No Place in Our Community

STICKS AND STONES can break our bones but words can never hurts us.

Oh yeah? Just ask many members of the Harvard community what they thought about the Harvard Law Review's annual parody of Peninsula's recent poster advertisement.

In their annual Revue spoof edition, some Law Review editors included an article titled "He-Manifesto of Post Mortem Legal Feminism (From The Desk of May Doe)," a parody of an article published in the Law Review in March entitled "a Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto," by late New England School of Law professor Mary Joe Frug. Frug was brutally murdered on a Cambridge street last April.

The sick parody is not only an insult to Frug's family, whose husband (a professor of law) and son (a member of the Class of '93) are members of the Harvard community, but to feminists, women and thinking people everywhere. Spoof editors wrote "Then we go out at night to hunt down some hunky men and rip their clothes off. Sure, it's degrading, but we've all carefully selected wimps for husbands. Like Jerry," a reference to Frug's widower, Gerald.

The parody has been condemned by many members of the Harvard community, but the frightening insensitivity of the parody authors and the response and lack of response from the faculty and administration may be indicative of the larger problems at the Law School. Professor of Constitutional Law Laurence H. Tribe '62 branded the issue as "a rape in all but biological reality."

SIMILARLY, Peninsula's outrageous poster publicizing a talk entitled "Spade Kicks: a Symposium on Modernity and the Negro as a Paradigm of sexual Liberation" did nothing to promote dialogue, and only stirred intergroup disputes. The racial slurs and allusions to negative stereotypes of Black sexuality--including the poster's image of a Black woman performing a strip before a white audience--are hurtful and insensitive.

Condemnations by the Black students Association, Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III, Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57 and Assistant Dean for Race Relations and Minority Affairs Hilda Hernandez-Gravelle convinced Peninsula to remove the posters and change the symposium's title. At least the conservative group is now aware of their offensive and insensitive action.

Peninsula Council member Chris Vergonis '92 explained "the speakers used the word 'Negro' to place the symposium in its historical context." But historical context to some is racist and offensive to others.

While campus groups rightly enjoy unrestricted free speech at Harvard, the community reserves the right to object to anything it finds offensive. we hope that the editors of the Law Review and the Council of Peninsula have learned that certain kinds of speech aren't welcome in the Harvard community.