Cornell University Has Some Explaining To Do: Why Oh Why Can't We Have Better Academics?/William Jacobson Edition
Surely Cornell could find somebody less prone to major errors in argumentative logic than William Jacobson to teach in their clinical legal program?
Ta-Nehisi Coates:
It's Not That You're Racist...: ...It's that you're either ignorant or dishonest. Cornell Law Professor William A. Jacobson inveighing against Matt Yglesias:
Using the logic of Matthew Yglesias of Think Progress, who is having his 15 minutes of race card fame, anyone who expresses any measure of praise for the pre-1947 Yankees necessarily would be "expressing affection for a White Supremacist" organization. It would not matter that the praise was for the Yankees' baseball skills; any expression of anything less than complete condemnation of the Yankees necessarily evidences tolerance for racism because the Yankees were part of a racist system. That logic is what Yglesias uses against Haley Barbour because Barbour made a statement that when Barbour was growing up in the early 1960s in Yazoo City, Mississippi, the "Citizens Council" stood up to the Klan and was organized to keep the Klan out of Barbour's home town. That apparenly is a true statement, but because the Citizens Council also supported the system of segregation, Yglesias has accused Barbour of "expressing affection for the White Supremacist Citizens Council," and almost the entire nutroots blogsphere has picked up the meme that Barbour is a racist. Yet nothing Barbour said, or has done in his professional life, supports the charge that Barbour supported segregation himself, although if he were a Southern Democrat during the 1960s he almost certainly would have supported segregation...
I think it helps to be very clear....
- Matt has accused Barbour of "expressing affection for the White Supremacist Citizens Council," and spurred the "nutroots blogsphere" (I assume that's basically left bloggers) to run with that and use it to argue that Haley Barbour is a racist.
- Left bloggers who, like Matt, are claiming that Barbour is a racist are doing something "odious and evil."
Let's take the last point first--I think it would be generally odious and evil to accuse someone of racism without much evidence. I think there's quite a bit of evidence that Haley Barbour is shockingly ignorant of the history of his state, and of American history at large. In his office hangs the battle-flag of an Army raised solely to found a republic based on White Supremacy. This is not the politically correct sooth-saying of liberal historians. It's the reprehensible rantings of the very Confederates whom Haley Barbour honors....
I can agree that merely displaying the flag of a white supremacist Army, praising a group which opposed integration in the 1960s, and--at this very moment--is boycotting a Hollywood movie because for casting a black person as a Norse deity does not make one a racist. I guess I'd also agree that dressing in Nazi regalia and praising Pat Buchanan's writings on Jews doesn't, in itself, make you an anti-Semite. No one can know the contents of person's heart. But it does make you, as Matt charged, "dangerously ignorant."...
Jacobson never quotes Matt--or frankly anyone--charging that Barbour is a racist. That... leads us to the second point--that there is an outbreak of liberal bloggers claiming Barbour is a racist. A google search of "Barbour is a racist"... does not reveal a single liberal blog of real note making that case... [but rather] a raft of sites either arguing that Barbour isn't a racist, or arguing why it's not relevant. Unable to deal with the actual arguments made by Matt here, for instance, and evidently generally ignorant of the basic facts of American history, Jacobson simply strawmans and changes the subject....
Jacobson is a professor at one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in this country. I can't for the life of me imagine how someone rises to such heights and, evidently, never acquires an understanding of the rudiments of American history, nor an ethic of honest debate. It's true that universities are sprawling. But this is the kind of dissembling defense of public official who honors a white supremacist flag, and praises a white supremacist organization, is what you get out of a professor at Cornell, what real hope is there for cable news?
