Vanke Not Ready for Dialogue

One would have thought that by now Jeffrey Vanke understood the difference between "libel"--which he accused us of perpetuating against him in his letter of April 6--and a candid process of free speech. We trust that by now Jeffrey Vanke has learned that "dialogue" need not be limited to the intellectual equivalent of the tea parlor. Foreclosing dialogue is not our game, Mr. Vanke, and not one white member of the Harvard community who has interacted with either of us regarding America's tragic racial-caste and Negrophobic legacy will support Mr. Vanke's anti-dialogue charge against us.

Jeffrey Vanke is really trying to have his cake and eat it too. But we will not let him. Today's Vanke (April 6 letter) wraps himself in victim colors while yesterday's Vanke (Feb. 21 letter) rather haughtily dabbled in what Martin Kilson characterized as a mode of amoral discourse on our country's racist legacy that was tinged with "neo-White supremacist arrogance." Jeffrey Vanke now wants the Harvard community to rally round the Vanke flag, insulating him from what he considers an unwarranted bad name.

But we were not calling Jeffrey Vanke a foul name. We were fitting an analytical classification to his amoral discourse about our country's sad history of violating black folks' humanity under Southern slavocracy and modern racism. This is no different than the classification that Native Americans put around the slaughter of their ancestors during the European conquest of North America and the subsequent "pacification" during the formative years of the American republic--that classification being "genocide" and thus those perpetrating this being "genocidists." Similarly, our classification of Jeffrey Vanke's amoral discourse was no different than the analytical classification that Jewish-Americans and Jews generally put around the long cruel history of systemic "pariahization" of Jews in European history--that classification being "anti-Semitism" and thus those so identified being "anti-Semites," "Jew haters," "bigots" or even "racists."

We suspect that Jeffrey Vanke's problem is that he is not yet ready for serious dialogue. By this we mean dialogue suited for a post-Holocaust world, a post-Bosnia world, a post-Rwanda world. A dialogue, that is, which is morally shaped and tapered by full recognition of modern human beings' responsibility for the vicious anti-human deeds done in the past and the name of our societies and nation-states. Jeffrey Vanke offers not a clue that he understands what serious dialogue must be about in our era. --Lee A. Daniels,   Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute; Martin Kilson, Professor of Government