It hasn’t really hit the national news scene, but for the past few weeks a dentist college at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, has been a focal point of understandable racial fear and anger.
Several weeks ago, somebody at the university began sending racist e-mails to students and faculty at the college, usually sent from free mail accounts at popular web sites such as Yahoo! or Excite. The same perpetrator made bomb threats and, in an extremely noxious display, left a portion of noodles dyed red with a message that it was a black person’s brain outside a black male student’s residence.
There was justifiable outrage at the college over these events and a variety of events designed to show that the college wasn’t racist. Finally last week the perpetrator was finally caught but apparently few people were prepared for the outcome — police arrested a black female student, Tarsha Claiborne, for making the threats. Claiborne apparently confessed to the e-mail and bomb threats and additionaly confessed that she was the person responsbile for the noodle incident.
This shouldn’t be all that surprising — there have been a number of high profile cases of such racial harassment that turned out to have been perpetrated by a member of the very minority that was targeted for harassment.
What was surprising, however, was that vice-president of University Relations at the University of Iowa, Ann Rhodes, chose to make a racist and sexist remark after Claiborne’s arrest. Asked about the outcome of the investigation, Rhodes told the media, “I figured it was going to be a white guy between 25 and 55 because they’re the root of most evil.”
To her credit, Rhodes immediately backpedaled and apologized for the remark, telling a Conservative News Service reporter (College Official Calls White Men ‘Root of Most Evil’) “I feel so horrible about this and I apologized as quickly as I could (Thursday) and I’ve been apologizing ever since. This is the worst thing I’ve ever said.”
The really sad thing about Rhodes’ comments is that she claims she received supportive email from women who agreed with her original statement that white men are the root of most evil. According to the Conservative News Service story on the controversy,
Rhodes, who’s worked for the university for the past 22 years and spent the past 11 years as the university’s official spokesperson, said she’s received numerous e-mails from men who were offended by the comment, along with correspondence from women she said agreed with her comments.
It’s a sad commentary on the current state of civil rights movements that academia has merely replaced one set of stereotypes about minorities and women with another set of stereotypes about whites and men. Rhodes’ initial comments don’t come from a vacuum, as the supportive email she received testfies, but rather is part and parcel of a very popular view within academic feminism. Only a couple weeks ago, for example, a feminist professor of communications at the university I work at gave a presentation about how the First Amendment doesn’t meet the needs of women because it enshrines a white male version of free speech (completely ingoring the fact that it was precisely this “white male” version of free speech which, unlike other countries, protected the rights of women and minorities to successfully agitate for a more inclusive political system — whereas the “female” version of free speech she advocated would have certainly been used to hamper such movements).
Rhodes shouldn’t be fired or forced to undergo sensitivity training. To do so would merely replicate the problems attendant with forcing sensitivity training or expelling other people who make sexually or racially insensitive remarks — it tends to violate their fundamental human rights and moreover it pretends that deep seated racial and sexual animosities can simply be wished away with a brief seminar or swept under the rug and ignored.