Former Teachers College Professor Madonna Constantine became (in)famous last year. More than once.

The first time was because of the hubbub that ensued after she found a noose attached to her office door. The finding turned into a national news story about hate speech and resurgent public displays of racism. Then people began to speculate that she had actually hung the noose herself as a way to deflect from an ongoing investigation into allegations of plagiarism made against her. The noose was found in October of 2007. The investigation was announce in February 2008. And Teachers College fired Constantine three months later.

Just this week, the plot has thickened (as some might have imagined it would). Constantine has filed a lawsuit against her former employer for ruining her reputation. Constantine’s attorney claims that they have proof of her innocence, even speculating that the evidence vindicating Constantine was purposefully ignored by Teachers College in an attempt to justify ousting her.

Of course, Teachers College intends to fight Constantine’s suit, and the school admits to no wrongdoing, calling her suit “baseless.”

I still don’t know how to make sense of this case. It gets glossed as one person’s disingenuous attempt to inoculate herself from critique by using the protective cover of racial sympathy, as an example of taking the so-called “race card” to completely new heights.

I’ve always refused to believe that Constantine put that noose on her own door, even as I admit that the ordering of public events do easily fit such a cynical scenario. But the reality of American life is more complicated than a “gotcha” melodrama about one person’s conniving attempt to short-circuit contemporary justice with recourse to part of racism’s historical iconography, the proverbial lynching noose.

The real story, I think, is a both/and tale, not an either/or one. That is, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of debating whether or not Constantine put that noose on her own office door as a way of justifying competing claims about the current significance of race/racism. We will never have definitive proof one way or the other, just the marshaling of circumstantial evidence and the too-smug support of our own ideological commitments (on both/all sides).

Proof about the noose’s origin is as elusive and contested as the plagiarism case itself. Of course, we should make sure that we have all the facts about the plagiarism accusation. For instance, Constantine’s attorney claims that several academic journal editors have copies of old Constantine manuscripts that pre-date the writings she allegedly plagiarized. I’m not sure proving guilt or innocence is always an open-and-shut case, but I do think that all of the copycat (plagiarized) nooses that sprung up after Constantine’s case indicate that such emblems of animus still have productive force for many people.

If the noose was her own concoction, most people would consider that an admission of guilt. And I’d agree. But that doesn’t mean that she would then serve as some closing argument for a case about the end of racism’s social salience. Racism can be both a dangerous weapon for marginalization/demonization and a mere simulation of reality at one and the same time, both genuinely real and a parody. Indeed, I’d argue that that was exactly the bifurcated/ambivalent design of “race” from the start.