MORE LIBERAL GUILT?

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I have to disagree with Messrs. kaiser and Sanders-Bey: the only things for which Martin Kilson's recent letter to the CRIMSON shows "a contemptuous disregard" are certain taboos sustained on this campus by the prevailing atmosphere of white liberal guilt. Professor Kilson apparently keeps stepping out of line because, being neither white nor guilty, he doesn't feel compelled to recognize those taboos.

The real point of the Kilson-Kaiser/Sanders-Bey exchange, it seems to me, is not the substantive questions with which it purports to deal (Is the Black Studies program an academic joke? Is black racism rampant at Harvard?) but the psycho-dynamics underlying them. Any discussion of such questions threatens to bring to light the degree to which the brand of black militancy" now popular on campus is purely the creation of liberal masochism, and, as such, a phenomenon of group psychology rather than politics. But we must remember that the fairy-tale about the emperor's new clothes is really the story of a psychodrama, and though we may currently choose to play it out in an academic setting, we do have to live with the possibility that an occasional up start will come along and point out that the emperor is, after all, naked.