NYU professors advocate unity of race/sex issues
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.