[In honor of the
upcoming birthday of an old friend, on which more this weekend, a series on histories
and stories from the Tarheel State! Add your Carolinian responses and stories
in comments, y’all!]
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 Carolina
story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Carolinian histories or stories you’d share?
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