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Tuesday, March 07, 2000
Why do we insist on viewing American history through a prism of artificial happiness and heroic myth? Are our sensibilities so delicate that we're incapable of dealing with strong imagery generated by our least sentimental narratives?
Is the preservation of group self-esteem a higher calling than frank discussion of our nation's checkered racial and political history? Judging from the anecdotes emanating from the front lines of the Culture Wars, protecting tender feelings will trump the legitimate expression of ideas nearly every time.
I'm particularly embarrassed by this overreliance on intellectual bad faith whenever black college students opt for censorship over exchanging ideas. Given the historic disadvantages of being black in America, avoiding ideas is a luxury we can ill afford. Black students need to be enthusiastic brokers of ideas, not censors.
Last week, the editor of Oklahoma City University's college newspaper, The Campus, resigned after black students complained about his decision to run Post-Gazette cartoonist Rob Rogers' Confederate flag cartoon.
Rob's cartoon ran in the Feb. 25 edition of The Campus. It features a beer-bellied white man, admittedly a stereotype, saying how much he likes to "look up the flag pole and see a symbol of our Southern heritage hangin' there."
In panel two, a pair of legs hangs parallel to a pole, suggesting a black man has just been lynched. "What's so wrong about that?" the redneck asks disingenuously.
Though didactic, Rob's cartoon makes no bones about his belief that the Confederate battle flag is nothing but a symbol of violence in the Old South. It isn't subtle.
So why did six black OCU students complain that Rob's cartoon was racist (i.e. anti-black) given its clearly stated sentiments? Does the image of a lynched black man override all other considerations? Why did The Campus' editorial board cave in and apologize rather than use the opportunity to discuss racial sensitivities and the limits of political satire? In a state where debate about reparations to the survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Riot is raging, wouldn't students have benefited from a forum about symbolism and violence?
Instead of courage under fire, the editors issued a wimpy mea culpa. Editor Brian Sargent fell on his sword. A sensitivity task force is already hard at work at the Methodist university, making the college a safe haven for intellectually bland material.
What would John Wesley have said about this wholesale abandonment of principle in the name of political expedience? For one thing, he would have understood that caving in to the misunderstanding of six well-meaning but naive students is far more patronizing and racist than anything the cartoon itself purports to say.
Wesley was an intellectually nimble religious leader. He would've been appalled by the willingness of a university founded on principles he espoused to embrace mediocrity in the name of a namby-pamby spirit of inoffensiveness.
For those students who attended high schools that didn't do a great job of cultivating critical thinking, political satire may be as foreign as Sanskrit. But American history is so much more interesting than what censors allow us to believe. It's especially cruel to allow students who don't understand who their friends and enemies in the media are to wallow in militant ignorance.
Shouldn't we ask the descendants of slaves to abandon intellectual shackles in a university setting? How long will they be spared the burden of unpleasant historical realities? Somewhere on campus, there's an icon of Christ hanging from the cross. What do those who recoil in horror from images of lynching think about that?
Tony Norman's email: tnorman@post-gazette.com