Remember: Responding to what your opponent says should always be a last resort. To do so requires the extra effort of reading someone else’s words and considering the implications of unfamiliar or uncomfortable thoughts. The discussion will go much faster if you just assume your opponent has said what you want to argue about and respond to that instead.

Thanks for proving my point. You get an A+ in “Suppressing Discussions of Racism.”

I’m suspicious of all the people defending against the accusation that “all” the people of Jena are racist. I’ve never heard anyone say that.

Exactly! What I have seen is folks critiquing institutionalized racism in the Jena justice system. I’ve seen folks critiquing the individuals that are willing to pass a blind eye to institutionalized racism, therefore helping to uphold it, but how that translates into “all the people of Jena are racist” is beyond me. As Pam pointed out at your place, it’s classic “How to Suppress Discussions of Racism”

Remember: Responding to what your opponent says should always be a last resort. To do so requires the extra effort of reading someone else’s words and considering the implications of unfamiliar or uncomfortable thoughts. The discussion will go much faster if you just assume your opponent has said what you want to argue about and respond to that instead.

Tell me about it. When was the last time someone threatened your life because you disagreed with their interpretation of a poem?

Hee hee. There’s some good satirical potential in that comment.

As for the opposition to people holding vigils in the town, that’s straight up white supremacist shit. It’s been well-documented that vigils work. A lot of the power of racism comes from bullying people who want to be against it by making them feel like outsiders. What vigils do is create the sense of community, so the anti-racists don’t feel so alone and can’t have the racists shame them into shutting up. It also makes the racists realize they don’t have nearly the social support for their views that they tell themselves they have, as David Duke, for instance, is doing here.

It’s times like these when the Ivory Tower seems to get a bad rep. Writing about Emerson and Whitman is so much less exhausting and so much more fun.

Tell me about it. When was the last time someone threatened your life because you disagreed with their interpretation of a poem? And if you don’t have a data set for something, you can (generally) go study it without causing massive uproar with your every word.

It’s times like these when the Ivory Tower seems to get a bad rep. Writing about Emerson and Whitman is so much less exhausting and so much more fun.