http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=7657749&page=1
I think this letter actually influenced Obama: one of the people who was approached but did not co-sign wrote an op-ed saying Obama should send a wreath to both the Confederate Memorial and the African-American Civil War Memorial. An idea I opposed, but this person's op-ed got published in the Washington Post, and this is exactly what Obama did, apparently the first time a president has ever sent a wreath to the African-American memorial. This person wouldn't have written the op-ed, I believe, if he hadn't been approached by the people who drafted the letter I co-signed.
Despite the several dozen names on the letter, I was focused on by neo-Confederates, Thomas DiLorenzo, for instance, listing me alongside "murderer/terrorist" Bill Ayers.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/026924.html
DiLorenzo is a tenured professor at Loyola College of Maryland, which I have contacted many times without getting a response from the administration or faculty. The president of the black student association only told me:
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On 28/08/2008, Autumn Sands-Caldwell <asandscaldwell@loyola.edu> wrote:
Hello Jonathan,
Sorry, that it has taken so long to email you back. I'm not sure if I can say that Thomas DiLorenzo is an avowed racist. I did look into it and in fact I've had him in class, and it seems to me that he is talking from an economic standpoint. If you have any other information, I'd be more than happy to look into it. However, as of right now I cannot go forth to the president with the concern that he is racist. Thank you so much for you concern. Hope you have a great day.
- Autumn
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Autumn Sands-Caldwell
President of the BSA
Green and Grey Society '08
Co-Coordinator of Diversity Peer Educators
Loyola College Class of 2009
And here's another group that seems to think I have special importance:
http://shnv.blogspot.com/2009/06/letter-about-and-to-agitators-and-their.html
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While it may appear as if none of this has slowed me down, in fact it has. (I am not whining, however: much, much worse happened to people far, far more talented, like Paul Robeson.) I cannot give concrete proof that potential employers or collaborators googled me and then decided not to hire me or work with me, but it seems reasonable that the neo-Confederate attack had an indirect if not a direct impact on my career. Certainly if not for the attack, I would now be teaching at Vanderbilt, even if no one else had offered me a job.
I'll give just four stories: I had a face-to-face meeting with Admiral Dennis Blair, now Director of National Intelligence, about being hired by the Institute for Defense Analyses. (I moved into counterterrorism after being attacked by the neo-Confederates.) One employee, Brian Cohen, even started making plans for working with me, near the close of my visit. But then I never heard from the IDA, despite being accepted into their "Defense Science Study Group". And in 2009, I was made the attached offer by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (a government lab), but when I told the recruiter how I had been targeted by neo-Confederates, mindful of the lab's condition of employment that I not invite "public criticism" and its "fire at will" policy, the lab all but cut off contact with me. And at Caltech, my colleagues started receiving anonymous messages literally the first day I started teaching, such as this one:
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Ultimately, I filed a charge of racial harassment against the one student who did not write me anonymously, and then eventually against the chairman of the math department, Matthias Flach, both of which grievances Caltech all but ignored.
Michael Feuer of the National Academies asked me about using mathematical psychology for counterterrorism in 2005, and we agreed to meet up at Stanford to discuss this further. In the meantime, though, he sent me a link to my article from The Guardian newspaper about racism and the war on terror, asking if this was me. I gave a joking response, not wanting to mix my work with politics, but that meeting never did take place nor did I hear back from him until some years later (when I wrote him about another matter and he may not even have remembered I was the same person).
Another way in which the attack affected me was that, when I had my "Henry Louis Gates" moment, described in this article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/07/dnaofthekkk
(the Cambridge, Massachusetts police detained me for 20 minutes on suspicion of being a bank robber), I did not pursue the matter, for fear that a reporter would look into my background and then the Tennessee controversy would follow me up to MIT---the difference being, I did not have another job to move to if I had to suddenly quit.
Note that a big role was played by the irresponsibility of student newspapers, which is why I focus on the students whom I mentioned, Jacob Grier, David Barzelay, Jeff Woodhead, and Ben Stark. The mainstream newspapers, I believe, were working hand-in-glove with the student newspapers, because the latter had a lower threshold concerning what they could write.
If you need a news peg, it could be that I moved into counterterrorism after being attacked, and a book I co-edited is being launched next week at a new counterterrorism center in Denmark.
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Methods-Counterterrorism-Nasrullah-Memon/dp/3211094415
Another possible news peg is that the anniversary of Obama's election is coming up, when America naively thought that racism was behind us (as Stephen Colbert amusingly celebrated).
Regards,
Jonathan Farley
