While the people at Emory University continue to debate what it means that a biological anthropologist on its faculty described herself as "the nigger in the woodpile" of cultural anthropology, the University of Virginia is officially appalled because a medical center employee expressed her distaste for the Washington Redskins football team by saying that the name is as "derogatory to Indians as having a team called Niggers would be to blacks." University President John T. Casteen, III has issued a statement calling the comment "offensive" and "insulting," while UVa history professor and national chair of the NAACP, Julian Bond, has called for a public apology and sensitivity training for the employee who uttered the epithet. "My first impulse is that this should be a dismissible infraction," Bond wrote to a black faculty email list; "but free speech protections I hold dear tell me that shouldn't be so." Bond stated that the UVa administration "ought to disavow such language."

UVa's and Emory's handling of two cases in which individuals have been publicly pilloried for uttering the word "nigger" on campus tells a disturbing story of collective incomprehension in which the desire to root out and punish racist speech has reached such a hysterical pitch that reason and context have fallen by the wayside. In each instance, the word "nigger" was enough to ignite accusations of racism and calls for the speaker to be disciplined with both formal sanctions and forced sensitivity training, even though, in each instance, the offending commenters were actually using the problem term critically, to attempt to articulate their concerns about patterns of professional ostracism (in Worthman's case) and to criticize racist speech itself, in the UVa case. There is a displaced puritanism to all of this--as Captain Yips has noticed, racism has become the new original sin, the horrible cultural failure we must all attempt ritually to purge. There is also a mercenary quality to it. The rewards for discovering proof of campus racism are large.

Consider the recent rash of "hate crimes" at Northwestern. Two were faked by a freshman zealot who believed staging his own near-knifing would facilitate positive change; the rest consist of several instances of offensive graffiti--swastikas, racial and sexual slurs--that have appeared on campus since last February. There are no suspects in these incidents, and police believe at least one was also faked. But students have been up in arms for months, protesting, holding anti-hate rallies, and demanding that the university administration respond. They are getting their wish. As Eric Zorn rather cynically notes in the Chicago Tribune,

If isolated, alienated racists or heartless pranksters are behind the unsolved incidents, they've been rewarded richly with what all such idiots crave--attention.

And if provocateurs seeking to move the cause of tolerance and diversity to the top of the campus agenda are behind the vandalism, they too have been rewarded with what they crave--dramatic demonstrations of solidarity, a formal student-government reprimand of the university for failing to aggressively counter the incidents, the addition to the student handbook of a policy stressing mutual respect and a program for new-student week about the value of diversity.

Either way, "positive things are coming out of this," said Mishkin. "It's galvanized students to think about how to be more proactive in their activities and their friendships to make sure all students on campus feel comfortable here."

For a crisis that's basically insignificant and built in part if not in whole on lies, that's not bad at all.

Many would argue that there is nothing wrong with banishing the word nigger, and that it's simply perverse to argue that it has any redeeming value except as a reminder of the history of racism. But many would also, I suspect, have a big problem with where the logic of hate speech took the people at Gonzaga University recently. There, the word "hate" was itself declared to be an example of "hate speech," and censored accordingly: when a conservative student group advertised an upcoming talk by Dan Flynn, author of Why the Left Hates America, the group's flyers were torn down and the group was reprimanded because some felt that "the Left hates" was "discriminatory." If censoring the word "nigger" looks like a no-brainer, censoring the word "hate" looks like a non-starter. But at the bottom of hate speech's slippery slope lies the absurd tautology that is Gonzaga's concept of civility.

Atlantic Blog has more on Northwestern; John Rosenberg has more on UVa, including some pointed comments about how the current eagerness to display racial sensitivity there has much to do with an unsolved and, to the minds of some, quite suspicious hate crime that took place at UVa last year.