A reader writes in response to my post about Emory's handling of an anthropology professor's use of the "n" word at a scholarly panel:

Nice piece on the Emory flap, Erin, especially your wondering why the assistant professor didn't try to handle the matter immediately or privately. When you turn at the end of the blog to the remark itself, "More to the point, by describing herself as the anthropological equivalent of a "n----r in a woodpile," she is criticizing the very concept of marginalization, and expressing her disgust not with black people, but with the logic of categorical demonization and exclusion that creates, among other things, racism. Her remark was not, in this respect, gratuitous or non-germane. It also was, quite arguably, not racist", I find myself resisting this.

It is quite clear to me that she was in no way "criticizing the very concept of marginalization"; she was rather resenting her marginalized, indeed victimized, status within the wider field of cultural anthropology. I take your point, in the blog's critique of the excessive, institutionalized response, but let's not grant this nimwit the critical edge she has clearly abandoned in a moment of petulant self-indulgence. There is no critique of racism here, only the politics of professional resentment shellacked in a particularly ugly veneer. And it is entirely, hideously, gratuitous for a tenured (white) professor of anthropology to compare her professional identity to a meddlesome enslaved African. (And you know, that phrase's meaning is not self-evident: while it has come, apparently, to mean a troublesome, unpredictable factor or person, it has also been associated with escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad. The etymology of the phrase, in other words, comes from the perspective of the white slaveholder's regard of missing property as troublesome. How "germane" can that be??)

As for your suggestion that her remark "was, quite arguably, not racist," I would say at this point that a great deal of argument would have to be made to convince me of this. "N------r at the woodpile," in the southern US, in earshot of an African-American junior professor, is an utterance which, while virtually incomprehensible to you and me, is utterly comprehensible to a whole lot of folk, which is why Carol Worthman has wholly earned the rebuke she has received. And I do think it's worth questioning the integrity of somebody who could use such a phrase, in such a context, at such a time.

Unfortunately, university bureaucracies, as you and I know too well, aren't the best places to wonder about these things. But can we really expect a junior professor to confront, even with--especially with!-- a mediating department chair, a senior colleague over something like this? Puhleeze! We can hardly expect them to use the photocopier when the tenured faculty (or their research assistants) are waiting.

Given this, and given the problems of the institutional approach you so ably outline, how _else_ do we go about confronting ugly, arguably racist gestures in the academy?

The first is that it's better to talk about comments like Worthman's than to simply condemn them out of hand. Labelling things racist does not do much to end racism because it is an inherently anti-intellectual act. Trying to analyze where a comment gets its racial connotations and how it may be said to use--and abuse--those connotations brings us closer to an understanding of what it is about certain words or phrases that offends us. Incivility is not an obvious or self-evident phenomenon. It cannot be fought through condemnation alone.

This leads to the second thing I was trying to do with my suggestion that one may argue that Worthman's comment was not, strictly speaking, racist, which was to point out the enormous problem we face when we attempt to adjudicate through punitive means the moral status of someone else's speech. We can debate Worthman's comment all day. We can condemn her for making it, loudly, vociferously, publicly, and, hopefully, thoughtfully. But we cannot know what she actually said, or how she meant what she said, or what the precise context was, or how other people besides Rone heard her. Emory's attempt to mete out punishment on this basis, not just for Worthman, but for her entire department, is frighteningly authoritarian, and a worse violation, to my mind, of decency and dignity than Worthman's original comment.

All of this is to say that the short answer to this reader's question about how to respond to perceived instances of racist speech on campus is to meet reprehensible speech with more, and much better, speech. I'd welcome additional reader comments.

UPDATE: Ralph Luker has more, including an interesting history of the offending phrase.

UPDATE UPDATE: Eugene Volokh agrees with my suggestion that Worthman's remark need not be understood as racist. An irony here: Worthman's accuser is a linguist. Her sense of language's nuances seems, in this instance at least, to have failed her.