Tuesday, October 07, 2003

Harrowing rebuke 

The California Association of Scholars is asking the chancellor of the Cal State University system to rebuke trustee Alice Huffman for this comment:
There are a few people in this world that still believe that white men born in America are superior. If you want a live example, my disclaimer, all you have to do is tune into the recall election and you will hear Arnold Schwarzenegger . . . Swatzenegger . . . that last part of his name doesn�t register well with me . . .
It's not only a derision of candidate Schwarzenegger but also poor parsing. You can see Egge (the name of an economist in the Cities, by the way, that I've met a couple of times) is the word for 'harrow', which is the act of breaking up clumps of land into pieces for planting. That used to be done by hand, so it suggests quite menial roots for Schwarzenegger's family. The CAS wonders what would have happened if someone had mocked the name of a black candidate for governor?

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