On the pendulum, the benefit of the doubt, and the role of public scholars.
There’s a school of revisionist historical scholarship that actively seeks
to recover and portray the less attractive (or, to put it more bluntly, bad) sides
of idealized public figures and events, to tear down (for example) some of the “great
men” on whom historiography long depended. I think that kind
of revisionism was never as widespread as its critics would argue, and is
largely absent from contemporary work; but it certainly was a prominent part of
the field in the 1970s/80s era, accompanying (if not necessarily caused by) the
rise of multiculturalism. And while I find it too simplistic in its attitudes
toward its subjects—mirroring, ironically, the mythologizing of the “great man”
narrative and its ilk—I also understand and to an extent agree with the
rationale behind such revision. After all, when the pendulum has been located
so consistently on one side of its arc, it almost has to swing all the way to
the other if a full trajectory is ever to be achieved.
But when the pendulum swings, it has effects in the present as well as on
our sense of the past—contemporary impacts that are just as understandable but
that also have the potential for more genuine damage. Exemplifying that
possibility would be the infamous Duke
lacrosse case, the 2006 incident in which three white members of that team
were accused of rape by a
young African American woman (a student at nearby North Central Carolina
University) who had attended (and likely stripped at) a house party. In an
earlier era, perhaps even a couple decades earlier, the privileged white male
students would have been given the benefit of the doubt, and it would have been
very difficult to charge them with assaulting an African American woman; in
this case, thanks in part to that swinging pendulum and to other factors
(including an overzealous
and unethical prosecutor), it was the woman whose story received that
benefit, despite substantial evidence in favor of the lacrosse players’
stories. More than a year later, long after the team’s 2006 season had been
canceled, the coach forced to resign, and so on, the state’s Attorney General
dropped all charges against the three players and the prosecutor was disbarred;
the fallout
from the case has continued in a variety of forms since.
One of the more controversial aspects of the case were the actions of the
so-called Group
of 88, a group of Duke faculty members who co-signed an
advertisement (which appeared in the Duke
Chronicle but is no longer available online) addressing both the case and broader issues of racism and sexism on
campus. As a public scholar, one who works to address contemporary as well as
historical issues and themes, I’d be a hypocrite to critique any other scholars
for doing the same. On the other hand, by addressing an ongoing investigation
and trial, and moreover one that involved students at their own institution,
these faculty members did reflect, at least in part, one of the dangers as the
pendulum swings—that too overt revisionism does not allow for the kinds of
thoughtful and nuanced analyses that scholars would otherwise bring to their
work. A statement addressing issues of sexism and racism in general, on the
other other hand, would be a perfect example of how public scholars can engage
with the broader issues at stake in any event, while reserving judgment on the
specifics of a case and hopefully in the process contributing to communal and analytical
narratives rather than divisive accusations.
Next case tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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