But doesn't it feel even better when your students tell you that?

Husbands are overrated ;)

Honestly, the only reason I have come to realize that I am a warrior for justice is because my wonderful students tell me so. Let's just say I welcome hearing it from all quarters!

Hey Prof!

No question you are a brilliant light in our academic lives! I just wanted to express some disappointment at Haggis's portrayal of LA as incomplete. Where are the Asian Pacific Americans? Last i checked, central LA included Chinatown, Little Tokyo, and the massive urban sprawl of Koreatown. Crash seems oblivious to the fact that there are APAs living in Los Angeles, working legitimately as everyday citizens, not just running around as snakeheads and illegal refugees. Asians and Latinos are the two fastest-growing minorities in the US, so why aren’t there substantial and accurate representations of APAs in Crash?

In the movie, the snakehead is identified as Korean, and the refugees remain ethnically ambiguous. If Ludacris dumping them in the middle of Chinatown is any indication of their ethnicity, then what's a Korean man doing as snakehead? The only explanation i can come up with is that the refugees are N. Korean - highly unlikely given factual accounts - and if that is the case, why are they simply tossed into Chinatown? If this is any sort of statement about illegal immigration (which it doesn't appear to be), then it really needs to be better researched so as not to be misleading. Illegal immigrants from the other side of the Pacific are largely of Chinese or Southeast Asian descent! Rather than taking the easy route, Haggis could have made use of the opportunity to examine black and Korean tensions in central LA, left over from the massive race riots of the 90s.

While I applaud Haggis for taking on some pervasive racial issues head on, the film is problematic for the APA community particularly BECAUSE the film has received so many accolades. Now Hollywood will pat itself on the back for having confronted the threat of racism, giving itself sanction to ignore the one community that has suffered the longest from media ignorance and vilification.

i miss the stimulating conversations we had in class!

Wish I could take credit for instilling this brilliance in you, my love!!!! What perceptive reads of the film. Well done. The world is a better place for having you in it!

it's disgusting how much credit you give yourself for ranting and raving about how women are victimized.
i read your editorial last year and i couldnt believe how poorly it was written, how unfounded and hypocritical the arguments, and how proud you remain a year later. you are an embarassment to usc, to women, and to academics.
i would also like to mention that Crash was a mediocre film, particularly in comparison to some of the other nominees for best picture.
i wish i could go on, and explain my comments in greater detail, but it would simply take too long, and i have better things to do. so sorry about that, but perhaps if you re-read any of your work you might see all the problems i found, in grammar and in logic.

You're certainly welcome to be pro-sexism and rape, anonymous disgusted female! I am not. Therefore I do stand up for victims and don't see why I should be ashamed of that.

As to the personal attacks, well I hope they make you feel better. But I'm not insecure about my intellect or writing skills, so it's kind of a waste to try and make me feel inadequate in that area. Perhaps that's the best you've got, which signals to me that in fact my arguments are sound.

I encourage you to study feminist theory. It's changed my life and empowered me and millions of other women and men. You are most welcome in the club.

Some points about your editorial last spring that you recently cited.

1) It was terribly written. Don't be confident about it -- instead read Strunk and White. Please. I, like anonymous disgusted female, am surprised that you have a Ph.D. Your dissertation must be a real treat.

2) I thought you weren't interested in football anymore, that you were giving away your season tickets. Still going are you...?

3) You blame all men for rape, and claim only men can stop men from raping. Are women really so incapable? Maybe so. For example, you, woman and champion of rightousness, admit in your letter to knowing of numerous unreported sexual assaults regarding the football team, yet apparently you keep them secret (except to make vague, wild accusations). When women confide in you that they are sexually assaulted, why don't you report it? Why do you keep the secret? Do you want those men to rape again? Or perhaps kill someone? Isn't you silence pro-sexism and rape? I think it is.

Is this really the best you people can do?

Actually the idea that all men are responsible for ending rape, which is what I said, was first brought to my attention by the male speaker at Take Back the Night last year.

As to my diss, feel free to read it! It's called "'Are they simply going to leave her there?': Dead Women in the Modern American Novel."

Here's the abstract:

The novels in this study all feature a dead woman, one whose presence threatens both the characters in the text and the stability of the narrative. But the threat is manifested differently in the novels by white males than it is in those by African-American women. Traditionally in European and American art the image of a female corpse has been used to contain cultural anxiety, to reduce and objectify the irreducible concept of death by marginalizing her dead body. This containment is effected by the strength of the paternal metanarrative, the cultural locus of authority and stability. But in these postmodern narratives the woman's abject presence quite often becomes the center of the plot, physically as in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Robert Coover's Gerald's Party or conceptually as in Pynchon's V. And far from operating passively as the outside limit of subjective stability, these dead women have penetrated into the center of the text, revealing both a desire to return to the maternal body in the uncertain twentieth century and the threat of psychic collapse to the masculine subject that this would entail. The novels of African American women authors Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler, conversely, do not manifest this same anxiety at the collapse of stability of Western metanarratives. So the abject women in these texts do not undermine the beliefs of the characters in Beloved, The Salt Eaters and As I Lay Dying, nor does the idea that many of the fundamental concepts which grounded American society were lies. Toni Morrison has said that African Americans were postmodern from their first steps on this soil; dead women in these postmodern feminist narratives represent continuity and connection to a past long denied by the mainstream, that of non-Western metaphysics and nurturing communities of women. In the male-authored texts, on the other hand, her presence defies traditional ontological and epistemological beliefs, creating chaos and disruption, without offering any alternative.

You claim criticisms are personal to avoid answering to your hypocrisy and poor scholarship. So, let's take things in the same order as last time, but we'll keep it quick.

1) Nice super-paragraph dissertation abstract. Your Ph.D. comprised gleaning social truths for all white males and black women by comparing only six books...? I'm sorry, but that's pretty weak: n=6.

2) Where I come from, if one rants about the football team being filled with rapists and claims s/he will not attend any more games, then s/he should not attend any more games. Yet you apparently still go to cheer for the rapists. How does that speak to the credibility of your convictions? Do you have an answer, or will you just ignore this point again?

3) Withholding knowledge of criminal activities such as rape and battery from the authorities enables those criminals to continue their endeavors. Yet, you indicate in at least two separate public writings that you do indeed have knowledge of unreported criminal activities. Isn't it disingenuous to write, "...only men rape and only men can stop other men from raping" when you are enabling rapists through your silence? Again, do you have an answer, or will you ignore this point too?

Gosh, you've got me John. You are just so right about everything. I can't believe what a fool I've been.