Re: Diversity Issues & Resistant Students:response to Jay

Tony Michael Roberts (roberts who-is-at mail.msen.com)
Sat, 4 Oct 1997 12:01:18 -0400 (EDT)

Hi! I'm new to the list and just wanted to respond to your comments
briefly. A crude reduction of what I think you are saying, a crude
reduction designed to red flag the PC bull, might be "political
correctness is very real from the perspective of those who complain of it
but not at all real from the perspective of those who practice it". Is
that close or do you feel slandered by my reduction?
Years ago, I was speakers coordinator for Northern Illinois
University and brought Dinesh D'Sousa to campus to debate Stanley Fish. I
was quoted in the student newspaper on several times saying that PC
was very real from the perspective of many students and that many
university policies were attempts by faculty and staff to impose their own
values and perspective on a student body which, predominantly, did not
share those values.
The thing that was interesting was the assumptions that came to be
made about my own perspective and agenda on the basis of these remarks. A
little later, I ended up sitting at a table with the male co-president of
our campus gay/lesbian organization handing out literature during
safe sex week. He seemed genuinely startled when I showed up at the
appointed time smiling, friendly and not even wearing rubber gloves or
anything. At the same time, new faces I did not know started saying hi to
me as a walked across campus. It turned out these folks were the local
Pat Buchanan vote.
I really did live the PC debate for about a year. I came into that
debate already convinced that violence against the other rooted in ones
own core values is seldom if ever acknowledged as violence by the
perpetrator (sp). I see PC on campus as one relatively benign instance of
this. The thing that I know now, on the basis of my particapation in that
debate, is how surely one loses membership in any community based on
shared values by pointing out the violence done by that community to the
other. Pointing out that violence must mean that you are one of them
(those being violated) rather than one of us. Both those doing the
violence and those being violated agree in that assumption.
I've come to believe that part of being a member in good standing
of any community is being blind to the violence done by that community.
I've come to believe that every community is a conspiracy of denial where
what is denied is the cost of the communities existence from the point of
view of those outside that community. Alienation from the community is a
matter of seeing us from the perspective of whatever other pays the price
for our existence. This is what Burroughs called a Naked Lunch; that
moment when you look down at your fork and realized what it is exactly
that keeps a critter like you fat and sassy.
This moment is a painful recognition of complicity in a world
where the boundaries between purity and pollution or virtue and violence
shift with perspective in a situation where no one perspective is
priviledged absolutely. We are all either Jews or Germans just depending
on where the latest shift in perspective has left a boudary. Getting a
well socialized academic to see the violence in PC is hard because we all
want all the virtue and all the purity on our side of the line and all the
violence and pollution over with the other. I've come to believe that
hating the other, the person you can not imagine yourself becoming, is as
natural to human beings as sexual attraction. The person who does not
express identity in this way is as rare as the person who is volunteerily
celibate. Those who aren't allowed by their convictions to hate the usual
suspects hate those who do instead.
See Ya,
Tony Michael Roberts