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Revisionism; airbrushing
Topic Started: Feb 27 2010, 12:57 AM (370 Views)
Quasimodo

(repost) :

http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/

Aug 11 2008


When asked for an anecdote of why history is important, I usually cite a story from March 1948, shortly after a coup that installed totalitarian rule in Czechoslovakia, when the Czech Communist Party (KSČ) convened a celebratory gathering in Prague’s Old Town Square. Tens of thousands braved chilling temperatures to hear KSČ leader Klement Gottwald speak. The new communist foreign minister, Vladimír Clementis stood beside Gottwald on the podium, and gave up his fur hat to shield the prime minister’s bare head from the cold.

Four years later, a wave of anti-Semitic show trials occurred throughout the Eastern Bloc; Czechoslovakia experienced the most spectacular purge. In late 1952, the government denounced Clementis, KSČ first secretary Rudolf Slánský, and twelve other prominent Communists as “Trotskyite-Zionist-Titoist-bourgeois-nationalist traitors, spies, and saboteurs.” Eleven of the fourteen arrested leaders were Jews. All were found guilty in show trials; eleven, including Slánský and Clementis, were executed.

The trials’ outcome required creating a new, politically correct, version of the past. Propagandists eliminated the executed party members from communist history books. Clementis, for instance, was airbrushed from the photograph at the Prague demonstration hailing the coup. In the KSČ’s version of history, all that remained of the former foreign minister was the cap that he had placed on Gottwald’s head.

(snip)

In the lacrosse case, the Group of 88 most blatantly imitated the Czech propagandists. Beginning in late 2006—as the case to which they had attached their cause began to implode, and the African-American Studies Department had removed the ad from its homepage, where it had been posted for 183 days—we witnessed a furious attempt to create a new, politically convenient, meaning of the ad.

Airbrushed out was Wahneema Lubiano’s e-mail soliciting signatures for the ad. In its stead, Group apologists described the ad as a general commentary on society. Airbrushed out was the overwhelming, guilt-presuming early media coverage. In its stead, Group members deemed the ad a necessary corrective to the anti-black stereotypes and defenders of the lacrosse players that allegedly dominated the early media coverage. Airbrushed out was the way in which the unequivocal statement that something “happened” to Crystal Mangum took a position on the case. In its stead, Group members affirmed that the line was merely a commentary on Mangum’s public “drunkenness.”


(snip)


A more subtle type of airbrushing has occurred in the media, and in commentary about the media’s role in the case—as three recent items bring to light.


1.) From the Q&A session of the recent SEALS panel: the media coverage of Mike Nifong’s abuses, and in particular the 60 Minutes broadcast. The basic line: attention to the players’ exoneration proved the media’s class bias, since poor black victims of prosecutorial misconduct don’t usually get interviewed by 60 Minutes.

(snip)

The N&O still hates the presumption of innocence when it comes to politically correct defendants. Just like the “privileged white athletes” in the hoax frame, rich white businessmen can never be truly innocent to the N&O. That makes it OK to ruin their reputation before the trial and after an acquittal.

* I first wrote about perp walks long before the lacrosse case. See here.

One of the most distasteful examples of media behavior came on the day that Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty were arrested—the breathless coverage of their (arranged) “perp walk” followed by journalists all but clawing the Durham County Sheriff for a copy of their mugshots (we have a photo of the latter in UPI.) How can any newspaper that covered that event continue to justify covering “perp walks,” which serve no purpose other than humiliation?


(3) Perhaps the clearest case of media airbrushing, however, came in an AP article that from a couple of days ago. The headline “Race sometimes a problem in eyewitness IDs.” The article discussed a North Carolina case of a white woman who was raped by a black man, Ron Cotton, and then identified the wrong man in the lineup. DNA testing freed the man, but only after he spent a decade in jail. (A rape did occur in this case.) The victim and the man she falsely identified are now writing a book, Picking Cotton.


The article discusses how DNA exoneration of wrongly convicted people often (more than 75% of the time) involves cases where convictions were obtained in part through mistaken eyewitness IDs. From the AP article: “Of those, nearly half, roughly seven dozen, involved a person of one race wrongly identifying someone of a different color.” The article discusses the increased danger of cross-racial IDs, and contains a quote from Barry Scheck about the particular dangers of white IDs of black people.


Then came this item:



This year, North Carolina became the first state to standardize identification procedures. That includes preventing the police officer who is investigating the crime from conducting photo identifications with witnesses and requiring that lineup photographs be shown one after another rather than in groups of six.


What case provided the final impetus for this change? The AP doesn’t say—the lacrosse case gets airbrushed from history. (If anything, the article implies that the Picking Cotton case brought about the change.) This editorial decision was particularly odd given the lacrosse case demonstrated the dangers of cross-racial IDs, most notably when Crystal Mangum twice stated with 100 percent certainty that she saw Brad Ross at the party, even though Ross could provide unimpeachable electronic proof that not only did he not attend the party, he wasn’t even in Durham County that night.


It seems that the lacrosse case doesn’t fit into the article’s framework that one type of cross-racial misidentification is where the media should confine its attention.

(snip)

[We will probably see more of the airbrushing of the case from history.]
Edited by Quasimodo, Feb 27 2010, 12:57 AM.
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RighteousThug
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Link to KC's blog entry:

http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2008/08/airbrushing.html
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nyesq83
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Hate to pick nits, but

Quote:
 
This editorial decision was particularly odd given the lacrosse case demonstrated the dangers of cross-racial IDs, most notably when Crystal Mangum twice stated with 100 percent certainty that she saw Brad Ross at the party, even though Ross could provide unimpeachable electronic proof that not only did he not attend the party, he wasn’t even in Durham County that night.


I think this is a ridiculous 'bad example' of cross-racial identification, because CGM was so out of it she probably couldn't identify her drivers in a lineup.

She had personal motivation beyond that possessed by an actual victim to cooperate with the dirty Himan and Gott-lies.
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Payback
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I want to say something about Cathy Davidson as "scholar" and to lead up to it was recalling some of her efforts to rewrite history.

This is KC's 18 Sept. 2007 guest blog on The Volokh Conspiracy:
http://volokh.com/posts/1190148681.shtml
Group members disinclined toward unsubstantiated attacks or unprofessional behavior engaged in an Orwellian attempt to redefine the past. Perhaps the best example came in a January 2007 op-ed from English professor Cathy Davidson, who rationalized the Group of 88’s statement as nothing more than saying “that we faculty were listening to the anguish of students who felt demeaned by racist and sexist remarks swirling around in the media and on the campus quad in the aftermath of what happened on March 13 in the lacrosse house. The insults, at that time, were rampant. It was as if defending David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann necessitated reverting to pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans, especially poor black women.”
These claims were absurd: in late March and early April 2006 virtually no one was publicly defending the lacrosse players “on the campus quad” or anyplace else, much less using racial stereotypes to do so.
While the Group members’ positions might have been divorced from reality, they had a chilling effect on campus discourse. For nearly six months, as an extraordinarily high-profile case of prosecutorial misconduct involving their own students unfolded before their very eyes, not one member of the Duke arts and sciences faculty publicly criticized Nifong’s behavior. The first who did so, Chemistry professor Steven Baldwin, also blasted the Group of 88 for betraying their responsibilities as professors. The response? The next day, the director of Duke’s women’s studies program accused Baldwin of using the “language of lynching,” while the co-director of Duke’s Center for Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender sent Baldwin an e-mail implying that they should settle their differences through violence.
This is KC in Durham-in-Wonderland 4 August 2009

http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2009/08/davidson-does-grading.html
Widely perceived as among the more moderate of the Group of 88, Davidson humiliated herself by penning the first apologia for the Group’s action. In her January 2007 op-ed, the Duke English professor invented a past that never existed, claiming that in the first two weeks after the case broke—a time when both local and national coverage was overwhelmingly slanted against the lacrosse players—the media was in fact “rampant” with “racist and sexist remarks,” with those intent on “defending David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann . . . reverting to pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans, especially poor black women.”
Davidson, in short, revealed herself to be either a shameless fabricator or (much more likely) someone so steeped in the groupthink atmosphere that dominates Duke’s humanities departments that she actually believed that the early media coverage was favorable to the lacrosse players. When reality clashed with her own words, the Group of 88’er retreated to fulminations against those she labeled “hooligans.”


This is KC 12 October 2009.
http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html

Finally: the case of Cathy Davidson. All who followed the lacrosse case closely know that . . . memory problems . . . bedeviled Prof. Davidson in 2006 and 2007. After all, this is the same professor who preposterously claimed that in the week between March 29, 2006 and April 5, 2006, Duke students "felt demeaned by racist and sexist remarks swirling around in the media and on the campus quad in the aftermath of what happened on March 13 in the lacrosse house. The insults, at that time, were rampant. It was as if defending David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann necessitated reverting to pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans, especially poor black women."
In fact, during that week, Mike Nifong dominated the airwaves, virtually no one was defending the lacrosse players (much less doing so through "pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans," activists flooded the Duke campus with "wanted" posters of the lacrosse players, and Richard Brodhead made time to meet with African-American students who demanded recognition of the lacrosse players as guilty of a "hate crime" even as he refused to meet with the lacrosse players' parents or lawyers.
Now, Emory professor Mark Bauerlein has revealed that Prof. Davidson's . . . memory problems . . . predated her experience in the lacrosse case. Bauerlein notes that, in Davidson's 2004 apologia for the overwhelming political imbalance among the Duke faculty, "Either as a department member or a member of the APT [appointments, promotions, and tenure] committee, I've not encountered any Duke faculty member being harassed or discriminated against because he or she is conservative."
Yet Bauerlein has uncovered a letter from Davidson that contradicts her firm 2004 assertion. In an extraordinarily high-profile event from the pre-Keohane/Chafe Duke, then-English professor Stanley Fish (chairman of the department of which Davidson was a member) demanded that Duke not appoint any member of the National Association of Scholars to an APT or distinguished professor position. As Bauerlein noted, "Obviously, Fish's request marked a patent act of discrimination on ideological grounds."
Anyone who heard her 2004 statement might have assumed that Davidson was unaware of Fish's request. Yet Bauerlein has uncovered a letter from Davidson in the Fish Papers, in which she praised Fish's performance as chair. She also noted, "Although I do not agree with the tactics that he (reportedly) suggested with respect to the NAS debate, I also do not at all see him speaking for me in this matter and find it curious that, in the name of free speech, his voicing of his views is being condemned." (In other words: Fish wanted to exclude professors from appointments committees because of their political or pedagogical beliefs--and yet he was the victim in the affair.)
In any event, it appears that sometime between the early 1990s and her 2004 remarks, Prof. Davidson . . . forgot . . . about Prof. Fish's efforts to harass or discriminate against Duke faculty members "because he or she is conservative."
Given her recurring . . . memory problems . . . perhaps it is better that Prof. Davidson no longer does her own grading, and has ceded that basic professional responsibility to the students in her class.
Professors Dorfman, Hardt, and Davidson, it’s worth reiterating, are among the Group of 88's most prestigious scholars.

I want to add something about Davidson as a "scholar." Soon after she took over the editorship of AMERICAN LITERTURE at Duke she devised a special March 1994 issue on the "New Melville" in which one of her selected contributors announced that "WE ALREADY HAVE FULL-SCALE BIOGRAPHIES OF MELVILLE," and certainly did not need another one written from thousands of unused documents. She also printed a baseless accusation that Melville was a wife-beater--an article which had the predictable immediate effect of leading at least one female critic to announce in a book that she could not teach a wife-beater. I took the issue as a whole as an attempt to prevent my being able to publish the biography that had been announced, and in 1996 said so in a talk at the New York 92nd Street Y. That led to a pretty trashy article in the New York Times Magazine 15 December 1996 which at least started with a slightly more than full page color picture of me before I looked even more like GG Grandpa Henderson here on LieStoppers. Here is the third paragraph:
"His speech that Sunday in Manhattan was punctuated with anger. He lashed out at the journal AMERICAN LITERATUE for an issue it had done on the New Melville, an issue full of accusations that Melville scholars had hidden evidence that Melville was a misogynist, a scoundrel. Parker viewed the issue as a personal attack. 'The wanted to stop the biography because it's about a dead white male,' he said. 'It was a preemptive strike to silence me before I come out with it, just because of the mere fact that I celebrate and magnify Melville and regard him as great. For that, obviously, I should be shot.'"
Rather than being ashamed of herself, Davidson gloried in the publicity about the single most irresponsible article in her special issue--and reprinted it. In the preface to hers and Jessamyn Hatcher's NO MORE SEPARATE SPHERES! (2002)she gleefully pointed to "the brushfire of attention caused when first published in American Literature in 1994, a reaction that went all the way to the New York Times Magazine.
In her 2004 account in AMERICAN LITERATURE she revisits her New Melville:
Later she sums it up: "And did he beat his wife? Probably." That flippant "Probably" says all anyone would need to say about her renunciation of all standards for evidence. There is ample evidence for a marital crisis. When documents were discovered in the 1970s and printed in a specialized journal Donald Yannella and I spent 2 or 3 years soliciting comments from older scholars who had known some of the Melville family as well as members of the family so we could reprint the documents in as full a context as possible. The pamphlet format was cheap and cheap-looking, but we sent out copies free to every member of the Melville Society and to dozens of libraries. Yet in Davidson's New Melville we were accused of "suppressing" the evidence we had tried so hard to publicize! No wonder I went out for a run after the March issue of AL came and fell on the last patch of ice in the Mid-Atlantic and broke my right wrist! There was absolutely no evidence of wife beating although there is evidence enough of serious gloom around the house for some years as well as a serious crisis (in 1867). One of the great granddaughters, daughter of the one who got to stay with the Melvilles more than her older sister because she was a docile child, told me very firmly that her mother would never have been allowed to stay with the Melvilles if there had been any history of violence in the house. That is, Melville's daughter, who did indeed "hate" him, or at least hate his reviving fame, would not have let her daughter stay with a violent man.
I am pretty sure now that Melville will survive even Cathy Davidson, "Godzilla all over again." Stand by: Will she reinvent her role in destroying American literary studies?


Edited by Payback, Feb 27 2010, 02:13 PM.
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