There’s a reason why discussions with feminists about sexism never seem to go anywhere. It’s not that they don’t want to talk about it. Oh, they want to talk. It’s that their idea of talking about gender discrimination requires men to accept their language, concepts, excuses and feelz as a prerequisite to what they deem meaningful discussion.
There is no room in the discussion for disagreement. They want to talk at you, not with you. If the basis of the discussion isn’t their view of the world, you’re immediately branded a privileged cis-hetero-normative misogynstic rape-apologist shitlord. The rationale is clear; it’s because they’re right, you’re wrong, and this forms the basis for any fruitful discussion. Absent acceptance of their premise, you (not they) have refused to engage.
And this worthless effort is repeating itself, this time with race.
At Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler posted about a “dust-up” at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law that arose after a student wrote a highly controversial op-ed.
In the wake of campus protests against institutional racism, a law student penned a provocative op-ed in a national newspaper expressing sympathy with the Black Lives Matter movement. The article touched a nerve. Some students liked the op-ed, but many others did not. Some were offended, and some were outraged. Accusations and angry messages appeared on social media. Some were hostile. One could have been read as a veiled threat.
The op-ed writer, feeling unsafe as students so often do these days, went to the administration for protection. The reaction was less than sympathetic to her feelz, and they shifted the onus back on her to deal with the anger toward her. As Adler notes, her fears appear overblown, and having chosen to take a highly controversial position publicly, opening it up to further discussion seems like exactly the right course. Speech begets speech. Free speech doesn’t absolve anyone from a critical reaction.
The writer’s objection, that if anyone with the opposite position, claimed to feel unsafe, the reaction would have been highly protective, is likely true as well, but aside from being overblown, the solution is that all ideas should compete on the open market, not that she’s entitled to the same improper protections afforded other delicate teacups. Still, there was a level of “liberal bullying” that distinguished the school’s reaction this time.
And then things got interesting. Adler agreed to a request from a 3L at Moritz, Scott Surovjak, to offer his perspective on Eugene Volokh’s soapbox.
I can confirm that students in the meeting felt unable to discuss hot-button issues, and belittled everywhere from classrooms to hallways to the Internet. However, this facilitated discussion was not among members of the conservative Federalist Society or Law School Republicans; it was among members of the Black Law Students Association (BLSA). The participants were tired of feeling disparaged, tokenized and unwelcome in the United States’ legal classrooms, which rarely, if ever, discuss the intersection of the law and race. Minority students across the country know all too well the daily inundation of bias and hostility, regardless of whether they transmit their beliefs to the nation via the Washington Times.
What? Are students coming to class at Moritz wearing white hoods? Are they burning crosses in Con Law lectures? What does it mean that black students are “tired of feeling disparaged, tokenized and unwelcome”? Why do they “know all too well the daily inundation of bias and hostility”? What the hell is happening in law schools?
However, many in the BLSA discussion, myself included, worried the same of a legal education that does not prepare us for candid discussions about class, gender and race. Regardless of faculty ideology, U.S. jurisprudence and the U.S. law school experience is disproportionately affluent, male and white. Rarely, if ever, are law students asked to consider law’s social implications through any other lens. And when raised, these assertions typically end more conversations than they begin. Such viewpoints are discussed in classes like Critical Race Theory and Gender and the Law. These classes, of course, are not required and can be avoided by the students who would most benefit from exploring those viewpoints.
Ah. So the problem isn’t that anyone is doing anything to you, as much as law school isn’t all about you. Maybe that’s why they call it “Law School,” and not Feelz School. No one tells a black student not to contribute whatever she thinks is pertinent to a discussion of a case in property class; it’s just that race may not always be pertinent. But the writer feels it should be, because . . . reasons.
It’s telling that the only hard gripe is that law school is “disproportionately affluent, male and white,” as in students aren’t disproportionately poor, female and black. Well, to the extent that’s accurate, given that there is near-parity in female law school enrollment, so what? There are reasons behind who attends law school having nothing to do with racial discrimination. Pretending otherwise helps no one.
Given that law students are rarely confronted with the social implications of the law, it should come as no surprise that our arguments and critiques may be inarticulate and visceral — especially when made online. However, if our reaction to criticism is to simply dismiss the challenge and search for scapegoats, then our knowledge will not expand, our perspectives will not evolve and we will leave law school no better than when we arrived.
If your arguments are “inarticulate and visceral,” then the fault lies with you. Your inability to express a persuasive argument isn’t the other side’s problem, and, it should be clearly noted, is particularly problematic when coming from law students. What lawyers do is persuade. If you can’t, it’s not merely a really bad excuse, but an indication that you’ve made a damn poor choice of career.
And yet, your concern, that “we will leave law school no better than when we arrived,” begs the question. The only possible “better” is that everyone embraces your hysterical hyperbole that black law students suffer “the daily inundation of bias and hostility.” This is the sort of nonsensical crap that not only fails to change anyone’s mind, but makes you look like an entitled, narcissistic fool.
These pages are strewn with my position on Black Lives Matters, so there can be no question about where my racial sympathies lie. But if you want to have that “real discussion” you insist is critical, then stop the whining, the absurd exaggeration and the insistence that any discussion be cast only on your terms and with the predetermined outcome that the universe gets reinvented with your feelz as its center.
We need to have a lot of discussions, and race is one of them. But just as the gender discussion will never happen as long as women insist that it be on their terms, the same goes for you. And if black law students, trained in reason, can’t grasp that real talk is going to include views and disagreements that hurt their feelings, then there is little chance less rational people will be capable of doing so.
You want better? Be better. Win in the marketplace of ideas instead of whining that no one is buying.
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“If the basis of the discussion isn’t their view of the world, you’re immediately branded a privileged cis-hetero-normative misogynstic rape-apologist shitlord.”
Where is mansplaining in this list? The omission makes it hard for me to credit anything else you say.
I knew I left something out. Damn.
“Where is mansplaining in this list?”
I thought that statement was meant to be an example of the mansplaining. Like it’s Mr. Big City White Male Lawyer’s place to tell me when and how I will be branded for my opinions. That’s punching down and silencing all the opinions from the people who are truly right!
An interesting reaction, typical of the rationale that only the voices of “people who are truly right” should be heard, and more particularly, when Mr. Big City White Male Lawyer challenges a 3L who has asked to be heard on VC, it’s punching down.
Or, it’s a grown-up in the room doing what grown-ups are obliged to do. Explaining to entitled children that the world doesn’t revolve around them. Of course, which point of view one takes tends to reflect one’s inherent bias. And that bias is why there can be no discussion. Go figure.
Being on the internet for a while teaches one new words (mansplaining), and novel meanings for older one (problematic) that are repellent to me to read, let alone type. It’s unsubtle how much they not only shows a bias, but signals fellow travelers.
“Fellow traveler” is such a cold war word. Eh, comrade?
I am an old white woman who graduated from law school and was admitted to practice in 1976. I have seen a tremendous increase in diversity in both the judiciary and bar associations. I don’t know whether law school faculties are still predominantly white and male, but I am reasonably certain that they are not an affluent group. And yes, we still have a long way to go. I’m sure female and black law students have some legitimate gripes. But anyone who goes to law school in hopes of being treated politely and respectfully is in the wrong place.
Discussions about race and gender in the law should focus on how those things affect people who are NOT lawyers and law students.
I have a sneaking suspicion that us old folks have lived through enough pedestrian unpleasantness in our lives that we can distinguish things worth going to war about from the ordinary, day-to-day, annoyances that everyone experiences. I wonder whether that explains our ability to shrug off the small stuff, and why younger folks feel every twinge is the end of the world.
Probably, although I recently moved to an old fart’s community call Century Village where some of my neighbors have been pissed off at everything for 80 years or more.
Wow. My grandmother lived at Century Village, Boca, until she had to go to the home. Of course, she was a pretty wild broad.
Mine, too. Small world, or perhaps just a reeeeeeally big village.
SHG or Ms. Mulcahey,
Please provide me with directions to Century Village in Boca. I think I have fallen but can’t get up. I can still drive though. Thank you.
All the best.
RGK
You can’t get there on what of those baby Deere garden tractors judge. By the way, my wife loves hers, says it’s cute as a button.
My kinda people…
younger folks”?
Your microagressions truly know no bounds. You’re a monster. It’s not like it’s my fault I didn’t exist sooner. I demand a safe post and an apology.
I was going to say “young’uns,” but decided to stick with parallel construction.
I can’t claim to have begun to have absorbed the entire context, but taking the article stand-alone, one possible interpretation is that the last sentence translates as “it’s not that bad and we may even be making progress.” with 99% of everything before that being gertruding for a particular audience.
The starting assumption in this law student’s complaint — “that law students are rarely confronted with the social implications of the law” — certainly was not true when I went to law school at Georgetown in the late 1990s. I suppose there may be some law schools and law professors who do not discuss the “race, sex, class” aspects of their subject matter (and some subjects naturally lend themselves to more or less of this type of discussion), but I’m very skeptical that this is a widespread phenomenon. When I was in law school, we discussed these issues (as I recall) in torts, con law, crim law, family law, local government law, and several others. Indeed, almost any time discussion veered from case law to policy (which is to say, all the time), these issues inevitably came up, whether they were on point or not. The notion that these issues are only discussed in specialized theory classes is highly dubious. I suspect that what these students really are complaining about is that the “black letter” law they are required to learn to become lawyers does not (yet) reflect their SJW perspectives and policy choices.
I’m not at all clear what he is seeking. Should Palzgraf be discussed based on race of parties? Or its future impact based on race? Or its correctness based on racial perspectives? Or none of the above? When I went to school, there was never any reluctance for a student to introduce issues of race or gender into a case if there was a reason. If there wasn’t, there wasn’t.
Your cavalier dismissal of the centrality of race, or at least gender and ethnicity, in any decent discussion of Palsgraf is naive at best. At worst, it reflects a deliberate refusal to acknowledge that the case is really about Cardozo’s shameless use of judicial privilege to lawsplain away the duty owed by a large corporation to a female plaintiff, thus invalidating her “lived experience,” barring her recovery and empowerment as a survivor, and at the same time microaggressing a group of “Italians” by branding them as irresponsible firework-wielding maniacs who can’t even board a train properly. Needless to say, this tells the reader everything he/she/ze (which I assume is a new pronoun for men who chose to employ a comical quasi-German accent) everything they need to know about your inherent cisgenered ablist shitlord worldview.
Well. That straightens me out.
Check your privileges. You use scare quotes to erase and invisibilize Mediterranean non-bodies of color who identify as Italian. You refer to a party as a “female,” imposing your gender binary and cisnormative views on on hir and denying hir’s right to identify hirself. Your behavior marginalizes and oppresses those of us who rely on the warm, safe, and reassuring space of Simple Justice to escape the demeaning misappropriation of social justice memes by “allies” like you.
It’s not that we can’t have discussions on feminism without you a priori conceding that the person you are arguing with is right, it’s just that it’s not much of a discussion when everything one tries to explain about what’s wrong with how one is treated is replied to (by SOME men) with “There, there, don’t get your pretty little head in a tizzy about it/You’re just imaging things/It’s not that bad/You just have no sense of humor/You’re on your period, aren’t you?”
It’s not a discussion if one party won’t listen or has decided in advance that the other party has nothing worth saying. As you noted, but it works both ways.
“Some” men. I caught that.
Well, most men I work with take me seriously, as does the one I live with. Other women I actually know aren’t so lucky. Women I don’t know on the Internet who may be making stuff up or may be telling the truth say they get treated patronizingly and with contempt. Other women on the Internet, same caveats, have great male co-workers/friends/spice who treat them like any other person with something to say.
So yes, “Some”.
p.s. Your CAPCHA’s timeout is either buggy or interacts badly with work’s firewall. I always have to repost, even for short one-liners.
I treat women, men and everyone in between the same. SOME women hate it, which is why I’ve been characterized as a well-known misogynist. Names don’t really bother me. I’ve been called them all.
But when you write “Other women on the Internet, same caveats, have great male co-workers/friends/spice who treat them like any other person with something to say,” I don’t know if the image I get is the image you have. There are many women who want to be treated the same. There are more for whom equality means “very special.”
Sorry about the capcha. The program was just updated, so it’s probably still glitch. Glad I don’t have to use it.