Revenge of the Ice People

ON WEDNESDAY night at Sanders Theatre, the University's most distinguished speaking venue, there was Black and there was white.

There was an orchestra section and a mezzanine section. Hah-vahd and Harvard. Sun and ice. Cheering and hissing. The spoken to and the spoken at.

And there was Leonard Jeffries.

There was also some common ground. Most students felt shock and anger--over something. Some had even more intense emotions.

The glaring racial and ethnic polarization at the Jeffries' speech arose partly from the content of the talk. But it mainly arose from members of the audience watching their fellow students respond to the speaker: as a hero or a racist, an academic or an anti-Semite, a leader in the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or that of David Duke.

THERE IS NO longer any doubt why the BSA invited Jeffries to Harvard. And it's certainly not because he speaks flawless French.

"We endorse [Jeffries'] Blackness as a Black individual and a Black intellectual," said BSA president Art A. Hall '93 last weekend. "But as far as agreement with his viewpoints, that's another side of the issue."

Apparently not. That side of the issue was cleared up Wednesday night, when the spectators in the orchestra section--exclusively members of the BSA and other sponsoring organizations--cheered Jeffries at every turn of his speech.

Applause was directed not at his melanin but at his message. In no uncertain terms, Jeffries views met applause, approval and endorsement from most--if not all--of the "sun people" in the orchestra.

So it went when Jeffries made one of his more egregious claims of inherent Black racial superiority: "African genes are dominant genes and European genes are recessive genes."

So it went when Jeffries, reflecting his obsession with and hatred of the Jews, commented on the Holocaust: "Adolf Hitler is not my problem."

So it went when Jeffries, echoing other Black luminaries who see themselves as cult hero-victims oppressed by a racist media, dismissed Crimson editor J. Eliot Morgan's charge that Jeffries threatened his life in an interview: "He never had an interview," he said.

So it went when Jeffries, challenged by a questioner citing historical sources over the degree of Jewish involvement in forming the Dutch East India Company, answered: "Form a study group."

IN GENERAL, a student group at Harvard lends legitimacy to the content of a speaker's message by inviting him or her to campus to speak to that group's particular concerns.

That's why Hillel members not only did not invite the late Meir Kahane to speak at Harvard but walked out of the Hillel building when Kahane showed up uninvited two years ago. That's also why the Institute of Politics erred by inviting to campus David Duke, a former KKK wizard and no less a bigot than Jeffries.

Content-free invitations, in short, don't exist. We'll be the first to defend the free speech right of people like Jeffries, Kahane or Duke to pontificate in front of Out of Town News. Or, if a Harvard group chooses to invite them, at Sanders Theatre or the ARCO Forum at the IOP.

But Harvard groups should have the sense not to issue invitations to people so clearly offensive to this community.

The Jeffries invitation, though, seems not even to have been intended as a "content-free" one. By applauding the content of Jeffries' speech, BSA members showed precisely how they feel about him. At least--we hope--IOP members won't cheer Duke with anywhere near the same intensity.

As for Black Harvard students who are not BSA members, their silence on the issue is even more disturbing. No Black Harvard student has denounced Jeffries' views in public, and only a handful of Black students were among the 450 demonstrators at the protest Wednesday night.

If Harvard's Black community is really as diverse as BSA claims, then where are those opposed to Jeffries' views?

In essence, Jeffries is the BSA's Confederate flag. When Brigid L. Kerrigan '91 justified the hanging of the Confederate drapeau from her Kirkland House window last year with arguments of regional pride and honor, BSA charged her not with overstepping her free speech rights but with being insensitive to Black feelings about the darker side of the flag.

This time, though, the BSA played Kerrigan's role in offending a campus minority group. For Jews, Jeffries means something--not anti-Semitism (his convenient term for anti-Black sentiment), but anti-Semitism--based on the many on-the-record comments he had made before coming to Harvard.

If this well-known Jewish position on Jeffries was unknown to BSA members, they could have asked anyone at Hillel about it.

But they didn't. Like Kerrigan, it seems, they just don't care.

IT IS NOT surprising, we suppose, that in a speech entitled "The Significance of Black History," Jeffries talked precisely about that--Black history.

So what if King Tut was Black? What does his Blackness do for Blacks in the inner cities? For Blacks in poverty? For Blacks who are enslaved to this day in Arab countries? Or for the rest of us genetically underprivileged ice people?

Beneath all his hateful demagoguery, Jeffries offers no constructive answers to any of the pressing problems facing Blacks and non-Blacks in America and the world today.

At post-Jeffries Harvard, there are now two paradigms of inter-ethnic group relations, neither of which questions free speech rights of groups or individuals.

The first, represented by the ice people and others from eight student groups (who were literally freezing outside during the pre-speech protest), stands for (the triangle of?) sensitivity, understanding and coalition-building.

Ironically, it is this paradigm that BSA itself helped to design during the Confederate flag incident. Now it is this paradigm that most campus ethnic and minority groups--outside BSA--seem to support.

The second paradigm, then, is reflected by Brigid Kerrigan and the BSA. It stands for divisiveness, separatism and insensitivity. The Confederate flag is its symbol, and Leonard Jeffries its prophet.

Just as we did with 450 fellow students on Wednesday night, we stand on the side of the first paradigm. Where do you stand?

Allan S. Galper '93 and Kenneth A. Katz '93 are Crimson editors. Galper is also co-chair of the Hillel Inter-Ethnic Committee, although this piece does not necessarily represent committee opinions.