Put a plug in your “well, actually.”
It’s a pretty common story here. Law professor/lawyer/law student engages in bigoted trolling behavior for some reason. People object because that’s what you do when you live in a society founded on the principle that other people deserve basic respect and human dignity. Original actor throws a tantrum doubling down on their behavior.
Now, why would they do that?
The simplest explanation is that most people willing to come right out and say bigoted stuff are awful people and they’re doubling down because they legitimately refuse to believe they’re wrong. Whether they do it by demonizing “cancel culture” for calling them out on their reprehensible actions or they gussy it up with some quasi-intellectual veneer like the “use-mention distinction” it boils down to refusing to take responsibility because they don’t feel they owe anything to anyone who isn’t them.
A reader crystalized this mentality by replying to this article with “You [sic] insulting description of libertarians is much more bigoted than anything you describe in this article.” The “anything” in the article is “using the n-word” and the description of libertarians was that it’s childish to use free speech as an excuse to gratuitously use slurs. The implied formula is “infantilizing a philosophy > racial slurs.” It was such a perfect self-own that I wish it was parody. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.
But two stories from this week ventured into territory that we don’t see often at Above the Law. We learned that CUNY Law’s Dean Mary Lu Bilek, who we already knew was stepping down, decided to leave her post after remarking at a meeting that she was a “slaveholder.” In context, her comment reads as acknowledging that she was the one ultimately responsible in an ongoing tenure dispute over perceived racial bias, making it a straightforward analogy if an extraordinarily problematic one. We also heard from Michigan’s Dean Mark West apologizing for the covers used on his past published books. Dean West is an expert on Japanese law and the published works exploit common stereotypes.
In both cases, the person involved is owning up to it and, in Bilek’s case, leaving her post since her actions directly impact school management. In both cases, we still heard from folks that the responses were “too little too late.” Everyone has to judge the quality of an apology from their own perspective. Someone apologizing under duress isn’t genuine, for example.
I don’t think the people who wrote us meant it that way, but the “too little too late” word choice got me thinking about whether or not some of these double-down artists are motivated by a perception that no conciliatory path exists for them, so they may as well be jerks about it. One of the worst side-effects of the whole right-wing “cancel culture” rhetoric is that it portrays people criticizing bigotry as impossible to satisfy and therefore unworthy of attention.
And that’s bad, because confronting incidents like these head on is much more conducive to a productive discussion. Engaging and listening might be all it takes to resolve the matter to everyone’s satisfaction. Come to it with some basic humility. Maybe what was said wasn’t even bad per se but the speaker didn’t understand the context that made the audience hear it that way. That’s still something to acknowledge and address. If people at the center of these controversies start shutting down and trying to avoid these conversations because they don’t see any productive outcome, it just incentivizes bad behavior.
I thought about this a lot in the Bilek situation, because one of the strong arguments made by the student government in continuing to criticize Bilek even after she took the serious step of leaving her post is that she tried to cover up why she was leaving. Was it because she thought nothing could come of engaging the problem head on? Because right or wrong, it seems as though it only made it worse.
Make no mistake, most people double down because they’re just jerks. But I’m willing to hear them out on it.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.