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Not news about moi for a change, but the kind that shows up in newspapers.
I normally try to avoid the political, but I have seen so many comments about Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. that make me sick, that I do want to say something. I work for a university. I once broke into my own house--or, rather, sent my daughter to break in. I'd locked the key inside (long story, not worth telling), and brilliantly got then Very Small Child to crawl through the cat door, run to the front, and let us in.
No one called the police on me. If anyone had, I'd have shown the police my ID, especially if they came while I was still outside my house. I cannot imagine the police then calling the police at my university to verify that my faculty ID was valid. If the police had done the unimaginable and not taken my ID but called the university, I'd have probably said some highly uncomplimentary things myself. I didn't realize that you could be arrested for insulting a cop. You can, but officials will likely drop the charges. I think Slate spells it out pretty well here:
Once Dr. Gates was inside his house, he was under no obligation to come out or to show his identification. He did. I do believe he expected common courtesy in return, not further doubting of his identity.
They can charge him for disorderly, but that's not really how the law has been interpreted by courts. They have every good reason to drop the charges.
I don't know Dr. Gates personally. I've read some of his work, but mostly excerpts. I think I've seen him on tv. I find it difficult to imagine that him yelling at cops, and maybe even gesturing, could be interpreted as a genuine threat. I've seen bigger people yelling at cops and getting, "Calm down, sir. Please calm down."
I cannot imagine a white Ivy League professor being treated that way. And you know what? If one were, and raised a fuss, it might not make national media, but it would make The Chronicle of Higher Education. I've read far, far too many comments on the story, but not a single one has said, "Well, that happened to me, and I'm white." Every time a race issue is raised in CHE, at least one person makes such a post, usually very soon after the story goes up online. "It can't be racism, because it doesn't just happen to people of color." That ignores the fact that some things happen disproportionately to people of color, but here I haven't seen a single such comment.
My opinion is that it's not "playing the race card" if you are merely pointing out that a deck has ben stacked against you. The police have dropped charges. Dr. Gates has apparently said he regrets getting angry. I'd like to think people will learn from this (especially the police), but the bulk of comments I've seen show people drawing completely the wrong lessons, like an unfunny Fractured Fairy Tales.
Now that you're already depressed or annoyed, I thought I'd pass on this new-to-me news: Amazon can silently delete books from your Kindle. I have already expressed concern to friends, colleagues, and random people trapped in front of me (AKA students) that I can photocopy an article and send it to a friend for his or her personal use in scholarship or teaching, but under the terms of most (but not all) services that distribute electronic copies, I can't send a pdf. Can my library? Can another library with an electronic-only subscription send a copy to my library when I request it via Interlibrary Loan, or am I out of luck? I honestly don't know.
I thought that was bad enough, but the idea that texts can be silently deleted.... I'm an Anglo-Saxonist. I have held in my grubby little hands books that are over a thousand years old. (I washed my hands first. And the one from which my icon is drawn is a little under a thousand years old, nor have I held it, but I really like the picture--you notice that she has my name, right?) I did not actually cry in the British Library when I held the remains of a burned manuscript, but I did shed a few tears privately, and right there in the Manuscript Reading Room my eyes prickled and burned. But at least we had the fragments. We know we've lost some, but after a thousand years or more, well, we just have to live with it.
To think of many or all copies of texts being erased with a simple command, without a trace left behind, appalls me. Copyright violation is nowhere near the same order of crime. I know of scholarly websites that have disappeared, and fanfics that have been removed and no one seems to be able to find. For literature to go this way--I pray it doesn't happen. I worry that it might have happened already. I had a professor who used to lose sleep worrying that our sole copy of Beowulf is a later forgery. I think I know people who have lost sleep worrying that Cædmon's Hymn is a back-translation from Latin. Now I'm going to be lying awake nights wondering what's disappearing on the Internet....
You'll have to pardon me. I am recovering from intestinal difficulties, so I may be in a Marvin the Paranoid Android mood today. "Not getting you down at all, am I?"
I normally try to avoid the political, but I have seen so many comments about Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. that make me sick, that I do want to say something. I work for a university. I once broke into my own house--or, rather, sent my daughter to break in. I'd locked the key inside (long story, not worth telling), and brilliantly got then Very Small Child to crawl through the cat door, run to the front, and let us in.
No one called the police on me. If anyone had, I'd have shown the police my ID, especially if they came while I was still outside my house. I cannot imagine the police then calling the police at my university to verify that my faculty ID was valid. If the police had done the unimaginable and not taken my ID but called the university, I'd have probably said some highly uncomplimentary things myself. I didn't realize that you could be arrested for insulting a cop. You can, but officials will likely drop the charges. I think Slate spells it out pretty well here:
Once Dr. Gates was inside his house, he was under no obligation to come out or to show his identification. He did. I do believe he expected common courtesy in return, not further doubting of his identity.
They can charge him for disorderly, but that's not really how the law has been interpreted by courts. They have every good reason to drop the charges.
I don't know Dr. Gates personally. I've read some of his work, but mostly excerpts. I think I've seen him on tv. I find it difficult to imagine that him yelling at cops, and maybe even gesturing, could be interpreted as a genuine threat. I've seen bigger people yelling at cops and getting, "Calm down, sir. Please calm down."
I cannot imagine a white Ivy League professor being treated that way. And you know what? If one were, and raised a fuss, it might not make national media, but it would make The Chronicle of Higher Education. I've read far, far too many comments on the story, but not a single one has said, "Well, that happened to me, and I'm white." Every time a race issue is raised in CHE, at least one person makes such a post, usually very soon after the story goes up online. "It can't be racism, because it doesn't just happen to people of color." That ignores the fact that some things happen disproportionately to people of color, but here I haven't seen a single such comment.
My opinion is that it's not "playing the race card" if you are merely pointing out that a deck has ben stacked against you. The police have dropped charges. Dr. Gates has apparently said he regrets getting angry. I'd like to think people will learn from this (especially the police), but the bulk of comments I've seen show people drawing completely the wrong lessons, like an unfunny Fractured Fairy Tales.
Now that you're already depressed or annoyed, I thought I'd pass on this new-to-me news: Amazon can silently delete books from your Kindle. I have already expressed concern to friends, colleagues, and random people trapped in front of me (AKA students) that I can photocopy an article and send it to a friend for his or her personal use in scholarship or teaching, but under the terms of most (but not all) services that distribute electronic copies, I can't send a pdf. Can my library? Can another library with an electronic-only subscription send a copy to my library when I request it via Interlibrary Loan, or am I out of luck? I honestly don't know.
I thought that was bad enough, but the idea that texts can be silently deleted.... I'm an Anglo-Saxonist. I have held in my grubby little hands books that are over a thousand years old. (I washed my hands first. And the one from which my icon is drawn is a little under a thousand years old, nor have I held it, but I really like the picture--you notice that she has my name, right?) I did not actually cry in the British Library when I held the remains of a burned manuscript, but I did shed a few tears privately, and right there in the Manuscript Reading Room my eyes prickled and burned. But at least we had the fragments. We know we've lost some, but after a thousand years or more, well, we just have to live with it.
To think of many or all copies of texts being erased with a simple command, without a trace left behind, appalls me. Copyright violation is nowhere near the same order of crime. I know of scholarly websites that have disappeared, and fanfics that have been removed and no one seems to be able to find. For literature to go this way--I pray it doesn't happen. I worry that it might have happened already. I had a professor who used to lose sleep worrying that our sole copy of Beowulf is a later forgery. I think I know people who have lost sleep worrying that Cædmon's Hymn is a back-translation from Latin. Now I'm going to be lying awake nights wondering what's disappearing on the Internet....
You'll have to pardon me. I am recovering from intestinal difficulties, so I may be in a Marvin the Paranoid Android mood today. "Not getting you down at all, am I?"
