to gain leverage for their demands, evidenced by numerous red flags in the placement of the tape and timing of the “vandalism,” as my colleague Jenn Kabbany summarized.

One defaced professor had my favorite response: Randall Kennedy wrote in The New York Times Friday that it was “puzzling.”

Unlike the students who can only see the world through their own narrow lens – who demand that important though flawed historical figures be excised from memory, who fault The Vagina Monologues for not being “trans-inclusive,” who call for the punishment and firing of anyone who challenges their views – Prof. Kennedy hesitates to make a judgment on such thin information:

I have been asked repeatedly how I feel about having been targeted by what some deem to be a racial hate crime. Questioners often seem to assume that I should feel deeply alarmed and hurt. I don’t.

The taping could have been by a law school student, a white student, could convey “anti-black contempt,” OR perhaps it was intended to “protest the perceived marginalization of black professors,” was a hoax or a “rebuke to those who have recently been taping over the law school’s seal” and its slaveholding past, Kennedy said. It’s not obvious.

Rather than wildly speculate, Kennedy wants activists to take a breath:

Assuming that it was a racist gesture, there is a need to calibrate carefully its significance. On a campus containing thousands of students, faculty members and staff, one should not be surprised or unglued by an instance or even a number of instances of racism. The question is whether those episodes are characteristic or outliers.

He’s worried these activists are “exaggerating the scope” of campus racism and “minimizing their own strength” by playing perpetual victims.

Going further than some members of the media (including campus publications), Kennedy actually wants the specifics of this alleged pervasive racism at Harvard:

They complain of a paucity of black professors, courses in which racial issues, though pertinent, are marginalized, teachers whose interactions with black students display far less engagement than interactions with nonblack students, white classmates who implicitly or even expressly question the intellectual capacity of black peers (“You know, don’t you, that they are here only because of affirmative action”) and campus police officers who subject black students to a more intensive level of surveillance than white students. …

While some of these complaints have a ring of validity, several are dubious. A decision by a professor to focus on a seemingly dry, technical issue rather than a more accessible, volatile subject involving race might well reflect a justifiable pedagogical strategy. Opposition to racial affirmative action can stem from a wide range of sources other than prejudice. Racism and its kindred pathologies are already big foes; there is no sustained payoff in exaggerating their presence, thus making them more formidable than they actually are.

With words of wisdom like these, I wouldn’t be surprised if Kennedy’s own mouth were the victim of a drive-by taping by black activists.

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