While I share Cluess’s evaluation of Germán’s tweet as fanatically anti-intellectual, this response was never going to b

There were a few more tweets. All of them like this.
While I share Cluess’s evaluation of Germán’s tweet as fanatically anti-intellectual, this response was never going to be well-received. Cluess had to have known that. This is young adult fiction — there was just no way Cluess was going to avoid getting snowed.
The outcry was as brutal as it was predictable. But it was the particular form of rebuke that Cluess endured — that she is a super vile racist — that I found most disappointing and worrisome.

http://www.repfiles.us/war/video-pelicans-vs-jazz-Live-tv01.html

http://www.repfiles.us/war/video-pelicans-vs-jazz-Live-tv02.html

http://www.repfiles.us/war/video-pelicans-vs-jazz-Live-tv03.html

http://www.repfiles.us/war/video-pelicans-vs-jazz-Live-tv04.html

http://www.repfiles.us/war/video-pelicans-vs-jazz-Live-tv05.html

Actually, as I see it, it was Germán’s response to Cluess that was problematic. Germán said: “Sounds like I struck a Confederate nerve” — which, I mean, passionately defending classical literature from a philistinish attack is a function of Confederate thinking now? Wow, who knew?
What I want to do is give an account of why I think the attribution of racism to Cluess’s tweet-thread is a mistake. If I’m right about this, then it’s very likely we’re applying seriously reputationally damaging labels to people who don’t deserve it.
Harper’s Scarlet Letter
Matthew Yglesias, free speech, and cancel culture
arcdigital.media
As a result, we could be short-circuiting discussion on important matters — such as the ongoing role of classics in our pedagogy — by imposing an intolerable cost to anyone taking perfectly reasonable positions.
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As I see it, if something is going to be seen as obviously racist or offensive, or even just very likely racist or offensive, we need good reasons for interpreting it that way. Cluess was branded a vile racist, but I don’t think that was deserved; the far likelier read is that her anger did not have a racialized dimension to it. Why? Nothing in her critique requires, or even strongly gestures at, a racial animus to her words.
Cluess questioned Germán’s intelligence in a variety of different ways. Racists have often used this avenue of attack for people of color. So, why is this not enough for me to see Cluess’s words as encoding a racist message?
Indeed, we are often perfectly willing to interpret innocuous-sounding language as being code for racist putdowns. Take the example of using a money sign in reference to a public figure who happens to be Jewish. That trades on the old antisemitic trope in which a symbol of greed is used to refer to a Jewish person. What makes these instances cases of coded language but Cluess’s tweets something different?
In the antisemitic examples, it is usually unmistakably clear that the offenders are targeting the person’s Jewishness.
There is vast cultural awareness of that particular mischaracterization of Jewish people, and, as a slur, it retains near-exclusivity as a target against Jews. That’s why, in such instances, it strains credulity to think there’s anything other than the target’s Jewishness that is being implicitly invoked.
The offender will of course protest — but in these cases their protestations just aren’t credible. They will suggest that they simply posited that the individual just happens to be plagued by avarice — they’re just incidentally greedy, you see. But there is no basis for accepting this defense. They know what they’re saying, and so do we.
(Obviously this doesn’t apply highly specific cases such as, say, when we describe Bernie Madoff as greedy. Madoff is Jewish, but it’s his documented and legendary level of greed that warrants ascribing to him, to the person, the property of being a greedy bastard.)
Poverty of the Imagination
#DisruptTexts and the problem with teaching literature for social justice
arcdigital.media
Are the facts as clear cut in the Cluess example? Well, what we’ve got there is a young adult fiction writer aggressively insulting an educator (and fellow author) in her own field, an author of color, for disparaging classical literature. To me the most salient fact is that Germán is attacking, from the inside, the continued worth of something Cluess finds great value in.
That’s just it: the natural response you would expect an author who feels strongly about the importance of the classics to have, when she feels the canon’s value is being unfairly discounted, is to get bigly mad at the person doing the discounting.
Cluess obviously went way overboard in her treatment of a peer. But I see that as a different matter. The relevant point here is that the details of the exchange are entirely explainable by nonracial facts. That is, those facts by themselves explain everything about the episode.
That’s partly because the insults took the universal pejorative form of targeting Germán’s intelligence and suggesting she must be impaired to think what she does. Symbols of greed or wealth are highly specific, but it’s hard to find an instance of discourse dunking, targeting any number of different races or people, which doesn’t involve some slight on the targeted person’s intelligence.