Law Schools, SCOTUS, Supreme Court

Georgetown BLSA Exposes The #WhitePeopleProblems Of Scalia Mourners

In an open letter to the school, BLSA did the best version of "turning it around on them" that we've seen in a while.

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Antonin Scalia finger raised LFI’m on record, at least around my office, as not having a problem with Georgetown Law Center Dean William Treanor issuing a statement of mourning over the passing of Antonin Scalia. The core of the controversy is that the Georgetown community does not speak with one voice about the life of Scalia, and that the dean shouldn’t therefore be speaking for the community. But I don’t think there is any likelihood of confusion between what the dean says and the personal views of each individual Georgetown Law faculty member. Dean Treanor could come out with a statement saying, “We all mourn the loss of Patches, the Law Center bunny,” and I’d expect that there would be at least one faculty member who was all, “F**k Patches, that bucktooth asshole tried to steal ALL the damn hummus out of the Faculty Lounge.”

Figureheads are supposed to be sorry when people die. Faculty are supposed to debate the legacies of controversial figures. I think it was appropriate for Treanor to issue condolences (and the “mere puffery” that often accompanies a man’s death). I think it was appropriate for a liberal professor, in this case Gary Peller, to send out an email explaining why he thinks Scalia was a dickhead. And I think it was appropriate and expected for conservative professors, in this case Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz and Randy E. Barnett, to send around their own email explaining why Scalia was awesomesauce.

What I did not expect was for Rosenkranz and Barnett to defend Scalia on the grounds that Peller made them butthurt. From their letter:

For one’s colleagues to write, within hours of the death of someone one knows, likes, and admires, that he was a “defender of privilege, oppression and bigotry, one whose intellectual positions were not brilliant but simplistic and formalistic,” is startlingly callous and insulting, not only to his memory but to those of us who admired him. To hear from one’s colleagues, within hours of the death of a hero, mentor, and friend, that they resent any implication that they might mourn his death — that, in effect, they are glad he is dead – is simply cruel beyond words. But, though the insult and cruelty of our colleagues was grievous, at least only two of us had to bear it….

Leaders of the Federalist Society chapter and of the student Republicans reached out to us to tell us how traumatized, hurt, shaken, and angry, were their fellow students. Of particular concern to them were the students who are in Professor Peller’s class who must now attend class knowing of his contempt for Justice Scalia and his admirers, including them. How are they now to participate freely in class? What reasoning would be deemed acceptable on their exams?

Remember when conservatives were the ones who were against victimization? Here, the conservatives are saying that the liberals were not sensitive enough to their cultural views. I mean, whatever you think about Scalia, we can agree that the man was not noted for his sensitivity to other people’s viewpoints, yes? And yet here his defenders are not debating the content of the Peller’s objection, just that it was “cruel” to write so soon after the death of their hero. It’s like Millennials wrote this response. From New York Magazine:

What’s fascinating is the way Barnett and Rosenkranz are adopting campus lefty-speak in the service of a conservative argument. After all, while some of the concerns about “trigger warnings” and fragile college students are overstated, it’s undeniably true that within a segment of the campus left, a particularly high-strung idea about dissenting views has taken hold: namely, that dissenting views on hot-button issues don’t just lead to bad policy but actually do psychological harm to students who are exposed to them, or even exposed to the knowledge that they are being expressed somewhere on campus.

Barnett and Rosenkranz seem to be trying to tap into this idea with their encouragement of students to stay strong in the face of “pain” and “anger” and “traumatization” at … one professor’s email.

It’s interesting, but it’s also hypocritical. And the Black Law Students Association at Georgetown was ALL OVER IT. In an open letter to the school, BLSA did the best version of “turning it around on them” that I’ve seen in a while:

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Many Black students were also “traumatized, hurt, shaken, and angry” as “22-year-old 1Ls” when the law school declined to make unprompted timely statements last school year regarding the uptick in racialized policing, law enforcement, and the lack of indictments of violent police officers. Many Black students were also “traumatized, hurt, shaken, and angry,” when fact patterns on a practice exam directly referenced the facts of the Trayvon Martin tragedy. Many Black students are also “traumatized, hurt, shaken, and angry” every time a classroom micro-aggression, from a professor or student, is dismissed until it escalates into something more systemic. Many Black are also “traumatized, hurt, shaken, and angry” as real progress on institutional anti-racism and administrative equity and inclusion is constantly delayed.

If this one email exchange exacerbated frustrations of conservative or libertarian students, imagine the impact of continuous antagonistic classroom lectures and insensitive remarks about issues that directly affect the lives of the Black students here at the Law Center. How do we speak up in class? What reasoning will be acceptable on our exams? If our community can empathize with the hostile environment conservative students will reportedly enter as the result of the comments made by a two liberal professors in an email, then they cannot turn a blind eye to the calls for sensitivity training and a concerted effort to make faculty aware of the issues that face minority students.

You can read the full letter on the next page. And you should, because it’s goddamn awesome. This Georgetown/”Scaliagate” controversy has fully morphed into one of my favorite scenes from Silence of the Lambs where the suddenly impotent conservatives scream down into the well, “Don’t you hurt my dog,” and the newly empowered victim shouts back, “Don’t you make me hurt your dog!”

In a few weeks, conservative law professors around the country will line up to deride whatever black, brown, or vaginal American Obama picks to fill Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court. They will make arguments that our President somehow shouldn’t even make an appointment. In weeks they will do this. Some of the same people who are demanding “respect” for the dead Supreme Court justice will muster none for the living President. And when you tell them that there are clear racial overtones to their advocacy, they’ll say, “No no no, it’s just politics. YOUR TRAUMA MEANS NOTHING TO ME.”

But maybe I’m being cynical. If conservatives at Georgetown don’t like how they are being treated now, maybe next time they’ll be more careful in how they treat others. That would be an great takeaway from Scalia’s death.

Read the BLSA letter. My initial reaction to Rosenkranz and Barnett was more like, “N***a, please.” But BLSA deconstructed the problem much better than I would have.

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Conservative Law Students at Georgetown Were ‘Traumatized’ by an Anti-Scalia Email [New York Magazine]
Georgetown Campus Conservatives “Traumatized” Over Scalia Reply-All Email Apocalypse [Gawker]

Earlier: Controversy Erupts At A T14 Law School Over How (Or Even Whether) To Mourn Justice Scalia
‘Scaliagate’ At Georgetown Law: The Conservatives Strike Back
Rest Of Georgetown Law Faculty To Quarreling Colleagues: OMG Stop

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