No sooner does Harvard University President Larry Summers try to make nice over his remarks about women in the sciences than he finds himself under new attack for other allegedly offensive remarks--this time, involving the history of Native Americans.
And tho I'm no admirer of shoot-from-the-lip Larry, this time I'm inclined to think he may be getting a bum rap.
The remarks came at a September 2004 conference at Harvard, "On Our Own Ground: Mapping Indigeneity within the Academy."
Via the Harvard Crimson:
Tara Browner, associate professor of ethnomusicology and American Indian studies at UCLA, wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson Sunday that she and several other attendees were "appalled" by Summers' statements.
"What Larry Summers said, and this is an exact quote, was that `The genocide of American Indians was coincidental.' As in it was an accidental by-product of Western European and Euro-American expansion," Browner wrote.
Well, maybe not an exact quote--as we'll pursue on the flip.
According to a
transcript of Summers's remarks released by Harvard-and confirmed by one attendee who reviewed a recording of the proceedings-here is what he said:
... for everyone who was killed or maimed in some attack by European-descended Americans on the Native American population, for every conscious death that came in war, ten were a consequence of the diseases that came to North America with the European immigrants.... [T]he vast majority of the suffering that was visited on the Native American population as the Europeans came was not a plan or an attack, it was in many ways a coincidence that was a consequence of that assimilation. Nobody's plan. But that coincidence caused an enormous amount of suffering.
After being read the transcript, UCLA's Browner maintained that the actual remarks were "essentially" just as offensive as she recalled.
C. Matthew Snipp, chair of Native American studies at Stanford University, told The Crimson in an interview last night that "the transcript sounds considerably less obnoxious and more innocuous than the actual talk."
"But if that's the transcript, that's the transcript...I'm as puzzled as anybody now," said Snipp, who was a visiting professor in Harvard's sociology department last academic year.
....
Snipp, the Stanford sociologist, said yesterday that Summers' claim--that many more indigenous people died from disease than from direct combat--is "factually correct."
But [Michael] Yellow Bird [of the University of Kansas] said that Summers' comment downplayed the culpability of settlers and U.S. officials who engaged in coordinated campaigns of genocide against indigenous groups.
"The point is that you don't minimize people's lives and their deaths by creating some kind of apologist stance for colonialism," Yellow Bird said.
What to make of this new imbroglio?
- I was among the critics of Summers's remarks about women in the sciences, but it seems to me he's getting a bum rap here. His remarks were historically accurate, and it's hard to see that they were intended as an apology for colonialism. Indeed, even his remarks about "coincidental" deaths was immediately followed by an insistence on the importance of "reflecting on what we do consciously and of what are the innocent by-products--or the non-innocent by-products--of the policies that we pursue in our country...."
- The problem for Summers is that no one is prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt any more. And that situation is, I'd say, largely his own fault--a product of his tendency to shoot from the lip on controversial issues, and intentionally play the provocateur. Indeed, that's why these remarks are surfacing now, more than 6 months after the fact.
- Finally, there's a lesson here about how memory works: what the conference attendees clearly remember is their outrage, and they tailor their memory of Summers's actual remarks to conform to that remembered emotion. Thus, UCLA's Browner insists on an exact quote that wasn't, and the Stanford professor expresses surprise that the remarks weren't as "obnoxious" as he remembered. Some attendees, clearly, were primed to be pissed by what they regarded as Summers's off-the-cuff manner; Browner remembers that he "was 15 minutes late and totally unprepared.... He didn't even have little note cards in hand, and he just started speaking off the cuff."