Carolina Review Daily » hate crime

This is the face of panel culture!

nkeune — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 22:35:15 +0000

In 1975, Michel Foucault taught a seminar at Berkeley nominally about Emile Zola. However, Stephen Greenblatt, rock star of contemporary American literary criticism and frequent attendee of Foucault’s lectures, reminisces that Foucault rarely, if ever, mentioned Zola by name. Instead, he dealt with the evolving concepts of confession and penance in the medieval Catholic Church, “from a once-for-all, lifelong public status to a tariff system of penalties based upon the precise nature of the sin confessed, to a complex, sliding scale of penitential practices whose severity was determined by the sinner’s inward assent or resistance to the sin he or she had committed.” As the conception changed so too did the mechanism priests used to extract confessions from their parishioners. By the end of this development the Catholic Church started erecting “special confessional booths for privacy” and distributing “increasingly sophisticated manuals for confessors.” Foucault argued that this “pastoral technology” didn’t simply facilitate different modes of confession, but it shaped the way that laypeople viewed and even experienced their own sin.

Foucault’s central lesson that the way in which a person learns to interpret their life determines how they construct and participate in their life’s narrative(s) can be applied to Carolina’s mania for panels. It seems that every potentially controversial event on campus from hate crime hoaxes to the looming threat of Snoop Dogg visiting campus requires a hastily planned panel where the socially conscious meet to agree at each other in a round table format. A Foucaultian (sp?) reading of this tendency might argue that training ourselves to react to every public scandal as a panelable moment directs us to spontaneously respond to each event as if it were a panel topic. Having occasionally attended these panels as a freshman/sophomore, and then weening myself from the habit despite the frequent promise of free cookies and/or beverages, I can attest to the fact that in aiming for the lowest common denominator of inoffensive compromise, public panels of this sort at best arrive at vapidly agreeable but ultimately useless propositions, such as: “racism is bad,” “free speech is good,” “rape is bad,” “Led Zeppelin is good.” Thus, our obsession with panels will cause our thinking on undeniably meaningful issues to be restricted to such bland sentiments, eventually rendering our public discourse anemic and unable to actually solve the dilemmas facing our institution.

Stupid Alert!

jlcrowde — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 07:50:45 +0000

: County Seal

I am so sick of government filling its trophy case with nonsense. Speaking of which, Orange County’s Human Relations Commission is in the news. Ever diligent at their responsibilities (and omniscient in their understanding), the Commission has recently “noticed” that “hate crimes” have increased across the United States. This trend, according to them, has been in effect ever “since the heated debate concerning immigration reform, since the announcement of this country’s economic struggles and since Senator Barack Obama has become the President-Elect across the united states.” Brilliant!

The situation called for immediate action by the commission! Yes! This was no ordinary circumstance; this called for a PDF file. In a document entitled “High Alert!,” the Commission further explains that these “crimes have been towards Hispanics, African-Americans, Arab-Americans, Arabs and persons of Middle Eastern descent, Eastern Indians who have been perceived to be Arabs or of Middle Eastern descent and homosexuals.” But how are all these haters succeeding in the face of hate crime legislation? Alert! Some “hate groups,” they warn, are changing their approach and attempting to use white people as vehicles for their purposes.

For example, between October and November 2008 the commission received a total of 4 reports of “hate crimes” and two reports of “hate bias.” Of the 6 “reports,” 5 involved incidents of vandalism to Obama campaign signs as well as citizenry speaking negatively about Obama in public (the nerve!) Those are the facts ma’am, just the facts. Here’s the call to action: Alert! “Be very vigilant and prepared for possible incidents to occur. From now until May, 2009…remain on high alert for any hate group activities, hate crimes in your local areas and hate bias incidents during this period.”

Boy, I hope May comes quickly! Until then the best we can hope for is that the Human Relations Commission continues to serve as our collective mommy. Sure, with people publicly disagreeing with Obama, things may seem bad. Maybe worse than they’ve ever been. But, the commission is driven by the hope that their work may someday bring about a time when all (white/straight) people can commit crimes void of hatred and that the criminal activity, while it may be illegal, can be done out of love and concern for mankind.

In closing, if you hear local government whining about lack of money or tax revenue and their inability to cut vital programs, email this article to your representative. Somehow I don’t think a fascist thought police force is on the list of necessary government expenditures.

Expensive Free Expression

jlcrowde — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:46:10 +0000

: State’s Free Expression Tunnel

After racial slurs directed at Barack Obama were discovered in the NC State Free Expression Tunnel the DTH Editorial Board explained that “hate still exists in our country.” Fascinating. I guess Erskine Bowles “awoke to [that] painful reminder” as well, and decided to do something about it. So, Bowles, president of the UNC system, created a commission out of thin air to investigate whether it would be helpful to write a new “hate crime” policy applicable to all sixteen campuses.

One may ask, “What is all this hoopla about someone expressing free speech in a free expression tunnel?” The NC NAACP president explains that the spray-painted messages “were intended to create a hostile environment.” Well, if this was the case (and it most certainly was) NC State already has a policy regarding “hostile environments.” The four students involved committed “Hostile Environment Harassment.” Not that it’s hard. All one need do is be “offensive.” These students simply decided to be super offensive. I suppose their thinking was something along the lines of, “If we’re going to be Hostile Environment Harassers, why not go out big?”

The UNC system does not need another layer of vague, unconstitutional, unenforceable policy. It has enough of those. Here in Chapel Hill, for example, we are not “intentionally or unintentionally” to act in a way that results in “adverse treatment” of “a person based on. . .protected status.” Between “unintentionally” and “offensive” what are students allowed to say? NC States’ mistake was to think that its policies were compatible with such freedom.

Bottom line: the racist expressions were stupid, and in bad taste. But since when does the UNC system care about the existence of racism on its campuses? The Black Student movement (BSM) student organization here at Carolina is committed to “expressing black ideals.” The question is, then, “black ideals” as opposed to what? Racism is that belief that one race is inherently superior to another, and, I can only assume that the BSM chose to promote “black ideals” because it believes its set of ideals to be superior to say “Hispanic ideals.” Perhaps someone should inform the BSM that UNC does not permit discrimination based upon race.