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

Notes
genetic predisposition to crime." He added disingenuously: "the suggestion
that this is political is offensive to the N.I.H. and personally offensive
to me as an African-American." The Secretary of the Department of
Health and Human Services, also African American, denied that the
National Institutes finance studies of the relationship between race and
crime or violence. "I have full confidence in the scientific and ethical
merit of the Public Health Service's research activities on the problem of
violence and pledge that these programs and their leadership are free of
any racial bias." The president of the Association of Black Psychologists
denounced the conference as "a blatant form of stereotyping and
racism." A spokesman for the University of Maryland, which had organised
the conference, called this "political correctness in motion. The
University of Maryland has had conferences on racism and sexism, and
just having such a conference doesn't mean the university endorses
racism or sexism." In fact, the conference was to begin by critically
examining a 1970s fad—the extra Y chromosome—which was shown to
have nothing to do with criminality. And the conference prospectus stated
that any genetic markers probably would "have little specificity, sensitivity
or explanatory power: most people with the markers will not be
criminals" and "most criminals will not have the markers." New York
Times 1 (September 5, 1992), B5 (September 15, 1992), A18 (October 2,
1992) (letter to The Editor, September 24).
Consider the furor over Oscar Lewis (1961) on the culture of poverty,
Daniel Patrick Moynihan on dysfunctional families (Rainwater & Yancey,
1967), Hannah Arendt (1964) on Jewish passivity in the Holocaust, Fogel
and Engerman (1974) on living conditions under slavery, or Lawrence
Harrison (1992) on culture and inequality.
55 A black woman's criticism of black men for relationships with white
women (Campbell, 1992) provoked angry replies:
I happen to be a black woman who is tired of hearing other black
people's complaints about things like "racial mixing," which would be
construed as racist and offensive if uttered by white people.
I'm an African-American man who happened to fall in love with a
white woman. ... I will not let the color of my skin limit my life's
possibilities.
The pain of being made to feel unattractive or "not good enough" as a
black woman because of our cultural definition of beauty ... is not
justification enough for the dissemination of prejudicial stereotypes
... As one of those blond white women who was involved with a
black man for five years, I was neither "docile" nor "obedient."
My wife and I find that maintaining an "interracial" marriage in a
society as obsessed with race as the United States is hard enough. The
last thing we need is more divisive rhetoric.
New York Times Magazine 12-13 (September 13, 1992) (letters to The
Editor).
Israel's Law of the Return has raised awkward questions about who is a
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