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II. The Reasonable Person Rule. Before I took my current job, I taught a year and a half of composition and rhetoric at Cal State Santa Barbara. I gave the third lowest grades in the English department but carried the highest teacher rating on the student-run website. I challenged my students, belittled them even, but they liked me anyway. I found, much to my surprise, that I liked them too. I didn’t want to leave.
“OK, this brings up an important point,” I say. One of the twins runs his eyes across the ceiling; the other sleeps soundly. “A common misconception about harassment is that it’s not harassment if your intentions are benign. That’s not true. And I’m glad Danny and Smith led us into this discussion, because it’s a perfect segue to what we call ‘The Reasonable Person Rule.’”
In one of my freshman comp classes, I had a student named Anna. She had moved down the coast from Salinas to go to school, and she inhaled books as if they’d keep her alive. At first she would come to my office hours to talk about writing. Then she started coming to my apartment to talk about what it was that made other people so happy.
“If a reasonable person,” I continue, “could take offense at a particular action, then that action can be considered harassment, regardless of the intent of the perpetrator. So,” I go on, “even if Smith was joking when he called Danny that name—”
“He wasn’t joking,” Danny says. “He’s just a hater.”
“Well, we can’t know for sure what Smith was thinking, but the important thing is—”
“No, he’s right,” Smith says. “I wasn’t joking. He is a dirty Mexican.”
III. What constitutes harassment? If harassment is committed during a seminar on harassment, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. So I try to avoid this. “OK,” I say, “moving on. Let's talk about who can and cannot harass someone.”
I scan the room. I come across the younger of the two women, a short girl in a white sweater with gold earrings and tanning-salon skin. I can’t help but notice that she’s glowing. Maybe it’s the fluorescent light that makes her glow. Maybe it’s the brown hair shining down her face. Maybe it’s the two Vicodin I popped in the parking lot.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
She looks up, startled. “What was the question?”
If I were still teaching at the university, I would say, The question was: Why are you in this class? What are you even doing here? But I’m not. So I say, “The question was, what is your name?”
“Penny,” she says.
“Good,” I answer and nod. I can’t stop nodding. When did all this nodding start? “So Penny, what do you do for the team?”
“I’m a secretary.”
I don’t ask why a slaughterhouse would need a secretary. I say, “Excellent. Now Penny, let me ask you a question. If you don’t know the answer, that’s fine—just take a guess, OK? Good. Does a team member have to be a man to sexually harass another team member?”
She thinks about it for a minute. “Yes?”
“No, stupid!” Danny says. He cracks up. “You can harass me just as good as I can harass you.”
“Just as well, you illiterate schmuck,” Smith says.
“OK, good,” I say and nod. “This brings us into another important point: can a team member be discriminated against for being illiterate?”
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