Snarkers, start your engines. My friend sent me this link about one of our own suing her students for, as the headline states, "being mean to her." The article includes a couple of embarrassing emails and some classic Gawker snark.

I have to admit, my first reaction was, "Now that's what I call privilege." Just some background: I have spent approximately five years teaching students of various difficulty levels, and have had stuff chucked at everything from my face to my soul by students who harbored varying degrees of anger at the fact that they had to learn chemistry at all / the fact that they had to learn chemistry from me / the fact that I was giving them a failing grade (which I'd like to think they earned, but they might argue otherwise) / the fact that I existed. While some of what they did was definitely mean, and while my time in the public school system was also the time when I had the lowest self-esteem EVER, I would never have sued these kids. Education in this country can be a nightmare, particularly in the places where I was teaching (or, more accurately, attempting to teach with questionable success). Suing someone else for pain and suffering generated from my inadequacy in the classroom seems whiny and spoiled, the kind of thing you do if you have too much money and not enough humility.

Add to that our recent discussions on race on this very blog, and I kind of wanted to give it to comrade Priya good. The giving it would go something like this, excessive punctuation included:

"What are you doing?! People already think of us as the race without the street cred to complain about racism. Why are you giving them more evidence? Why are you making us look like we're the weenie minority? For the love of god, woman, cease and desist! BUS! BUS!"

But then I thought a little harder, and I wasn't so sure if my first reaction was the right one. Maybe (gasp) this is not a time for snarkiness, but for contemplation.

Take this excerpt from the article:

From the Dartmouth News:

"As an example of Venkatesan's rejection of views different from her own, the student highlighted Venkatesan's cancelation of class for a week after the class applauded a student who contradicted Venkatesan's opinions about post-modernism.

Venkatesan said the incident occurred when she was lecturing about "The Death of Nature," a book by Carolyne Merchant, and the witch trials of the Renaissance. The student went on a "diatribe" about the inappropriate nature of challenging patriarchal authority, Venkatesan said. Vakatesan (sic) respected the student's right to express this opinion, she said, but the manner in which he vocalized his views and the applause afterward were disrespectful and offensive.

"I was horrified," Venkatesan said. "My responsibility is not to stifle them, but when they clapped at his comment, I thought that crossed the line ... I was facing intolerance of ideas and intolerance of freedom of expression.""She was horrified! Horrified that an Ivy League undergrad bitched about hearing some academic nonsense about the entrenched power structures that got them where they are today! (No winners in this story, folks.)

This to me sounds like a teachable moment gone wrong. Some privileged kid stands up and rails on about how great patriarchy is, and poor Vakatesan - oh, I'm sorry, Venkatesan (thank you, Gawker) doesn't know how to respond. I, too, would have challenged the student and his views, and I, too, would have done it clumsily. I, too, would have pointed out to the class that those of us who aren't white and male do believe that patriarchy should be challenged, and I, too, would have been horrified by the appluase that followed the diatribe described. And although Gawker's snark about "no winners in this story" is right on, it's not the whole story. Just because we know there are people who don't believe that oppression exists doesn't mean that we should write them off and not try to change them.

Then I looked up another article about her that's linked to the original, and it says that she's suing for "workplace harrassment." Okay, I don't know how many of you have braved or are braving the academy, but how many of you have felt just a teensy weensy bit marginalized for being a person of color or a woman at school. I know I have - and so have lots of faculty. I started to wonder if our friend Priya felt like she was being persecuted for her liberal views and for her non-white-ness and non-man-ness, wanted to do something, and felt like this was her best option.

After spending the last few years studying the ways in which gender and race intersect (yes, I admit it - I totally ripped that line right out of my dissertation proposal; but I swear it's more than liberal jargon! Really, it is!) perhaps the only thing I've learned is that talking about either racism or sexism means putting your reputation at risk. You have to be very smart about it get people to listen. Poor Priya was clearly not so smart. And, yes, there is plenty of opportunity in this article to make fun of her - I'm sorry, Priya love, you sent an email saying you were going to "name names" in the expose article you're writing, and then you signed it "have a nice day"? Beti, please - but maybe, underneath the exclusively snarky coverage she's getting, are some issues we should think about.

Namely: as South Asians, are we afriad to use the word racism because we think we're immune to it / not oppressed enough to experience it / not bothered enough to pursue cases like this that might actually improve the lives of marginalized, progressive scholars if handled correctly? As professional snarkers, are we too quick to dismiss other people's mistakes, particularly when handling touchy topics we have educated ourselves about and think we maybe know something about? As humans raised in a society where talk about race and gender discrimination is effectively taboo, are we doomed to screw up any chances we get to confront either?

In short, is Pesky Priya, in fact, making a fool of everyone? (With my sincere apologies to the Beatles...)