As many of you might have already heard, the Jena Six incident found an odd resonance at Columbia University in NY. A noose was hung outside an African-American professor’s office door on Tuesday morning. The past two days have seen student protests, press conferences, and emotional meetings with university officials. The NYPD hate crimes unit is testing the rope for DNA.
The professor, Madonna G. Constantine, whose specialty is race, racial identity and multiculturalism, stood before protesters at midday and thanked her supporters… “I think we are all pretty much mystified as to why it happened,†said George A. Bonanno, a professor of psychology. “This is an institution that prides itself on having open dialogue about race and fairly progressive ideas.â€
At an afternoon news conference, Deputy Inspector Michael Osgood, commander of the New York Police Department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, said, “Right now we have no suspects, but we will go down all investigative pathways.†He ruled out any possibility that Professor Constantine had hung the rope herself. link
So amidst the uproar, why has Columbia University refused to turn over security video tape to the police?
Police and students remain baffled as this move only ignites conspiracy theories. Not to further fan the flames here, but the Associated Press, New York Magazine, and that bastion of rational thought, The New York Post, have already named another professor at Columbia involved in a legal tussle with Constantine:
Court records show Constantine filed a defamation lawsuit in May against another professor of psychology and education, Suniya S. Luthar. The one-page filing in Manhattan’s state Supreme Court also accuses Luthar of libel and slander and asks for $100,000 in damages. The single page was signed only by Constantine and does not indicate if she had a lawyer. Luthar declined to discuss the lawsuit. She wouldn’t say if she had spoken with police about the noose. “I think it is an unspeakably ghastly, horrible incident,” she said Thursday.link
Any current of former students at Columbia care to comment on this? Ever had Constantine or Luthar as teachers? This case grows murkier by the day, but no matter the outcome, it’s dismaying to realize we’re so far from ever becoming a race-blind society.
Daily New says that there was some sort of competition over being assigned to some new post (no doubt heavily endowed)
When I heard about this, all I could think of was, “At Columbia? Really??” I know, shame on me for thinking NYC was above the fray.
Agreed. 🙁
Just to clarify… both are professors at Teachers College, an education-focused grad school at which I doubt there are as many desis as at Columbia undergrad. I do wonder what the defamation lawsuit is about though.
I’m glad that Columbia students and faculty have shown that this of type hatred is not welcome on their campus.
Ah…wonderful Teachers College! I did an astonishingly mind-numbing MA program there a couple of years ago. I somehow managed to escape with my intellect intact. I’ll be watching this story with bated breath.
I’m glad that Columbia students and faculty have shown that this of type hatred is not welcome on their campus.
which is all well and good. i expected nothing less. we have yet, however, to establish that it was done by a malicious ‘other’ as they haven’t released the tape yet. Gawker seemed to think that this was, as the least likeliest rationale, possibly Colombia’s assertion of 4th amendment rights.
since i’m your representative from the vast right wing conspiracy, i can report back that a certain giddiness is just beginning to take hold. a rule of thumb in conservative circles is when the liberal press does not report the race of a suspect, the suspect cannot be white…a rule that played out true in amardeep’s recent hate crime post.
and just as the left is concerned about the noose epidemic, the VRWC likes to talk about a fake hate crime epidemic, like duke lax, anti-muslim posters at GWU, and one sad sack who burned a cross on his own lawn.
so now that columbia is balking at releasing the tapes, the conspiracy theorists are going wild, specuialting that the tapes will show up in sandy burgers socks or william jeffersons freezer.
This type of thing is completely unacceptable in any civilized society. My only problem is with the “hate crime” investigation. The utilitarian in me does not like to criminalize symbolic acts, however despicable they may be and however much I may detest and abhor the person indulging in such acts.
1) i had the same thought as manju running the conditionals through my bayesian filter
2) it’s dismaying to realize we’re so far from ever becoming a race-blind society. i don’t want to be snarky, but come on, many of the people on SM don’t want a race-blind society, they like hanging out with other desis in preference to other races. hatred, violence, etc. = bad. but there’s no point being blind, and the emergence of websites like SM for people generally from one particular race shows that we see color vividly and critically (that being said, though SM obviously isn’t race blind, it generally isn’t exclusive either, which is a major issue).
by the way, the so-called “anti muslim” poster was a satire (at least an attempt)targeting the “islamo-fascism” awareness week held by a ‘conservative’ (the word has lost its meaning) student group.
This is not like Jena 6. I have talked to Alan Bean who assisted the Jena 6 crowd. If you want to be shocked, you got to read all the details of that story. This is nothing. There will always be an isolated racist or even a non racist weirdo who wants to commit trouble by hanging a noose for kicks. We can not condemn an entire institution based on a random incident. The problem is when it is accepted by the authorities as not a big deal. In this case, the Professor is getting a lot of support from whites and other races. In the Jena 6 case, there was little discipline or action initiated by the white people in the school. Columbia should just hand over the part of the tapes from that time frame. It should not affect the privacy of others if they isolate the timeframe.
A few weeks back, the same thing happened at UMD campus in College Park… Is this spreading all across universities too?
in case that cross buring link didn’t work, here’s another report:
Please. The way they treated Ahmedinejad says it all. Here’s Sunsara Taylor on the same event cicatrix discusses here.
I woudn’t be surprised if Constantine did this herself. Why? For a host of reasons: (1) publicity and (2) buttress her lawsuit against Luthar. Personally, I find the whole affair fishy.
maybe, just maybe prof.constantine did the deed herself or outsourced it.
Kinda ironic that somebody whose name is a homonym of Luther is suspected of this event. Did you know Luthar’s secretary is named Malkum? Personally, I live by the philosophy that no noose is good news.
Agreed. If Columbia should be mocked, I think Bollinger’s pathetically defensive attempt at grandstanding with Ahmedinejad ranks far higher among the reasons.
i can’t believe these publications named names. even when the investigating officials, and all others involved, were reluctant to. if luthar isn’t found guilty, it wouldn’t matter. her reputation (teaching at an ivy league school) is already ruined.
if luthar is guitly, she should be appropriately punished. but her involvement is one of many leads, officers say. constantine wrote a book on racism. that’s enough to bring out any bigot in nyc to perform such atrocity.
terrible as heck, regardless.
oh no dravidian lurker… you went there. the HMF-Manju NOI back-and-forth begins soon.
true. many people seem to think there’s something fishy about this case.
aside, I will say that I find it disappointing that something has to be so overt, so hateful in higher education in order to get attention or to ‘get people (campus officials) talking.’ I’ve been a tutor, student teacher, etc., and it’s disappointing that people never discuss the many ways in which different groups of students feel maligned in the classroom.
forgot to add- it’s particularly ironic that this took place at teachers college too.
razib, Of course. Identity-politics is terrible if left to fester on it’s own and create tumor-like political schisms as it thrives but we all do practice a certain unconscious style of identity-politics as we shop for music, look for books and join online communities.
Manju,
you must be behind on your Limbaugh. That’s “Sandy Burglar” I’m not sure what the particular fundie-con appellation for William Jefferson is, however.
black. the other six letter appellation starting with n is reserved only for smoke filled rooms in country clubs.
While we are on the subject of obvious racial slurs. http://www.theage.com.au/news/cricket/monkey-chants-for-symonds/2007/10/12/1191696091293.html
Ahem…”while we are on the subject of stories that have been on the news tab for a freaking day and are just barely tangential to the subject of the post…”
As an outsider I find the noose thing funny although politically incorrect.
that is whole tragedy. If the person is innocent they have been screwed over.
Is suniya luthar a desi ?
I highly doubt the Suniya woman is responsible for it. I actually find it odd one professor sues another for defamation. Constantine sounds a little oversensitive with the lawsuit. She has a right to freak out if she feels isolated by the community. But if she is getting all the support she needs, she needs to isolate the jerk who did it as the guy who is outnumbered. Otherwise your life is going to be hell if you let every prank, no matter how offensive, get to you.
These incidents will continue to happen even if he have a color blind society simply because there will always be one freak somewhere who will want to rile things up for his pleasure. I don’t think anyone should be embarassed by this incident unless the university keeps covering this up. The controversy blew up to such a huge degree in Jena not because there were nooses. It was the way the white community reacted in the days subsequent to that incident.
Yes.
Is it really necessary to refer to her as “the Suniya woman” for pete’s sake?
I don’t ever want to sound disparaging about a comment, about anything, because someone lives outside the US, but in this case the “noose thing” is rather a lot more of an issue that just political correctness. Maybe you haven’t been to the US (or been here long enough) but the history of US white/black relations makes a noose a quite frightening object, loaded with the historical connotations of being arbitrarily strung up on the nearest tree for whatever reason the nearest white people found objectionable. This continued well into the 1950s, so it’s not something that occurred centuries ago either. Whoever did it, there’s nothing funny about it.
Not in Oz mate. Ahem! was that a raw nerve there?
Ah razib… how I’ve missed your smugness. As I’m sure you’ve missed my priggish tone (great choice of words, by the way).
I got somethin’ you can run through ya bayesian filter right here, pal.
I think that the goal of being “race blind” is really misleading. Unless we actually deconstruct the idea of race itself, on all levels, being blind to it doesn’t make any sense. In fact, I believe there’s some evidence that “colorblind” ideology runs counter to progress on our struggle with race and racism, insofar as it denies something that is real on a social level whether we acknowledge it or not.
As far as this incident… Dr. Constantine, from what I know and from people who know her, is a gentle and good soul, and this noose incident is heinous and shameful. I am curious to see what develops from it. I have serious doubts that some angry grad student of a desi professor would hang a noose over a black professor’s door.
I think this is just part of a larger campaign by some individual at TC… this is not the only incident. There have been at least two reported incidents of racist and/or Nazi graffiti scrawled in bathroom stalls there. I’m sure they targeted Constantine because she is a prominent voice on issues of race and social justice.
Some poor Desi Prof. gonna get all the hate because of the NY POST ARTICLE.
did Ahmadinejad use this bathroom?
I got somethin’ you can run through ya bayesian filter right here, pal.
wow, i’m astounded by the ‘come back.’ we’ll see what’s on the video tape soon enough.
I think that the goal of being “race blind” is really misleading. Unless we actually deconstruct the idea of race itself, on all levels, being blind to it doesn’t make any sense. In fact, I believe there’s some evidence that “colorblind” ideology runs counter to progress on our struggle with race and racism, insofar as it denies something that is real on a social level whether we acknowledge it or not.
english please?
Identity-politics is terrible if left to fester on it’s own and create tumor-like political schisms as it thrives but we all do practice a certain unconscious style of identity-politics as we shop for music, look for books and join online communities.
not all identity politics are created the same. people riot, kill and discriminate on the basis of race, religion and ethnicity far more often than they do on whether they like white wine or beer, bach or butt rock. that’s why consumer driven globalization won’t bring us all together.
I’ve always felt like desis aren’t proactively racist… they may snub their noses at those they deem to be inferior, but they can’t be bothered to actively hate (gotta hit the books!). That’s something left up to white people…
nor did I suggest as much (i.e. all identity politics are created the same). I was not making the ‘consumer-driven globalization will bring us together’ point either. I was proceeding on the very reasonable assumption that we routinely make decisions as simple as sitting at table A or table B, based on the apparent essential characteristics of the people sitting there. That’s the basic assumption of someone who ascribes to a particular kind of identity politics–that something/someone/some experience will be better simply because it is made or populated by the group to which you assign the most positive values.
fyi, from my own experience and that of my family, I can describe in sickening detail the violence and mayhem sown by ethnic identity-politics, so it amuses me just a tad that you would see fit to remind me of the likely outcomes of widespread adoption of identity-politics, when the wounds it leaves behind are still so raw.
Razib – “english please?”
doth i hear the smarty pot calling the kettle black….?
i think that the axioms of multiplication imply that identity politics = politics. think about it.
Re 13 & 16:
Columbia under Bollinger seems to have been succumbing to external pressure quite a bit. Besides Bollinger’s charming introduction to Ahmedinjad, I recall the attempts to get rid of Joseph Massad and George Saliba in the MEALAC Department, and the current attempt by external groups to deny tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj at Barnard.
Shaad- I’d heard of Joseph Massad, but I looked up the other two profs that you mentioned, and all I have to say is, academia sure is a tough world.
also, kind of off-topic, but I really love the photograph accompanying this post. It’s gorgeous.
especially true in the social sciences. this is not columbia, but another ugly incident was the dershowitz-finkelstein dustup, which led to norm finkelstein and mehrene larudee both being denied tenure at depaul despite otherwise glowing academic recommendations.
i think sen craig should get massad to defend him
Finklestein really did know and on several occasions said/wrote about the likely outcome to his tenure review process. The fact that he never actually published an article in a peer-reviewed academic journal really hurt as well as the fact that most of the arguments from “The Holocaust Industry” were picked out of Novak’s book on the holocaust in american life. That being said, with the Dersh dead-set against him, even if his tone in writing was a bit more civil, he’d probably still be out searching for another job. Most of my awesome professors in middle-east area-studies had no love for the man or his work, but certainly didn’t think he was a bad teacher or deserved the Dersh-bomb by which he was forced out of DePaul.
I doubt the desi professor in this story will face the same kind of rail-roading, unless she is inextricably linked to the hanging of the noose.
Re 40:
nala, it isn’t really that bad in academia, unless your area of interest is the near/middle east. That said, Daniel Pipes’ Campuswatch and David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights do have the effect of muzzling tenure-track faculty even in other fields.
I was proceeding on the very reasonable assumption that we routinely make decisions as simple as sitting at table A or table B, based on the apparent essential characteristics of the people sitting there. That’s the basic assumption of someone who ascribes to a particular kind of identity politics–that something/someone/some experience will be better simply because it is made or populated by the group to which you assign the most positive values.
ok, let’s back up here. part of this is semantical. what is ‘identity politics’? for example, some people have an identity as working class or not middle class. these people organize for their interests. in the context of elite campuses that really isn’t a major factor because elite campuses are already strongly biased toward those of means (no matter the race). on elite campuses ‘identity’ often means race, sexual orientation, gender, etc. and yes, everyone essentializes and stereotypes. that’s a psychological fact, you take the information you have and make the best inferences possible. this is not always racial, the fact i am a registered republican leads many acquaintances to assume i’m religious and pro-death penalty and what not when i’m neither of these things. they generalize because that’s the best model of being a republican there is out there until further information can add more accuracy to the picture. that’s life and i don’t have much of a problem with that actually.
back to what cicatrix said about being ‘race blind,’ i honestly just had to laugh because SM attests to the daily fact that race matters. and, it also confirms that it doesn’t always matter in a negative way, being around people who look like you can be liberating when you are no longer the ‘indian guy/girl’ etc. (this isn’t really a fact for me, but i know it is important for many people) in any case, i was probably being a bit harsh as it isn’t like she was running over her words with a fine tooth comb. but, i think the terminology used in ‘discourse’ can flesh out assumptions and that need to explored some. in the USA today most progressives favor diversity and tolerance, but sometimes we need to ask what we mean in the first place…speaking of which:
doth i hear the smarty pot calling the kettle black….?
yeah, yeah. but you know, i usually talk about facts that can be retrieved via google in 5 seconds, or scientific concepts, when i’m being inscrutable. the former just needs to be confirmed (i usually provide links) and the latter is real (science that is), jargon is necessary because you can’t just use good ole boy language to describe it (or even good ole boy classical common sense, see QM). that is, science isn’t made up word games. it’s word games which map onto to reality in a systematic and coherent way. some of the deconstructionist stuff is also real and worthy, but a lot of it is just crap to mask people’s attempt to force their ideas down your throat. e.g., many people are highly selective in their attempts to interject nuance, highlight subjectivity and deconstruct the concepts used in discourse. for example, there’s no point in deconstructing and understanding the nuance of manju’s politics for many here, he’s a ‘right wing apologist’ or something pretty simple like that 😉 there’s going to be no reflection on manju’s Way of Knowing, which might be embedded in his own Truth. deconstruction is an open-ended process, and generally the process is ended at a point where the people are at the conclusion they wanted to reach in the first place. in that way, it’s often just like theology or op-end journalism, you know the conclusion before you assemble the data.
New York magazine also thinks Prof. Luthar’s name got dragged through the mud by the Daily News…
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/tags/madonna%20constantine
Also whats up with Bollinger calling D-Jad a dictator. He came from behind and won a victory against a powerful incumbent. Thats not really that dictatorial. He might very well lose the next election.
razib,
you cheeky bugger. did you just remove the foundation of cultural studies, historiography and most post-colonial area-studies?
Shaad #45
You’re right, it’s not bad, it’s ugly. Tenure-track faculty can do just about anything they feel like. A good many of them have skeletons in their closets. I know because I am one of the dead bodies. Except no one is asking any questions·
That is why foreign students, Chinese in particular, are so appreciated on US campuses. They don’t say anything.
Ahem! was that a raw nerve there?
Personally, I fear the day when we DON’T have raw nerves about the historical lynchings of black people.
Also whats up with Bollinger calling D-Jad a dictator. He came from behind and won a victory against a powerful incumbent. Thats not really that dictatorial. He might very well lose the next election.
I agree, Bollinger showed a real ignorance of the Iranian political system. Actually, it might have been really interesting if he had pressed Ahmadinejad about his boss Khamenei’s actions.