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PARTISAN REVIEW
ing, understanding or even saying hello, you are the radicals, not
we. The black community will continue to assert its cultural
autonomy, its right to exist and its right to help other black people
escape the dismal conditions facing most people of color.
Not all black people will be involved and not all those involved
will be black, but we, as the black community, will continue to
struggle, loud and proud, until this campus becomes an institution
which serves and respects all peoples.
-Bill King
To the Editor
of
THE STANFORD DAILY*
July
5, 1988. I feel that I should take a brief moment to
respond to the recent series of letters in
The Daily
and place some of
the more controversial sections of my original letter back into the
context in which they were written.
At Stanford, as in much of modern day America, controversy
and disagreement are discouraged. When this isn't entirely suc–
cessful, the goal is to keep the differences at an unobtrusive (i.e.
comfortable) level. Debate and discourse are regulated as if there is a
thermostat at each forum: whenever a student becomes irate, impas–
sioned or even agitated, the immediate impulse is to turn down the
thermostat with such phrases as "she's unreasonable," "he's emo–
tional" or "they're radical."
Most students at Stanford have had some training in rhetoric
and hyperbole; unfortunately, in many discussions the rhetoric over–
whelms the issues. The discussion following my letter seems to have
deteriorated into semantic instead of substantive arguments. I would
like to restate several of the more "inflammatory" sections of my let–
ter and ask a few questions about the impressions evoked.
"If a nerd like myself can bring fear into the hearts of provosts,
·We are publishing this second letter by Bill King because he would not give us per–
mission to print the first letter without also printing the second, which obviously at–
tempts to soften or explain or justify his earlier statements. - The Editors.
