To respond to issues of race, gender and sexuality, national leaders need to realize that the issues belong together and stop separating them for political gain, according to panelists at yesterday's launch of the Women's Resource Center's Sex Series.
History professors Tricia Rose and Lisa Duggan, both from New York University, argued the above point during a dialogue on race, gender and sexuality in Brace Commons yesterday as part of their efforts to end a problem they have deemed the "Balkanization of issues."
Rose began her part of the presentation with an explanation of the need to combine race, gender and sexuality in our observations.
Society has created an "imaginary norm to which only a small group of people actually belong," Rose said, saying that this group is formed only by the exclusion and exploitation of other people.
She then presented a 1987 case study of Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old black girl who would not speak and wrote only "white cops" on a piece of paper after being raped, beaten and left in a garbage can.
According to Rose, after the arrests of five area police officers and assistant district attorney Steve Pagones, the media immediately sensationalized the case and ran with it, only to be embarrassed later when a jury declared that there wasn't enough evidence to declare guilt. All six men went free.
Pagones later filed suit against Brawley claiming defamation of character, but this lawsuit changed the focus of the case from a child's rape to the politics of black against white. Representing Brawley's side were Rev. Al Sharpton, C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox, all black males.
Soon every black person in New York had decided that Brawley had been raped by a group of white men, while all the white people were sure that she was a liar, Rose said.
Rose made the case that "Tawana and her story became invisible," as the whole debate revolved around the stereotypes of race, specifically the historic truth that white males fathered children of their black slaves versus the inaccurate label of black men as excessively sexual. Brawley was forgotten as politics took over.
Duggan then took over the talk with her story of a second case in 1997 in which the Women's Studies Program at SUNY New Paltz presented a conference where "the motives were similar to the motives of this sex series here at Dartmouth."
The conference aimed to talk about issues in women's sexuality through keynote speakers and workshops.
"The conference sounds normal, but it generated a humongous national debate," Duggan said. It was attacked by moral conservatives and the religious right, who claimed that education funds should not be used, in their view, to teach women to be lesbians.
The media raised issues of academic freedom and culture wars in this situation but practically ignored the deeper underlying cause.
According to Duggan, the groups attacking the conference wanted to "defund education." Without public support, this would have been impossible, but by claiming that "the speakers were part of the lesbian Mafia," they were able to gain political and public support.
Essentially, Duggan said, the attackers of the conference were utilizing the public fear of sexuality and the taboo of its discussion to remove funds from the school, breaking down democratic education in the process. Removing funds from the school would make it inaccessible to minorities and poor.
Although she argued her case rapidly and used an occasional unfamiliar term, Duggan clearly outlined her argument: that to analyze this case, we can not only look at one issue.
After covering a large amount of ground in a short time, the two speakers initiated a question-and-answer session which quickly escalated into a shouting exchange between Rose and an audience member who spoke almost unintelligibly about the media in New York during the Brawley case.
During one distinguishable section of their exchange, Rose reiterated her point.
"I'm going to complicate things a bit," the upset woman in the audience said, and proceeded to speak about how the media could not be blamed.
"The media is a complicated entity," Rose responded, "I am not accusing the white press."
The woman said that Rose generalized the media's actions and protested Rose's implication that the media had been mistaken.
Rose responded, "Your defensiveness is blinding you. You are not hearing my talk. I don't care about the media -- I am talking about the separation of race behind it."
In answers to other questions, the two panelists discussed the necessity of national forums to resolve the issues. Rose mentioned the importance of the media, saying that "we are in an information nation. The media determines the national conversation."
