speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

The Perils of Pluralistic Regulation
on records, Eldridge did worse than chance. After Danny Santiago
won an Academy of Arts and Letters award for his moving portrayal
of Chicano life in the East Los Angeles barrio in his novel Famous All
Over Town, he embarrassed many admirers by revealing that he was
Daniel L. James, a 70-year-old jew educated at Andover and Yale. 50
The Education of Little Tree, promoted as the true story of a 10-yearold
orphan who learned Indian ways from his Cherokee grandparents,
sold 600,000 copies, won the American Booksellers
Association award for the title they most enjoyed selling, and was
displayed on gift tables in Indian reservations and assigned as
supplementary reading in Native American literature courses. Studios
competed for the right to film it. Booklist praised its "natural
approach to life." In Tennessee, where the story was situated, the
Chattanooga Times called it "deeply felt." Declaring that it captured
a unique vision of native American culture, an Abnaki poet lauded it
as "one of the finest American autobiographies ever written" and
compared it to "a Cherokee basket, woven out of the materials given
by nature, simple and strong in its design, capable of carrying a great
deal." The New Mexican reviewer raved: "I have come on something
that is good, so good I want to shout 'Read this! It's beautiful.
It's real.' " But it wasn't. The pseudonymous author Forrest Carter
actually was the late Asa Earl Carter, "a Ku Klux Klan terrorist, rightwing
radio announcer, home-grown American fascist and anti-
Semite, rabble-rousing demagogue and secret author of the famous
1963 speech" in which Alabama Governor George Wallace promised
"Segregation now . . . Segregation tomorrow . . . Segregation
forever." 51 If identity can be successfully feigned, biology does
not guarantee acceptance. When Julius Lester criticised James
Baldwin in 1988, 15 colleagues in the African American Studies
Department forced the University of Massachusetts to reassign
him to Judaic Studies. Many blacks repudiate conservatives like
Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell; many women disavow Phyllis
Schlafly. 52
Like any political conflict, the struggle for equal status will foster
excesses. Some feminist critics of pornography have entered unholy
alliances with conservative moralists and religious prudes, threatening
valuable art and literature as well as misogynist trash and
inhibiting sexual expression by women as well as men, homosexuals
as well as heterosexuals. 53 As long as gendered power inequalities
persist, complaints against real sexual harassment may also inhibit
love. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie is a grave injustice to him
and a terrible blot on the reputation of Islam. Suspicion contami-
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