In preparing for a hearing, Eden secured a long list of black and white eyewitnesses
from the high-rise eager to testify that he was the very opposite of a racist, and
that on the night in question, he had merely said "water buffalo" (as the JIO already
had stipulated). Because it seemed obvious that Eden was responding to noise, not
seeking to inflict injury, Kors spoke to a former general counsel of the University,
Professor of Law Stephen Burbank. Burbank termed the case "ludicrous" and "open and
shut" (because the charges did not even touch the categories of the University's own
definition of harassment) and agreed to testify on Eden's behalf.
Encyclopedias and dictionaries revealed the obvious, that "water buffalo" had no
racial connotation. The animals were the "Indian Buffalo...domesticated in Asia"
(Britannica), "domesticated Asian buffalo" (Merriam Websters Collegiate Dictionary),
"the common Indian buffalo" (Webster's Unabridged New International Dictionary), and
limited "to southern Asia" (Grolier's Academic American Encyclopedia).
The issue now was not the speech code itself, but Eden's innocence even assuming
the speech code's legitimacy. Many offered discreet help. Dan Hoffman, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic and poet, spoke to the curator of mammals
at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science, who had consulted Walker's Mammals
of the World (the Bible, it turns out, of mammalian zoology). Authorities, Hoffman
wrote, gave "the range of the 75 million domesticated water buffaloes as from Nepal
to Vietnam." The African buffalo, it turned out, was not a water buffalo, but a
Cape buffalo, and "Confusing the African Cape Buffalo with the Asian water buffalo is
clearly an error."14 A brilliant black ethnographer at Penn, a
scholar who had walked the streets of racial tension, confirmed that he "never"
had heard the term "water buffalo" used as a racial epithet or derogatory stereotype
of blacks. He provided both a written and a taped deposition for Eden. He also
referred Kors to several eminent scholars who worked in black linguistics,
African-American studies, African-American folklore, and African folklore. None,
a phone call to each revealed, ever had heard of the term "water buffalo" used either
as a racial epithet or as a derogatory (or any other form of) stereotype of blacks.
A professor of linguistics at Penn sent an inquiry to an international linguistics
listserve: "Have you ever heard 'water buffalo' used as a racial epithet?"
The replies revealed that in one Asian country it indicated an overeater and in
another a fool. A senior professor in African History further confirmed that "water
buffalo" had no African or racial connotation whatsoever, and he agreed to testify
at any hearing. Acquaintances provided a bevy of innocuous "water buffalo"
references: the humorist Dave Barry, in Dave Barry Does Japan, referred to himself
several times as a "water buffalo" when he did something clumsy or out of place; the
white cavemen of "The Flintstones" used "water buffalo" as a friendly term; in the
classic film "His Girl Friday" (1939), Cary Grant called Rosalind Russell "a water
buffalo."
The whole case took on a new light, however, when the world-renowned Israeli scholar,
Dan Ben-Amos, whose field was African folklore, replied. "What would water buffalo
have to do with Africans or African-Americans?" he asked. Informed about the facts
of the case, Ben-Amos asked if the student were Israeli or spoke modern Hebrew.
Learning that Eden's parents were both Israeli and that he had attended a
Hebrew-language high school, Ben-Amos explained that "Behema was Hebrew slang
for a thoughtless or rowdy person, and, literally, could best be translated as
'water buffalo.' It has absolutely no racial connotation." When Kors asked
Jacobowitz, "what's the first thing that comes into your mind if I say 'behema,'"
Eden said, "Wow...that's amazing. In my yeshiva, we called each other behema all
the time, and the teachers and rabbi would call us that if we misbehaved." He
supplied a list of students and teachers from his school who would be glad to
testify about it.
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9/19/98
