Essay 4
Minimum of 3 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Choice A
Read Alexandra Sifferlin's "The Weight Loss Trap" and Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence" and develop an argumentative thesis that addresses their claim that losing weight is a nearly futile quest.
Choice B
Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Why I’m Giving Up on Preventative Care” and agree or disagree with her position to quit preventative maintenance.
Choice C
Read Ibram Kendi’s “What’s the Difference Between a Frat and a Gang?” and agree or disagree with the author’s contention that there is a double standard for exacting the law against these groups.
Choice D
Read “What Women Know About the Internet” by Emily Chang and agree or disagree with the author’s contention that regulations are more important than free speech for protecting women.
Choice E
Read the following: “Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner,” “Why Hugh Hefner’s Haters Won’t Let Him Rest in Peace,” “Negative Obituaries Prove Hugh Hefner Was Right,” and 10-minute video Maher vs. Douthat. Then develop an argumentative thesis that addresses this question: Was Hefner a warrior for equal rights, free speech, and higher culture, or was he a selfish, salacious Peter Pan who denigrated women? Or a bit of both?
Choice F
Read Conor Friedersdorf’s “In Defense of Harvey Weinstein’s Harvard Lawyer” and agree or disagree with the contention that representing someone as monstrous and diabolical as Harvey Weinstein performs a civic good.
Choice G
Read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison and write an argumentative thesis that address the contention that it is morally objectionable for white woman Rachel Dolezal to fabricate an identity to pass as being black for several reasons, not the least of which she is appropriating blackness in the manner of a “culture vulture.” How do you address the counterargument that she is simply choosing her racial identity the way one has the right to choose one’s sexual identity? Is the comparison fair? Explain. You can also consult the parody of Rachel Dolezal in the Donald Glover’s Atlanta episode “B.A.N.” in which Paper Boi discusses “trans-racial” issues with Montague. You can also consult Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide.
Option H
Watch The Game Changers on Netflix and develop an argument that either supports the claim that the documentary makes a persuasive case for a plant-based vegan diet or the assertion that the documentary is a work of cheap propaganda.
The Game Changers Criticisms:
One. The producer is an investor in a pea protein factory.
Two. Some of the information is not as scientific as presented.
Three. Some of the vegans haven't adopted veganism long enough to make a credible appraisal of their results.
Four. There is no attention paid to long-term adherence since most people find a vegan diet to be punitive.
Five. They don't acknowledge that on a vegan diet you need to eat more protein than an animal diet because vegan protein doesn't assimilate inside the body as much as animal protein.
November 19 Go over Ibram Kendi’s “What’s the Difference Between a Frat and a Gang?” and agree or disagree with the author’s contention that there is a double standard for exacting the law against these groups.
Read “What Women Know About the Internet” by Emily Chang and agree or disagree with the author’s contention that regulations are more important than free speech for protecting women.
Homework #17: Read “Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner,” “Why Hugh Hefner’s Haters Won’t Let Him Rest in Peace,” “Negative Obituaries Prove Hugh Hefner Was Right” and then explain in 200 words why Hugh Hefner is such a controversial figure.
November 21 We will examine the Hugh Hefner debate: Was Hefner a warrior for equal rights, free speech, and culture, or was he a selfish, salacious Peter Pan who denigrated women? Or a bit of both? We will study the following: “Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner,” “Why Hugh Hefner’s Haters Won’t Let Him Rest in Peace,” “Negative Obituaries Prove Hugh Hefner Was Right,” and 10-minute video Maher vs. Douthat.
We will read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison and address the contention that it is morally objectionable for white woman Rachel Dolezal to fabricate an identity to pass as being black for several reasons, not the least of which she is appropriating blackness in the manner of a “culture vulture.” How do you address the counterargument that she is simply choosing her racial identity the way one has the right to choose one’s sexual identity? Is the comparison fair? Explain. You can also consult Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide.
Your homework #18 for next class: Read Conor Friedersdorf’s “In Defense of Harvey Weinstein’s Harvard Lawyer” and agree or disagree with the contention that representing someone as monstrous and diabolical as Harvey Weinstein performs a civic good.
November 26 Go over Conor Friedersdorf’s “In Defense of Harvey Weinstein’s Harvard Lawyer” and agree or disagree with the contention that representing someone as monstrous and diabolical as Harvey Weinstein performs a civic good.
November 28 Holiday
December 3 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write introduction, thesis, and first supporting paragraph.
December 5 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write supporting paragraphs and counterargument-rebuttal paragraph.
December 10 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write conclusion and MLA Works Cited and proofread entire essay.
December 12 Essay 4 due on turnitin. We will grade Portfolio #2, responses 10-18.
Conor Friedersdorf’s “In Defense of Harvey Weinstein’s Harvard Lawyer”
Headings are mine.
(Are students in a position to dictate college policy?)
The law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. is among the most accomplished people at Harvard. He has helped to overturn scores of wrongful convictions and to free thousands from wrongful incarceration. A sought-after defense attorney and the director of Harvard’s criminal-law clinic, he became the first African American in the institution’s history to be appointed as a faculty dean, a pastoral role that includes residing at Winthrop House among its undergraduates. But a vocal faction of students now want to force his resignation, an escalating controversy covered most thoroughly in The Harvard Crimson.
According to the Crimson, vandals spray-painted the doors of Winthrop House this week with down w sullivan!, Our rage is self defense, whose side are you on?, and your silence is violence. An online petition has circulated among those who want to end his role in residential life. Protesters assembled on campus to publicly show their displeasure. And Harvard administrators launched a “climate review” among the undergraduates in his charge, invoking procedures for “when climate concerns arise in a faculty-led unit.”
Sullivan faces this “clamor of popular suspicions and prejudices” because he agreed to act as a criminal-defense attorney for an object of scorn and hatred: Harvey Weinstein.
(Is tradition a worthy defense for supporting a claim?)
His detractors should know that by undertaking to represent such a client, Sullivan is participating in a tradition older than the nation itself. The British soldiers who opened fire on a crowd of Bostonians in 1770, killing five, were among the most reviled men in the 13 colonies. Harvard alumnus John Adams, a patriot with aspirations for political office, agreed to defend them at trial, even though he knew that he was risking not only his reputation, but the safety of his family, because aggrieved Bostonians felt that their safety was implicated.
“In the Evening I expressed to Mrs. Adams all my Apprehensions: That excellent Lady, who has always encouraged me, burst into a flood of Tears, but said she was very sensible of all the Danger to her and to our Children as well as to me, but she thought I had done as I ought, she was very willing to share in all that was to come and place her trust in Providence,” he later wrote. Though he went on to sign the Declaration of Independence, and serve as vice president and president of the United States, he counted bolstering the principle that even people accused of heinous crimes deserve a vigorous defense as “one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.”
Throughout U.S. history, criminal-defense attorneys have endeavored to conserve and apply that principle. And they’ve been subjected to attacks for so doing.
(Valid premise: False accusations can paint some innocent people as monsters, so if defense attorneys can't defend "monsters," real or not, then the innocent won't get representation.)
“Little more than half a century ago, mainstream lawyers were frightened away from defending alleged Communists who faced congressional witch hunts, blacklisting, criminal trials, and even execution,” Harvard Law’s Alan Dershowitz wrote. “Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the millions of Americans—including many lawyers, law professors, and bar association leaders––who supported this attack on ‘communist lawyers’ made it impossible for decent lawyers who despised communism but supported civil liberties and constitutional rights for all to defend accused Communists without risking their careers.”
Defense attorneys for Communists made many feel angry and unsafe.
More recently, lawyers who defended War on Terror detainees and later sought employment in the Barack Obama administration’s Department of Justice were smeared by prominent figures including Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol, who dubbed them “the al-Qaeda seven” and implied that they shared the enemy’s values.
Defense attorneys for al-Qaeda terrorists made many feel angry and unsafe.
In 2016, during the second presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump attacked his rival as unfit to lead because she once acted as the defense attorney for a man accused of raping a 12-year-old. (She thought he was guilty.) Defense attorneys for child predators make many feel angry and unsafe.
Now Sullivan is defending a man who makes many at Harvard feel angry and unsafe. The Change.org petition started by a Harvard student and signed by scores more suggests that some are now disgusted by the dean and law professor.
As they put it:
For those of you who are members of Winthrop House, do you really want to one day accept your Diploma from someone who for whatever reason, professional or personal, believes it is okay to defend such a prominent figure at the centre of the #MeToo movement? Regardless of Dean Sullivan’s intentions, his role as a community leader, and as someone who should first and foremost value the safety of the students he lives with in Winthrop House, should always come first … he should step down as Winthrop House Dean immediately.
(If Harvard capitulates to students' demands, then they are creating "disincentive" for future defense attorneys to defend both the innocent and the guilty, what are called "unpopular clients.")
These students might not realize it, but they are creating a disincentive for ambitious young legal academics to undertake the defense of any potentially controversial client, including indigent men who stand accused of rape or sexual assault. That raises the odds of wrongful convictions, especially among the poor.
The Harvard religious-studies professor Diana Eck took a more forgiving approach. She told the Boston Globe that defending unpopular clients is noble and “extremely important.”
Yet she went on to say that “for our part, we also expect there to be choices made in the interests of our students and the community of students that we try to nurture.”
(Civic norm of defending people for a trial is pitted against students' demand for a "safe space." In other words, can a faculty attorney defending a notorious figure for sexual assault create a traumatic environment for some students?)
If there is an inherent tension between upholding an “extremely important” civic norm––legal representation for even the most reviled—and nurturing undergraduates, it seems to me that Harvard ought to prioritize conserving the norm. But is it really inherently “incongruous” for Sullivan to defend a man like Weinstein in a criminal rape trial and endeavor to promote a safe environment for students, including victims of sexual assault, as a faculty dean?
(Can sexually abused students feel comfortable having a faculty member defending a "credibly accused multiple perpetrator of sexual assault"?)
Catharine MacKinnon, Harvard’s James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law, emailed:
The issue is not whether Ron can represent reviled clients accused of crimes and still be the faculty dean of a college. Of course he can. The issue is substantive: whether siding with a credibly accused multiple perpetrator of sexual assault is consistent with being the person to whom sexually abused students can feel comfortable confiding in, in an institutional position of reporting such abuse. This is an equality question for Ron to consider and also for the college to consider.
(Catharine MacKinnon is using a Straw Man argument by saying that Sullivan is "siding" with Weinstein.)
To me, Sullivan isn’t “siding with” Weinstein any more than liberal attorneys who represented members of al-Qaeda at Guantanamo Bay were “siding with the enemy.” (Had any of them been faculty deans at Harvard, I doubt anyone would have felt unsafe confiding to them that a terrorist plot was afoot.) Nevertheless, the subjective feelings of students do have some relevance here.
As MacKinnon put it:
Under these conditions, the students are entitled, as they have said, not to feel safe reporting their abuse to him, resulting in compromised access to their education on the basis of sex. Whether this outcome is consistent with his role as Faculty Dean of a college is for Harvard to decide.
(MacKinnon makes the claim that students might feel uncomfortable reporting a sexual assault to someone who defends someone as heinous as Weinstein. Is this claim false?)
Students are indeed entitled to their feelings; and deans do serve at Harvard’s pleasure. But it isn’t clear to me that a student’s equal access to education is compromised by virtue of feeling uncomfortable reporting a sexual assault to a given dean, especially when there are many other Harvard officials in whom he or she can confide. In fact, Sullivan appointed Resident Dean Linda D. M. Chavers to serve “as the house’s ‘point person’ for sexual assault issues,” the Crimson reports. “Students will also be able to seek assistance from house tutors—all of whom have been briefed on resources for sexual misconduct issues—and … the Dean of Students Office and the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response.”
The Harvard Crimson’s editorial board put its case against Sullivan this way:
We condemn his choice to represent Weinstein and urge him to address the tension between the two roles more directly than he previously has. As faculty dean, Sullivan has a primary responsibility to his students, namely in representing Winthrop House and fostering a “close-knit community” within the College. This includes upholding the College’s efforts to combat sexual assault on campus. By choosing to represent Weinstein, Sullivan has jeopardized his ability to keep the trust of an alarmingly large group of students.
(Is it a fallacy to believe attorneys are an extension of the clients they represent? In other words, we cannot say, "Defending a client is the same as defending a crime." This is the murky thinking behind the castigation of Sullivan.)
One powerful retort to that way of thinking appeared in the Boston Globe, which in its coverage of the controversy quoted a Harvard Law grad taught by Sullivan:
“Do you really think that lawyers are an extension of the criminals they represent?” she asked. The woman … said Sullivan advocated for her personally, encouraged her to pursue an assault charge, and offered to handle her case pro bono. He has done the same for other women at Harvard, she noted, often taking up the case of the accuser rather than the accused.
And, she noted, in law school he was known for encouraging students to practice both sides—as prosecutor and defense—often trading the roles himself. “It’s completely flawed to suggest that attorneys can’t step into and out of roles and representations and keep them separate,” said the woman, who went on to become a sex crimes prosecutor.
The woman’s account suggests that Sullivan does deserve the trust of victims and underscores the dubiousness of judging him on the basis of a single client he represents in a career full of them, rather than his behavior over decades in academic life.
The Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig echoes the argument that it’s possible to be a survivor of sexual assault and feel comfortable with Sullivan’s choice.
“I was raped repeatedly as a boy,” he wrote to me. “I would have no problem with Sullivan representing the man who raped me. That’s because I have a clear sense of how vicious and arbitrary the criminal justice system can be. That knowledge leads me to believe that we should encourage adequate representation, not scorn excellent representatives. Defending a criminal defendant is not to defend a crime. That understanding is fundamental to a just criminal justice system.”
A less personal retort, this one responding directly to the Crimson editorial, was offered in an unpublished letter to the editor shared with me by the Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy. He rejected the notion that there is an incongruity between defending a man accused of sexual misconduct as an attorney and promoting a comfortable environment for undergraduates as a faculty dean. “The skills, capacities, and dispositions that would help to make a person a valued defense counsel are also the skills, capacities, and dispositions that would help to make a person a valued Faculty Dean,” he argued. “These features include poise, close listening, mastery of relevant information, and a willingness and ability to safeguard the rights of all sorts of people, including outsiders, the ostracized and, indeed, the villainous.” He proceeded to ask:
The position advanced by the Editorial Board would presumably disqualify any lawyer who represents or has represented people accused of sex offenses.
Does that mean that a latter day Bella Abzug or Thurgood Marshall would be disqualified as a prospective Faculty Dean? Both represented defendants charged with rape.
Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the same subject, Kennedy mused that this episode “displays the intensity of the anger at sexual malfeasance and the institutional indifference that has allowed such misconduct.” He asserted—and I concur—that “anger is warranted” as “sexual harassment and assault are all too prevalent and prohibitions against them remain all too ineffective.” And he urged overdue reforms. Yet he cautioned that “anger, untethered from principles, is sometimes woefully misguided.”
The computer-science professor Harry Lewis adds that residential life at Harvard ought to teach “how to engage in a spirit of civic optimism with people whose decisions and actions you find disagreeable.” He thinks a society in which members play multiple roles “holds together peacefully and productively only through the exercise of reason applied to deep but sometimes competing commitments to individual freedom and to the common good,” requiring “sublimation of one’s own emotions … empathy toward others,” and rejecting the view “that discord is intolerable and personal comfort is supreme.”
More than any student discord, I was alarmed by the administration’s decision to investigate the climate at Winthrop House in response to this controversy (and perhaps also fallout from Sullivan’s defense of a colleague accused of sexual harassment). Rachael Dane, director of media relations for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, took issue with my use of the word investigation in an email correspondence. She wrote: “I think it is important to emphasize that we are not undertaking an investigation. We are using ordinary processes to collect information from the entire Winthrop Community.”
The Harvard professor Jeannie Suk Gersen emailed me her concerns with such “processes”:
Professor Sullivan has chosen to represent and defend persons whom many people would not defend. Strong disagreement with those choices is of course part of the exploration of differences of principle and opinion that we’d hope for in a university. That is not shocking or troubling, and a university should support that debate. What is shocking is that Harvard is undertaking an official “review” of the “climate” arising from Professor Sullivan’s professional choice to represent particular clients. The review is not based on an allegation that Professor Sullivan has violated any university policy.
It is based on some students’ demands that Professor Sullivan be removed as faculty dean because they are disturbed and distressed by his professional choice.
Announcing a “climate review” holds out a not at all veiled threat of removal from the faculty dean position based on what the climate review will reveal. We can kid ourselves that this is simply about a resident dean position that is “pastoral,” and that the university would of course not proceed this way regarding regular teaching faculty positions. But that distinction is illusory, since faculty members are also mentors, advisors, role models, and supportive figures, who, by virtue of their position, are part of the Title IX reporting apparatus.
Faculty members are now on notice that based on positions we take, clients we represent, or causes we speak out on, our university may determine that the “climate” is so negatively affected by some students’ reaction to work that it must take “action,” perhaps including removal. What are the chances that, seeing this, other faculty will dare defend such a reviled person or make a highly controversial argument inviting blowback, if there’s a real chance of triggering an official “climate review”? We are witnessing a major illiberal turning point in universities, but this moment is remarkable because it’s the Harvard administration acting in its official capacity, not just some stray voices.
The Harvard professor Janet Halley calls Harvard’s actions “deeply disturbing.” She explained in an email:
The right to counsel even for the most despised defendants, the basic role of counsel in our legal order, the presumption of innocence, academic freedom, and the right of University employees to assist persons accused in the University’s Title IX proceedings—are all implicated here. A small minority of students has asked the University to throw all these fundamental values out the window; it is deeply shocking to watch University administrators accede to these demands. Finally, the “climate survey” technique is a dangerous precedent as a matter of employment rights and as a threat to academic freedom. It’s a thinly veiled version of the heckler’s veto. The space for genuine intellectual controversy within the Harvard community has been narrowed by the University’s cowardly proceedings in this case.
The Harvard law professor Scott Westfahl, however, defended the idea of a climate review, also by email:
I don’t think the ‘climate’ review meaningfully threatens defense attorneys generally or related social norms. As an educator, I see this as a great teaching moment that will hopefully help our community appreciate that from John Adams, Harvard Class of 1755, to Ron Sullivan, Harvard Law Class of 1994, we have produced graduates who courageously advocate for the accused even when it is most unpopular to do so.
(Right to counsel is being compromised by capitulating to students' "emotional climate.")
In his view, “We are all better off as a result,” and he noted, “I completely support the right of Professor Sullivan, an extremely talented defense lawyer, to take on a very difficult case. Should Mr. Weinstein be convicted, there will be absolutely no doubt that he received a fair hearing with the best possible defense counsel.” He added that he draws a distinction between representing Weinstein at trial and hiring investigators for Weinstein, as previous attorneys did. There’s a difference, he noted, “between fact-finding and unethical intimidation.”
Harvard Deans Claudine Gay and Rakesh Khurana declined to comment for this article, and an attempt to reach President Lawrence Bacow failed.
(Once we allow "political climate" to dictate policy, we create a climate that begins a slippery slope against justice system of providing "zealous defense" for those accused of a crime.)
More is at issue here than the idea that every accused criminal, no matter how heinous, deserves a zealous defense.
- Victims of a given crime are not rendered “unsafe” or re-victimized by mere proximity to an attorney who has defended someone accused of that crime.
- Representing clients accused of heinous crimes does not render a lawyer unable to provide “pastoral guidance.” (Students can of course choose to ignore or avoid guidance from people whose moral intuitions and values differ from their own.)
- Harvard faculty members who are also defense attorneys should not be subject to climate investigations just because they represent unpopular clients.
Harvard should of course tolerate the viewpoints that a defense attorney who represents a heinous criminal is therefore creepy, or acquires the stink of the attendant crime, or cannot be trusted to counsel and mentor undergraduate students. And liberals should be forgiving of undergraduates who toy with those civically dangerous positions as they wrestle with a fraught subject that even adults who know better find hugely challenging to confront with circumspection.
But Harvard should never adopt those viewpoints, and should teach students why generations of principled attorneys suffered and sacrificed to oppose them. Even those who seek to exclude defense attorneys from polite society are not necessarily bad people. But they fail to grasp how much they risk as they work to further weaken the norm against punishing the lawyers of the reviled.
As Andrew W. Liang put it in the Crimson, if enough attorneys “feel the need to think twice … there will be no distinction between a trial by public opinion and a trial in a court of law. The onslaught of negative publicity for a lawyer will be so costly that few good attorneys will want to defend those who—for one reason or another—have been presumed guilty by a public majority. Such individuals will find no advocate … and the integrity of our legal system will cease to exist.”
Example of a Friedersdorf rebuttal: Procrustean Fallacy Supports Legal Defense of Harvey Weinstein
Procrustean Fallacy Supports Legal Defense of Harvey Weinstein
In his essay “In Defense of Harvey Weinstein’s Harvard Lawyer,” Conor Friedersdorf presents a rigorous critique of the firing of Ronald S. Sullivan, defense attorney and director of Harvard’s criminal-law clinic. As Friedersdorf frames it, Harvard capitulated to hysterical student snowflake demands to create a “safe space” by the mere presence of an attorney defending someone as monstrous as sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. The firing of Sullivan, Friedersdorf contends, is a violation of America’s legal tradition to defend people of heinous crimes, and this violation, the author asserts, opens the door for falsely charged people, tainted in public opinion, to be stripped of their legal representation and thereby degrading our liberal democracy.
While there are some credible points in Friedersdorf’s essay, his claim that Harvey Weinstein is deserving of Harvard faculty Ronald Sullivan’s representation is misguided for several reasons, but we will focus on three: First, legal tradition is not an argument; it is simply a tradition. Compelling lawyers to defend anyone under any circumstances because of some tradition or other is to go by the letter of the law rather than by the spirit of the law. Second, attorneys should not be forced to follow a general principle of defending the most heinous criminals. Rather, they should be allowed to follow common sense and common decency on a case by case basis. Finally, it is preposterous to expect Harvard students to not suffer some cognitive dissonance when they see their dean of law, who is supposed to be supportive of students’ needs, giving service to someone who, in the words of Catharine MacKinnon, is a “credibly accused multipile perpetrator of sexual assault.”
Friedersorf’s first stumble happens at the starting block of his essay when he defends Sullivan on the grounds that “Sullivan is participating in a tradition older than the nation itself. The British soldiers who opened fire on a crowd of Bostonians in 1770, killing five, were among the most reviled men in the 13 colonies. Harvard alumnus John Adams, a patriot with aspirations for political office, agreed to defend them at trial, even though he knew that he was risking not only his reputation, but the safety of his family, because aggrieved Bostonians felt that their safety was implicated.”
That America has a legal tradition of defending the most unpopular and heinous among us is not an argument. Tradition is not an argument for anything. If a man says his wife has to cook for him because of “tradition,” he is not making an argument. He is simply relying on a sexist custom passed down from one generation to another. The tradition of defending heinous figures may or not be valid. However, it would be absurd to say this traditional principle applies to all situations. A smart and responsible attorney must not look at a general principle generated from tradition; rather, she must look at a legal defendant on an individual basis.
Friedersdorf’s belief that tradition compels attorneys to defend all people, regardless of how odious, is what I call a Procrustean fallacy. Procrustean, in this usage, means “one size fits all.” Not all heinous suspects are alike. Some may be falsely accused. Others, like Weinstein, may have a preponderance of evidence stacked against them. To say that attorneys are compelled to take on all cases is a violation of common sense. Rather, let attorneys make an individual judgment using common sense and common decency to determine if whether or not they are going to defend someone.
One could make a strong case that examining the abundant evidence against Harvey Weinstein makes the very thought of defending him morally repulsive. This does not mean that I, if I were an attorney, may not decide that a political dissident who is charged, falsely or not, of some kind of corruption isn’t worthy of my representation. That’s my decision to make. But Friedersdorf doesn’t trust my intelligence to discern between a sociopath like Weinstein and a garden variety accused defendant. Friedersdorf would rather impose a Procrustean principle that I must defend anyone, regardless of the evidence.
In the case of Weinstein, the evidence is overwhelming. To quote Catharine Mackinnon, who is cited in Friedersdorf’s essay, Weinstein is a “credibly accused multiple perpetrator of sexual assault.”
As a defense attorney, my time is short. I would rather use common sense to save my efforts for others in need of my representation rather than defend a predatory monster whose moral ugliness is surely in the consciousness of the student body at Harvard.
Addressing Harvard’s students brings us to my final point. The flagrant and pervasive crimes of Weinstein are saturating the news and social media. If I, a defense attorney and faculty member at Harvard, have decided to give my time to represent Weinstein under some Procustrean order completely divorced from common sense, I am implicitly signalling to the students certain things about myself. I may not be “an extension of the criminal” Weinstein. Nor am I necessarily a sympathizer. But I have deemed Weinstein’s case worthy of my time and effort. Think about this from a student’s perspective. Here I am, a talented attorney in one of the most high-ranking professions in the world, enjoying lofty status. I have many endeavors to choose from: Fighting for civil rights, fighting against racism, fighting for a liberal democracy, but, no, under some Procrustean legal tradition, I have decided to defend a “credibly accused multiple perpetrator of sexual assault.” My defense of this monster will surely create cognitive dissonance in my students. There is now way to square their wanting to look up to their leading legal faculty as someone who promotes justice with a lawyer using his limited time and resources to defend someone as loathsome as Harvey Weinstein. Failure to acknowledge this is to be disingenuous, naive, or just plain bull-headed.
So to be clear, I do agree with the author’s contention that we must defend the unpopular who may be falsely accused, but common sense and common decency also allow us to draw the line when the figure obliterates all norms, and Harvey Weinstein is a line that is all too easy to see. Failure to acknowledge that line is a moral failure, and such a moral failure cannot be condoned at Harvard or any respectable institution.
Choice G
Read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison and write an argumentative thesis that address the contention that it is morally objectionable for white woman Rachel Dolezal to fabricate an identity to pass as being black for several reasons, not the least of which she is appropriating blackness in the manner of a “culture vulture.” How do you address the counterargument that she is simply choosing her racial identity the way one has the right to choose one’s sexual identity? Is the comparison fair? Explain. You can also consult the parody of Rachel Dolezal in the Donald Glover’s Atlanta episode “B.A.N.” in which Paper Boi discusses “trans-racial” issues with Montague. You can also consult Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide.
Rachel Dolezal charged with welfare fraud.
Question to Frame Your Thesis
Is Rachel Dolezal, by assuming the identity as a black woman, celebrating black culture, or is she a culture vulture committing the sin of cultural appropriation for her own "attention-seeking narcissism"?
Argument That Dolezal Is an Attention-Seeking Narcissist
"I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison
I don’t like Rachel Dolezal. I don’t believe she’s misunderstood or mentally unbalanced or confused. I think she’s a shameless attention-seeker, a vile narcissist, and a grifter. She’s a thief. And the thing she covets the most and is desperately trying to misappropriate is Blackness, specifically the Blackness unique to the descendants of American slaves.
To be the descendant of an American slave is to live in a particular kind of purgatory. It is to be the abused and neglected child who always eats last. It is to stand outside in the wet cold and be denied entry to the vast mansion your ancestors built. It is to be harassed and brutalized by police forces born out of slave patrols. There are daily humiliations, constant reminders that you are of the lower caste. It is to know that your existence is seen as a threat, a threat that may be met with deadly violence at any moment.
The freedom struggle of the descendants of American slaves has a proud tradition that has produced true American heroes. That platform of resistance is an honored space, one that Rachel Dolezal infiltrated with her appalling blackface routine. She was the president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP when she was outed by a local reporter who asked the simple question: “Are you African American?” Stunned that she had been found out, the only reply she could muster was, “I don’t understand the question.”
Soon after that embarrassing interview, it was revealed that Dolezal was White and had been pretending to be a light-complexioned Black woman for years. As evidence, she had shared a photo of her with an African American man she barely knew as one of her and her father. What sort of pathology drives a person to do a thing like that? The same thing that drove her to make claims of racial harassment and report hate crimes, none of which could be substantiated. There’s also the disgusting way she’s taken on the label of “transracial” — co-opting the struggle of perhaps the most marginalized group and turning it into a punchline. Write it down: the next outrage will be her faking a serious illness for sympathy. This is when everyone else will finally turn on her and begin to call out her lies. When she was disrespecting Black people to get attention, it was all good.
There have been plenty of White Americans who have worked towards the cause of racial equality. There was no need for them to fake being Black, and there was no need for Dolezal to do so either. But none of Dolezal’s deception was rooted in her trying to be a genuine ally to Black Americans. This whole production is all about Rachel Dolezal getting to play alternately the victim and the hero. She wants attention, and withholding it is the only thing that might finally get her to stop. And she needs to be stopped.
There is a kind of morbid curiosity that might have made me tune into The Rachel Divide (I mean, the whole thing is such a colossal train wreck). Ironically, it was the teaser Netflix released that cemented my decision to stay away. In the short excerpt, Dolezal’s half-Black son is trying and failing to get his mother to see that her actions have consequences for other people, him in particular. You can hear the exhaustion in his voice, the wearying frustration of trying to teach empathy to a narcissist — an impossibility. All of Dolezal’s replies are about her and her needs. She doesn’t see her son at all. He is merely a prop in her psychodrama.
What Dolezal is doing to her son is a form of child abuse.
And that’s why I’m not watching. I’m not enabling that and adding to his suffering. Each view humiliates that child, and he deserves so much better. (I was going to link out to the teaser, but watching it made me feel so gross. I think giving even that short snippet views isn’t a moral choice.)
While Dolezal needs to disappear, we can’t forget her. The descendants of American slaves need to understand that she is the first of many to come. As cries for slavery and Jim Crow reparations grow stronger, you’ll see more White Americans start doing genetic tests and looking into their genealogy to find a link, so they can shove themselves to the front of the line if the payout comes.
Erasure is one of the most powerful tools of racism. And it’s what White America is going to double down on next.
Rachel Dolezal is the canary in the coal mine. Trying to steal the lineage and very identity of the descendants of slaves will be the next mutation of American racism. We all must be prepared to confront it and beat it back.
NYT Editorial Critique of Dolezal
Possible Dolezal Defenses to Consider in Your Argument Or Counterargument
One. Just as we accept men who feel they identify with women and go through gender-transition process, we should accept Dolezal for going through a similar racial transition. Is the comparison legit?
Two. Since race is not a real thing and is nothing more than a social construct, why should we care if Dolezal identifies and passes as "black"?
Three. Dolezal's need to identify and "be" black doesn't hurt anyone. Why are we treating her with so much disdain as if she were a criminal? Does that not say more about us than it does her?
Four. Dolezel is championing civil rights for African Americans. She is a bona fide "sister in the struggle." She has earned the right to "be black." How dare we question her noble motives.
Jelani Cobb's Thesis Paragraph: "We're all wearing the fictive garb of race."
The easy presumption about Dolezal, who has two white parents and light skin and eyes—and hair that has ranged from blond to brown, though she has worn it in ways that are culturally associated with black women—is that this is an instance in which someone finally pointed out the obvious: the emperor is naked. But, in truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie.
"Lying about the lie": Race is not a simple category set in stone; rather, race is an arbitrary social construction historically designed to service a power hierarchy.
We read, for example, in Debra Dickerson's essay "The Great White Way," that white America initially tagged southern Europeans, Slavs, Greeks, and Italians, for example, as "black" and then around 1920 Anglo White America "allowed" these southern Europeans to earn their "whiteness" by assimilating into Anglo culture. However, they did not give such license to African-Americans and Latinos.
According to Jelani Cobb's logic, since race is a fiction and a lie, we should not be so offended by the lie that Rachel Dolezal assumes as she parades through life under the guise of a black identity.
Refuting Cobb's argument:
Try telling African Americans that their race is a lie when racial perception results in higher rates of police brutality, mass incarceration, and an income gap of 10:1 in favor of white Americans.
In spite of African Americans' struggle and oppression in America, African Americans wield huge influence over the world in terms of language and culture. The whole world is influenced by African American culture: language, style, music, art, fashion, entertainment, and business.
The whole world imitates and borrows from African-American culture, which has the biggest influence than any culture in the world.
Cultural influence is one thing. Piggy-backing on another culture is another thing.
But cultural appropriation, some argue, takes cultural borrowing too far to the point that one is stealing.
Pretending your black, putting on fake tan and using tanning booth, and telling the world you're black, many would argue, is taking cultural influence too far.
Rachel Dolezal wants positive attention as being a "sister in the struggle." Many people are annoyed by this.
Rachel Dolezal and her defenders say we should not be annoyed. It's cool to for Rachel, a white woman, to masquerade as a sister in the struggle.
At what point does a non African-American commit an act of cultural appropriation?
Should we be morally offended by white people passing as African American?
If you had a white college instructor championing black rights and disguising himself as black, would you be able to take that instructor seriously? Would you have any moral objections to such a professor? Would you question that professor's mental stability? Or would you "be cool with it"?
Sample Thesis Statements
Even if Rachel Dolezal is an attention-seeking narcissist using race to expand her status and social cachet, her claim to belong to the African-American is not a crime or an offense because there is no such thing as race except as a fiction that we all pretend to exist. By condemning Rachel Dolezal for masquerading as an African-American, we are guilty of perpetuating the mythology that race is an objective reality.
Refutation of the Above
While we can all agree that race is a mythology, the fact remains that America has used skin color as an arbitrary way to manage power and that people of color have been stolen from by America's kleptocracy. For Rachel Dolezal to appropriate blackness to elevate her social esteem while enjoying her white privilege is morally disgusting and morally bankrupt, evidence of a selfish narcissist, evidence of someone willing to mock and steal from the very people she claims to represent, and evidence of a kind of fraud that has no place in championing civil rights, especially someone who works for the NAACP.
Wild Card Thesis
Rachel Dolezal is a "special case" so embedded in pathological behavior that to use her charade as an argument about race misses the point. She is not so much appropriating race as much as she is evidencing a serious mental illness that requires medical attention.
"Black Like Her" by Jelani Cobb in The New Yorker
On June 7th, Elinor Burkett published an Op-Ed in the Times expressing what she portrayed as a feminist’s reluctant skepticism about aspects of the transgender movement. She argued, in part, that the notion of men simply transitioning into women was equivalent to a white person darkening his or her skin and professing to be black. The example was meant as a reductio ad absurdum—but, less than a week later, Rachel Dolezal, the president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a professor of Africana studies, was unveiled as a white woman who has for some years presented herself and identified as black. On Monday, Dolezal resigned, in a statement that didn’t answer questions about what she referred to as "my personal identity,” though it did refer obliquely to “challenging the construct of race.” That answer is clearly inadequate; many people have challenged the construct of race without lying about their lives. But there is something more worth discussing here.
The easy presumption about Dolezal, who has two white parents and light skin and eyes—and hair that has ranged from blond to brown, though she has worn it in ways that are culturally associated with black women—is that this is an instance in which someone finally pointed out the obvious: the emperor is naked. But, in truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie.
Among African-Americans, there is a particular contempt, rooted in the understanding that black culture was formed in a crucible of degradation, for what Norman Mailer hailed as the “white Negro.” Whatever elements of beauty or cool, whatever truth or marketable lies there are that we associate with blackness, they are ultimately the product of a community’s quest to be recognized as human in a society that is only ambivalently willing to see it as such. And it is this root that cannot be assimilated. The white Negroes, whose genealogy stretches backward from Azalea through Elvis and Paul Whiteman, share the luxury of being able to slough off blackness the moment it becomes disadvantageous, cumbersome, or dangerous. It is an identity as impermanent as burnt cork, whose profitability rests upon an unspoken suggestion that the surest evidence of white superiority is the capacity to exceed blacks even at being black. The black suspicion of whites thus steeped in black culture wasn’t bigotry; it was a cultural tariff—an abiding sense that, if they knew all that came with the category, they would be far less eager to enlist.
But this is precisely what makes the Dolezal deception complicated. Artists like Eminem and Teena Marie, white people who were by and large accepted by black people as a legitimate part of black cultural life, nonetheless had to finesse a kind of epidermal conflict of interest. Irrespective of their sincerity, a portion of their profitability lay in their status as atypically white. Dolezal’s transracialism was imbued with exactly the opposite undertaking. She passed as black and set about shouldering the inglorious, frustrating parts of that identity—the parts that allocate responsibility for what was once called “uplifting the race.” It’s an aspect of her story that at least ought to give her critics—black ones, particularly—a moment of pause.
Dolezal is, like me, a graduate of Howard University, a place where the constellation of black identities and appearances is so staggeringly vast as to ridicule the idea that blackness could be, or ever has been, any one thing. What I took from Howard, besides that broadened sense of a world I’d presumed to know, was an abiding debt to those who’d fought on its behalf and a responsibility to do so for those who came afterward. It’s easy to deride Dolezal’s dishonesty—to ridicule her hoax as a clever means of sidestepping the suspicion with which white liberals are commonly greeted—until we reflect on a photograph of Walter White, the aptly named man who served as the second black president of the N.A.A.C.P. Or one of Louis T. Wright, who served as the national chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. board during the Great Depression. In the nineteen-twenties, amid a feud with the organization, the black nationalist Marcus Garvey criticized the N.A.A.C.P. for being a organization whose black and white members were essentially indistinguishable.
The spectrum of shades and colorings that constitute “black” identity in the United States, and the equal claim to black identity that someone who looks like White or Wright (or, for that matter, Dolezal) can have, is a direct product of bloodlines that attest to institutionalized rape during and after slavery. Nearly all of us who identify as African-American in this country, apart from some more recent immigrants, have at least some white ancestry. My own white great-grandparent is as inconsequential as the color of my palms in terms of my status as a black person in the United States. My grandparents had four children: my father and his brother, both almond-brown, with black hair and dark eyes, and two girls with reddish hair, fair skin, freckles, and gray eyes. All of them were equally black because they were equal heirs to the quirks of chance determining whether their ancestry from Europe or Africa was most apparent. Dolezal’s primary offense lies not in the silly proffering of a false biography but in knowing this ugly history and taking advantage of the reasons that she would, at least among black people, be taken at her word regarding her identity.
Race, in this country and under certain circumstances, functions like a faith, in that the simple profession of membership is sufficient. The most—possibly the sole—democratic element of race in this country lies in this ecumenical approach to blackness. We are not in the business of checking membership cards. In this way, Dolezal’s claim on black identity is of a different order than the hollow declaration of a Hollywood scion or anyone else who opted to be Negro for a season. They can plead ignorance. But Dolezal spent four years at an institution steeped in the delicacies of race. If nothing else, she understands the exact nature of the trust she violated.
Despite the interchangeability of the terms “African-American” and “black,” this is a community in which ancestry is one, but clearly not the sole or necessarily even the primary, basis for inclusion. Walter White was only fractionally more African than Dolezal, but black enough to be accepted as not only a member of that community but one of its leaders. There is also a disquieting notion inherent in this approach to identity—that if anyone can indeed be “black,” then we all are, that Morrison and Coltrane and Chisholm and Malcolm are both unhyphenated Americans and indistinct. (And yet, in circumstances where someone named Eric Garner or Walter Scott is looking nervously over his shoulder, they are still vulnerably intelligible.) It putatively means that Chet Haze is as qualified to utter the word "nigga" as anyone for whom dark skin and skewed life chances have given the word connotations Haze would never countenance. It means, most damningly, that black people are not distinctly bound to each other. Yet both of these things—a community rooted in race and a deep-seated skepticism about the very existence of race—coexist.
Rachel Dolezal is not black—by lineage or lifelong experience—yet I find her deceptions less troubling than the vexed criteria being used to exclude her. If blackness is simply a matter of a preponderance of African ancestry, then we should set about the task of excising a great deal of the canon of black history, up to and including the current President. If it is simply a matter of shared experience, we might excommunicate people like Walter White, whose blue eyes were camouflage that could serve both to spare him the direct indignity of racism and enable him to personally investigate and expose lynchings. Dolezal was dishonest about an undertaking rooted in dishonesty, and no matter how absurd her fictional blackness may appear, it is worth recalling that the former lie is far more dangerous than the latter. Our means of defining ourselves are complex and contradictory—and could be nothing other than that. But if the rubric is faulty it remains vital. The great majority of Americans recognize slavery as a figment of history, interred in a receding past. But, for black people, that past remains at the surface—close at hand, indelible, a narrative as legible as skin.
Jelani Cobb's Thesis Paragraph: "We're all wearing the fictive garb of race."
The easy presumption about Dolezal, who has two white parents and light skin and eyes—and hair that has ranged from blond to brown, though she has worn it in ways that are culturally associated with black women—is that this is an instance in which someone finally pointed out the obvious: the emperor is naked. But, in truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie.
"Lying about the lie": Race is not a simple category set in stone; rather, race is an arbitrary social construction historically designed to service a power hierarchy.
We read, for example, in Debra Dickerson's essay "The Great White Way," that white America initially tagged southern Europeans, Slavs, Greeks, and Italians, for example, as "black" and then around 1920 Anglo White America "allowed" these southern Europeans to earn their "whiteness" by assimilating into Anglo culture. However, they did not give such license to African-Americans and Latinos.
According to Jelani Cobb's logic, since race is a fiction and a lie, we should not be so offended by the lie that Rachel Dolezal assumes as she parades through life under the guise of a black identity.
Refuting Cobb's argument:
Try telling African Americans that their race is a lie when racial perception results in higher rates of police brutality, mass incarceration, and an income gap of 10:1 in favor of white Americans.
In spite of African Americans' struggle and oppression in America, African Americans wield huge influence over the world in terms of language and culture. The whole world is influenced by African American culture: language, style, music, art, fashion, entertainment, and business.
The whole world imitates and borrows from African-American culture, which has the biggest influence than any culture in the world.
Cultural influence is one thing. Piggy-backing on another culture is another thing.
But cultural appropriation, some argue, takes cultural borrowing too far to the point that one is stealing.
Pretending your black, putting on fake tan and using tanning booth, and telling the world you're black, many would argue, is taking cultural influence too far.
Rachel Dolezal wants positive attention as being a "sister in the struggle." Many people are annoyed by this.
Rachel Dolezal and her defenders say we should not be annoyed. It's cool to for Rachel, a white woman, to masquerade as a sister in the struggle.
At what point does a non African-American commit an act of cultural appropriation?
Should we be morally offended by white people passing as African American?
If you had a white college instructor championing black rights and disguising himself as black, would you be able to take that instructor seriously? Would you have any moral objections to such a professor? Would you question that professor's mental stability? Or would you "be cool with it"?
Sample Thesis Statements
Even if Rachel Dolezal is an attention-seeking narcissist using race to expand her status and social cachet, her claim to belong to the African-American is not a crime or an offense because there is no such thing as race except as a fiction that we all pretend to exist. By condemning Rachel Dolezal for masquerading as an African-American, we are guilty of perpetuating the mythology that race is an objective reality.
Refutation of the Above
While we can all agree that race is a mythology, the fact remains that America has used skin color as an arbitrary way to manage power and that people of color have been stolen from by America's kleptocracy. For Rachel Dolezal to appropriate blackness to elevate her social esteem while enjoying her white privilege is morally disgusting and morally bankrupt, evidence of a selfish narcissist, evidence of someone willing to mock and steal from the very people she claims to represent, and evidence of a kind of fraud that has no place in championing civil rights, especially someone who works for the NAACP.
