WRITING for The Cavalier Daily can be a lonely enterprise. If you're reading this column, it's probably because you found the paper on a classroom floor and turned to the Opinion page after discovering that the previous reader had already completed the Sudoku. You'll probably stop reading once your class begins and if you make it to the end, you'll probably conclude that I'm nothing but an ill-informed attention seeker whose opinions are vastly stupider than your own.
One thing I know for sure is that nobody really pays attention to The Cavalier Daily until we commit some act of gross racial insensitivity, like the publication last week of Grant Woolard's "Ethiopian Food Fight" comic strip.
In case you missed it, "Ethiopian Food Fight" depicted a group of half-naked black people beating each other with various inedible objects and it predictably sparked outrage among a large part of the student body. A great deal of ink has been spilled on apologies, analyses and pleas for understanding, but if you can bear another essay on the subject, I'd like to offer my thoughts on why this blunder occurred and how The Cavalier Daily can rebuild its credibility going forward. The answer, quite simply, is that the editors need to toughen up..
For as long as I can remember, The Cavalier Daily has been offending the University's minority groups by publishing careless columns and comic strips that take cheap shots and make bad jokes without adding anything to any important public debate. "Ethiopian Food Fight" was no different. In a letter to the editor, Woolard defended his strip as a serious work of art that "invites the reader to realize that what initially appears to be a joke reflects a sobering reality." But I'm willing to bet that, like many Cavalier Daily comics, "Ethiopian Food Fight" sprang from nothing more sophisticated than the shotgun marriage of a bad pun to a crude illustration in order to meet a deadline. And in any case, if it takes a lengthy letter to explain why a comic strip isn't offensive, it probably is offensive, whether or not the author meant it to be.
Does this mean that Woolard is a racist? Probably not. In fact, I doubt that any of the racial slip-ups committed by The Cavalier Daily in recent years was the result of genuine racism so much as poor judgment and the inability of student editors to say no to authors and artists whose work isn't fit for publication.
The students who work at The Cavalier Daily tend to be thoughtful, open minded people who want to hone their journalistic skills and contribute to the public discourse. In three years of working and socializing with these students, I have never heard a racist utterance nor witnessed racist behavior, but time and again, I have seen editors approve the publication of sloppy work in order to save time, fill space and spare the feelings of incompetent subordinates. On occasion, the editors will also publish work, especially letters, that is extremist, inaccurate and even offensive in the incorrect belief that a newspaper must serve as an open forum for all comers.
When you combine the shaky judgment of youthful editors with an excess of democratic feeling, the result is a paper that will print just about anything. And when that paper prints something as thoughtless as "Ethiopian Food Fight," its next move will be to embark on a period of public soul searching, printing protracted apologies and pleading for tolerance, openness, dialogue and understanding. In an endless cycle of offense and atonement, The Cavalier Daily screws up and patches up without ever winning the enduring respect of the student body.
So what's the solution? It's not tolerance, openness, dialogue, understanding or any other liberal shibboleth, because it takes nothing more than ordinary common sense to see that "Ethiopian Food Fight" should not have been published. Rather, the editors simply need to exercise more discipline in determining what goes in and what stays out. Whenever the editors are presented with a piece of writing or a graphic, they must ask one simple question: whether the item at issue might offend somebody and if it might, whether the message carried by that item is sufficiently important that any offense given will be justified.
Once this question is answered, failing work must be banished from the paper no matter how late the time, how thin the forthcoming issue or how close the friendship between editor and staffer. And if the banishment offends some sense of First Amendment obligation held by the editors, I submit that no paper can serve as a forum for public discourse if it loses the respect of its readers by carelessly and repeatedly offending them.
Tolerance, openness, dialogue and understanding are the knee jerk prescription for ailments like "Ethiopian Food Fight," but before we reeducate The Cavalier Daily in the traditions of political correctness, I suggest that the editors simply stiffen their spines and start editing.
Alec Solotorovsky's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at asolotorovsky@cavalierdaily.com
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