Professor defends controversial remark

A couple of years ago I made a remark at a panel discussion that appears to have achieved a legendary status. It was recorded in the 1995 Duke Yearbook, and now it has been repeated in The Chronicle's September edition of Currents as follows: "This is, after all, a university where a prominent English professor not too long ago proclaimed the `superiority' of Western culture."

I am that not-so-prominent English professor, and I did make the assertion in question. The reason I write now is because the legend-making process has pruned away the context that I continue to believe makes my opinion inarguably valid. It will be interesting to see if anyone can refute my argument.

When I addressed the forum on multiculturalism two years ago, I began my remarks with the comment that, like most WASP heterosexual males, I usually maintain a polite silence when accusations about white male homophobic patriarchy begin to fly. Only a fanaticism of lunatic proportions is likely to draw a response on my part. Such an occasion had occurred shortly before our forum when the writer Amiri Baraka had irresponsibly vilified the West in a poetry reading.

My reply, to the forum, was that the West is superior to other cultures around the world with respect to the status of women. The argument obviously must rest on specific points of contrast between America and other large-scale societies, which I elaborated to my audience as follows:

1. Around 1991, the Supreme Court of Brazil ruled that men were no longer entitled to beat their wives to death, with impunity, on suspicion of adultery. So great an outcry arose against this ruling that within the year, the Court rescinded it.

2. The New York Times reports that, at this time, over 100 million women in both Arabic and Black Africa have suffered the awful butchery of genital mutilation.

3. In India, the practice of suttee--widows being obliged to throw themselves upon their husband's funeral pyre--ceased only by command of the imperialist, colonialist British masters. (Thousands of women every year are now being murdered by husbands in search of a bigger dowry.)

4. Within my own lifetime, countless thousands of Chinese women had their feet turned into doorknobs by virtue of indigenous custom.

I understand that Euro-American women have just grievances against their social condition, but I consider these problems rather minor compared with those in my brief checklist. Moreover, I think similar contrasts can easily be denoted with regard to race relations, class injustice and homophobia.

Hereafter, I would expect any honest use of my statement to include the reasons I said it. Perhaps the yearbook could rectify its little oversight in its 1996 edition, at least by adding the phrase "superior, with respect to the status of women."

Victor Strandberg