Morsberger Response

When I was a college freshman, one of my professors criticized a paper of mine by saying "You’re more radical than even Malcolm X."

I don’t remember now what had been the assignment in nineteenth-century American intellectual history, or what I had written. I do know it was impossible for me to have said anything like Malcolm. When he was on campus a few weeks earlier, I had been too politically incurious to hear him speak. I doubt Robert Morsberger went either, and rather suspect his knowledge of Malcolm was second or third hand.

What I was then was a white kid who had graduated from a small, culturally mixed high school in 1962 where social class was stronger than race, and where we thought, because we knew the names of Black kids and sat with them in band, we knew them.

Actually, we were probably right. Not only did we not know anything about the daily realities of being Black in a white community, we didn’t know if any of our friends had drunken or abusive parents. It would be a few years before we learned which of our classmates were so unstable they couldn’t negotiate the transition into adulthood and who were strong enough to survive Vietnam.

In short, we knew almost nothing about any of our friends.

The Morsberger response, as I’ve always called it, is the refusal to learn that our personal experience is not the measure for all experience, that if we generalized from the particular we may not be that particular.

Morsberger responses dominated the reaction of many to the young in the late 1960's who went from protesting the Vietnam war to discovering there were structural differences that limited the lives of some while benefitting others, that those taboos of high school that made interracial dating impossible were more pervasive and more destructive than we had believed as adolescents.

During the years of Republican hegemony, the Morsberger response was somewhat muted. When Sandra Day O’Connor intimated some of her professional experiences had been affected by her gender and when Colin Powell revealed he still had to deal with the realities of being Black in a white world, the Morsbergers were less inclined to punish than to suggest that perhaps they needed to improve their manners.

Such quiescence disappeared when Democrats began to seriously contest political power. How dare Michelle Obama observe life was different for Blacks at Princeton, and that she sometimes felt isolated from that privileged world. How dare Sonia Sotomayor suggest a woman descended from some Spanish-Indian mix in Puerto Rico have different experiences than white men that might lead her to different observations. How dare a man who had attended Harvard when racial tensions had been stronger in the Boston area defend a friend who had been arrested for mouthing off.

The Morsbergers demanded each retract his or her statement. When Sotomayor would only say she had spoken badly, but would not say she was wrong when she said a Latina woman might think and react differently, they denied her a promotion as unfit.

The purpose of the Morsberger response is intimidation, and always implies an abuse of power. The price it exacts in human misery is high.

On the one hand there are people like Michael Jackson who internalize criticism and try to change themselves. Many have theories about why he changed his skin color, his hair, the shape of his nose, some rooted in race, some rooted in his relations with his father. When we verbalize our reactions to his responses, we have no word but "weird" to express our bafflement.

When someone externalizes his response we’re even more confused. When I read Morsberger’s comments on my paper, I was puzzled, but was also grateful that the class I was taking was so structured that he couldn’t abuse his power and lower my grade. When Seung-Hui Cho continually heard such comments from his teachers and fellow students at Virginia Tech, he bought a gun.