"Young whites tell themselves that they had nothing to do with the oppression of black people. They have a stronger belief in their racial innocence than any previous generation of whites and a natural hostility toward anyone who would challenge that innocence. So (with a great deal of individual variation) they can end up in the paradoxical position of being hostile to blacks as a way of defending their own racial innocence."
To whom in the world should I attribute the above quotation? Could it be radical/communist/feminist/black scholar Angela Davis? Perhaps the cultural icon and former drug peddler Malcolm X? Or, better yet, everyone's favorite reverse racist, Louis Farrakhan?
These guesses are not even remotely close. The above quotation is gleaned from the neo-conservative black poster child and Duke Review icon, Shelby Steele. His book on racial politics in contemporary America, The Content of Our Character, if tainted by whole chapters of reactionary and uninformed dribble, has some wonderful moments like this one--ironic, (unintentionally) radical, and (God forbid!) quite structurally similar to the polemics of literary theory.
The best part has yet to come. To whom would you guess Steele was referring in the above passage? You guessed it--the staff members of the Dartmouth Review, the New Hampshire version of our own beloved Review. Steele has taken the position that the far right-wing of American college campuses has situated itself as a victim of the increasingly non-white reality of higher education; as a result, it lashes out at students of color rather than grappling with the changing landscape.
Enter the Duke Review. The Review recently printed an interview with Mr. Steele in part, I would imagine, to position themselves on the side of neo-con black empowerment, bootstrap politics and anti-victimization. Yet what does the Duke Review do issue after issue after issue? It homes in on its favorite multicultural moment of the month (invariably provided by Spectrum or the BSA) and begins its rather uncreative name-calling. Which leads me to the nexus of this column. The Duke Review's problems can be summed up in one sentence.
It is not a conservative publication at all.
A conservative publication suggests that opposing ideological viewpoints will be contested, that a conservative (and ostensibly better) viewpoint will be offered, and finally that the publication's articles will take on a political and therefore intellectual stance. The Duke Review does none of these things and when a staff writer tries to do so, he or she inevitably shoots him or herself in the foot with some irrelevant insult.
Case in point: The Duke Review, in an astoundingly ingenious move, based the better part of their December issue on a Chronicle letter by one Dana Chavis. Although I haven't seen the letter, I will assume that the Review represented it fairly (probably poor judgment on my part). Chavis apparently wrote that "Each cultural group represented on Duke's campus deserves at least a department of its own." This perspective is an utterly foolish one with which neither I nor any clear-headed individual could rationally agree. Yet, in the eyes of the Duke Review staff, Chavis' comments suddenly become emblematic of the leftist community of our campus. Editor-in-chief Nick Felton writes a parody of a "disenfranchised" "African-Latino-Asian-Irish-American student" who demands a department of his own. The story is entitled "Megaculturalism at Duke" and the Duke Review has once again in brilliant fashion deconstructed the general idiocy of all campus liberals. What the Review never gets around to doing, however, is offering an alternative paradigm. I believe nobody at the Review is dumb enough to accept an entirely stable academy, one which crystallizes itself in an 18th-century logic, yet if the ghettoization of PC politics is so outrageous, what do you suggest? Can you do more than taunt someone whom few people agree with anyway?
Contrary to popular Review opinion, anyone left of Atilla the Hun does not hope to steal the Review from newspaper bins. Liberal students do not shun conservative thought for fear of having their "politically correct" beliefs undermined. People don't read the Review because it's a rag. People don't read the Review because it substitutes insults for substance.
I write this column because I care. The Review shows flashes of usefulness. In December, a story on campus feminists briefly broke from its rantings to acknowledge that women do deserve some space of their own. Last month, Editor Emeritus Tony Mecia fleshed out some legitimate problems with the lax and unbalanced nature of Duke's English department. Unfortunately, these stories degenerated into vague stereotypical sketches. And when all is said and done we are left with a neolithic, reactionary, incomplete position.
When all is said and done, we need substance. Not nicknames.
Jay Mandel is a Trinity senior.
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