Last week, the Paula Zahn NOW show on CNN ran a segment called “The Duke Assault Case: A Question of Race.” One of the guests on the show was feminist academic Gail Dines of Wheelock College. Professor Dines describes the hate-mail she received in response to her television appearance in CNN’s ‘Journalism’ is a Fool’s Paradise” over at commondreams.org:
When I got back to the hotel 30 minutes later, I already had a few emails from enraged men informing me that I am a”bitch dyke,”“dumb feminist”and”nigger lover”who is an embarrassment to the academic profession. By the next day at noon, it was a flood of emails, each one more hateful than the next . . . .
Rather than being about racism and sexism in the media, the show had been billed as an examination of the”rush to judgment”on the part of the media and society. The possibility that these men were guilty had been”proved”wrong, as the victim is clearly lying and motivated by money. The case is framed as a”race”issue, which for producers meant that blacks are out for revenge for past misdeeds by whites. Jumping on this bandwagon, so the story goes, was the District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was trying to curry favor with the black community in a re-election year. The consensus on the show was that if anyone is guilty here, it is the lying, immoral black stripper and the amoral, politically motivated DA. The victims here are the upstanding white men who have now had their reputations tarnished first by a stripper and then by gullible fools who believed her. And of course, within the framing of the show, I appeared as not just a gullible fool, but even worse, a gullible fool with a feminist agenda.
My anger at the way the media humanized these men as victims and dehumanized the woman as the perpetrator of a lie clearly stood out from the rest of the show. And this was, I am now convinced, the producer’s goal. I was set up in the show to be an example of the problem — white liberal elites who have taken political correctness too far. I was not brought on as a researcher or activist but as an example of how feminists”rush to judgment”in order to further their man-hating propaganda . . . .
Virtually every email I have received blasts me as a conniving feminist who didn’t even bother to know the facts of the case . . . . The truth is that we actually have access to very little evidence about that night, yet every man who has emailed me is convinced that all the facts are out there and only a feminist fool would believe otherwise. This is because the”facts,”or lack of, speak for themselves and tell their own story in a society where racist and sexist ideology is internalized by a good percentage of the population and subsequently writ large onto a black woman’s body. Let’s not forget that this woman was bought and sold in the white male marketplace of sexual entertainment.
The media still delights in caricaturing feminists as angry, irrational man-haters and there seem to be plenty of people who are ready to buy into that stereotype. But the real haters are the ones sending the nasty emails to Dines.
A CNN transcript of the program is available here.
– Posted by Bridget Crawford
