D’Souza Speech Destroyed Opportunity for Dialogue
Elaine Wood
The Daily Evergreen
Published: 03/28/2008 00:00:00
Dinesh D’Souza delivered a speech titled “Racism is not the problem” to a packed CUE auditorium Tuesday night. He argued that racism does not contribute to the consistently different scores of ethnic and racial groups on standardized educational tests. He also spoke against affirmative action. While he claimed to be advancing intellectual diversity, he unfortunately packaged his message like propaganda.
To argue his point, D’Souza repeatedly used a bait-and-switch approach. He would refer to one school or situation, cite a fact or statistic, and then jump to a conclusion about society as a whole. Or he would start with a large group – such as 160 tests he had examined – then provide data related to group’s performance on one specific test without even providing its name. In this way, he never overtly lied or misstated data but still misrepresented the situations and made implications that were not logically supported.
D’Souza incorporated manipulation in his argument by frequent using of the straw man fallacy. A straw man occurs when a person describes their opponent’s position in a weak way and then has no problem in discrediting that straw-like position. Several times, he paired an exaggerated and ridiculous position with the opposing argument, then dismissed the entire argument with ridicule without ever addressing its realistic components. For example, D’Souza sarcastically asked if the Ku Klux Klan had written the SAT, implying that since it was not, it must be benign.
D’Souza’s ethnicity and background gives him incredible flexibility when addressing race issues. Elitely educated as a child in India, he came to the U.S. as an exchange student before attending an Ivy League college. With his diversity, he becomes almost a shapeshifter. With a mocking tone of superiority, he often denied that institutional racism causes individuals of color to receive different educational opportunities. However, when a young man articulated the discrimination he faced in school, D’Souza suddenly could relate, saying, “You and I are on the same page.” At the end of his speech, D’Souza claimed to be advancing intellectual diversity; this claim could have been legitimate had he presented information in a well-referenced manner so anyone could find the statistics he cited. But apparently, he intentionally kept the audience in the dark about the specific details of his sources.
The most unfortunate aspect of the lecture was that an incredible opportunity to hold an honest dialogue about a timely, important issue was degraded by this speaker’s disrespect for opposing points of view and his refusals to reason logically. It is surprising the Foley Institute would sponsor someone who modeled such poor scholarship to WSU students. After last night’s presentation by D’Souza, the issue of racism is further obscured and individuals are more highly polarized. I hope this was not the goal when D’Souza was nominated for a public lecture.
