But "playing into the hands" seems to me to be a more accurate description of what the Brown students did when they trashed the papers (Horowitz couldn't have hoped for better). They weren't thinking too well on their feet. They chose one course of action when others could have been chosen, like insisting on a public forum or sufficient discussion space in the newspaper to address the issues. Or more say in their student newspaper if they felt that such outside ads are inappropriate.
Obviously the ad did not have to be accepted by the paper, which could have had a policy (as some other school papers do) against outside political ads (but then you negate labor union ads, too, I suppose, since those aren't "student groups"). Or there could be a policy that political ads have to be cosponsored by some student constituency. Horowitz's ad probably would never have appeared under those conditions.
But acting like the Horowitz ad were some immediate threat (there was no immediate call for racist violence that I could tell), acting clandestinely to destroy the papers, and hiding out rather than confronting the issues head on in an open public debate . . . well, I suppose that convinced a lot of people that the Brown students involved had an articulate position on the matter at hand, no?
An analysis of the rhetoric of the ad itself could have shown up Horowitz's game. It oozes a patronizing tone, for example, about how blacks should be "grateful" for ANYTHING they are "given" by the culture that "freed" them (eventually) from their "African bondage." Yet clearly the argument requires not a comparison of how relatively "privileged" (supposedly) blacks are "today" compared (supposedly) to Africans in 1875, but whether they are getting fair and equal treatment in THIS society NOW compared to others HERE and NOW.
By the way, do you really think that a student newspaper that took $750 was "greedy"? They're not exactly Time Warner, you know.
Peter Kosenko (who doesn't know what being a "self-identified" whatever has to do with anything)
---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 20:50:46 -0500
>Peter Kosenko says:
>
>>you've got a PR problem on your hands.
>
>It's a PR problem indeed when self-identified left-wingers such as
>yourself & Dennis play into the hands of racist advertisers & greedy
>newspaper editors, agreeing with them that "advertising dollars =
>free speech."
>
>All power to Brown culture-jammers who protested against being sold
>down the river to racists with advertising dollars!
>
>Yoshie
>