McWhorter: The Columbia Protests Made the Same Mistake the Civil Rights Movement Did

2024/05/08 Leave a comment

Comparison of note:

Last week I wrote about the protests that had come to dominate my professional home, Columbia University, and make headlines across the country. I said that though I did not believe the participants were motivated by antisemitism, the volume, fury and duration of their protest left many Jewish students feeling under siege for their Jewishness. That assessment has turned out to be one of the more polarizing things I have ever written, in part because some readers interpreted my position as opposing student protest overall.

I had no objection when the protests began last fall, but since that time, they escalated significantly. After students occupied the university’s storied Hamilton Hall — and police officers in riot gear conducted over 100 arrests — the administration closed the campus, moved all classes online and recommended that we professors either trim or eliminate final examinations in our classes. The mood is as grim now as when Covid forced the spring semester of 2020 to end with a desolate groan.

What happened this week was not just a rise in the temperature. The protests took a wrong turn, of a kind I have seen too many other activist movements take. It’s the same wrong turn that the civil rights movement took in the late 1960s.

After the concrete victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, a conflict arose within the movement between those who sought to keep the focus on changing laws and institutions and those who cherished more symbolic confrontations as a chance to speak truth to power.

The conflict played out most visibly in what became of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC began with grass-roots activism in the form of sit-ins and voter registration, but in 1966 John Lewis, a veteran of the Selma demonstrations who spoke at the March on Washington, was replaced as the group’s leader by Stokely Carmichael, who spoke charismatically of Black Power but whose political plans tended to be fuzzy at best. The term “Black Power” often seemed to mean something different to each person espousing it. It was, in essence, a slogan rather than a program.

This new idea — that gesture and performance were, in themselves, a form of action — worried the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who regarded some of the group’s demonstrations as “expressions of rivalry and rage, without constructive purpose,” according to the historian Taylor Branch.

James Bevel, who worked alongside King, scolded his fellow activist Hosea Williams for having no political strategy beyond putting Black people — he used a racial slur instead — “in jail to get on TV.” In response to what he considered dangerous rhetoric, Andrew Young asked some activists in Memphis, “How many people did you kill last year?” and proposed that they translate their militancy into an actual policy goal instead.

Did this focus on performance bear fruit? Here’s something: Name some significant civil rights victories between 1968 and the election of Barack Obama. It’s a lot harder than naming the victories up until that point. Of course, protest requires theatrics, as King knew. (Writing to Young in 1965 amid the Selma demonstrations, King said, “Also please don’t be too soft. It was a mistake not to march today. In a crisis we must have a sense of drama.”) But it’s perilously easy for the drama to become the point, for the protest to be less about changing the world than performing a self.

I share the campus protesters’ opinion that the war in Gaza has become an atrocity. Israel had every right to defend itself after Hamas’s massacre, which itself was an atrocity. However, the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, with uncountable more left maimed or homeless, cannot be justified. I am increasingly dismayed that President Biden does not simply deny Benjamin Netanyahu any further arms.

Beyond a certain point, however, we must ask whether the escalating protests are helping to change those circumstances. Columbia’s administration agreed to review proposals about divestment, shareholder activism and other issues and to create health and education programs in Gaza and the West Bank. But the protesters were unmoved and a subgroup of them, apparently, further enraged.

Who among the protesters really thought that Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, and the board of trustees would view the occupation of Hamilton Hall — and the visible destruction of property — and say, “Oh, if the students feel that strongly, then let’s divest from Israel immediately”? The point seemed less to make change than to manifest anger for its own sake, with the encampment having become old news.

The initial protest was an effective way to show how fervently a great many people oppose the war, but the time had come for another phase: slow, steady suasion. This is not capitulation but a change in tactics, with the goal of making the activists’ work pay off. We recall King most vividly in protests, including being imprisoned for his participation. However, his daily life as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was about endless and often frustrating negotiations with people in power, which eventually bore fruit. In this, as much as in marches, he and his comrades created the America we know today. Smoking hot orations about Black Power might have instilled some pride but created little beyond that.

Richard Rorty wrote in “Achieving Our Country” of the sense in our times that self-expression alone is a kind of persuasion. Marc Cooper, describing the left in the George W. Bush years, wrote of the danger of viewing “rebel poses” as substitutes for how “to figure out how you’re actually going to win an election.”

In our times, when the personal is political, there is always a risk that a quest to heal the world morphs into a quest for personal catharsis. Keeping in mind the difference will get the Columbia protesters closer to making the changes they champion.

Source: The Columbia Protests Made the Same Mistake the Civil Rights Movement Did

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , ,

McWhorter: I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.

2024/04/25 Leave a comment

Valid contrast if similar protests were against other groups or issues:

Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4’33”,” which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that period of time.

I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon, because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway, but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building. Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others to my knowledge are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?

Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew-hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.

Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere, and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

I understand this to a point. Pro-Palestinian rallies and events, of which there have been many here over the years, are not in and of themselves hostile to Jewish students, faculty and staff members. Disagreement will not always be a juice and cookies affair. However, the relentless assault of this current protest — daily, loud, louder, into the night and using ever-angrier rhetoric — is beyond what anyone should be expected to bear up under regardless of their whiteness, privilege or power.

Social media discussion has been claiming that the protests are peaceful. They are, some of the time; it varies by location and day — generally what goes on within the campus gates is somewhat less strident than what happens just outside them. But relatively constant are the drumbeats — people will differ on how peaceful that sound can ever be, just as they will differ on the nature of antisemitism. What I do know is that even the most peaceful of protests would be treated as outrages if they were interpreted as, say, anti-Black — even if the message were coded, as in a bunch of people quietly holding up MAGA signs or wearing T-shirts saying “All Lives Matter.”

And besides, calling all this peaceful stretches the use of the word rather implausibly. It’s an odd kind of peace when a local rabbi urges Jewish students to go home as soon as possible, when an Arab-Israeli activist is roughed up on Broadway, when the angry chanting becomes so constant that you almost start not to hear it and it starts to feel normal to see posters and clothing portraying Hamas as heroes. The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful.

I understand that the protesters and their fellow travelers feel that all of this is the proper response, social justice on the march. They have been told that righteousness means placing the battle against whiteness and its power front and center, contesting the abuse of power by any means necessary. And I myself think the war on Gaza is no longer constructive or even coherent.

However, the issues are complex, in ways that this uncompromising brand of power-battling is ill suited to address. Legitimate questions remain about the definition of genocide, about the extent of a nation’s right to defend itself and about the justice of partition (which has not historically been limited to Palestine). There is a reason many consider the Israel-Palestine conflict the most morally challenging in the modern world.

When I was at Rutgers in the mid-1980s, the protests were against investment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. There were similarities with the Columbia protests now: A large group of students established an encampment site right in front of the Rutgers student center on College Avenue, where dozens slept every night for several weeks. Among the largely white crowd, participation was a badge of civic commitment. There was chanting, along with the street theater inevitable, and perhaps even necessary, to effective protest — one guy even laid down in the middle of College Avenue to block traffic, taking a page from the Vietnam protests.

I don’t recall South Africans on campus feeling personally targeted, but the bigger difference was that though the protesters sought to make their point at high volume, over a long period and sometimes even rudely, they did not seek to all but shut down campus life.

On Monday night, Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.

Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.

But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.

Source: I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

McWhorter: On Broadway, ‘Centering’ Antiracism Is Delightful

2024/03/30 Leave a comment

Refreshing take and approach, compared to the dry, humourless and ultimately limiting approach of many academics and activists:

My 12-year-old daughter practically had to drag me into the musical “Six,” currently raging on Broadway, in which Henry VIII’s six wives all have their say about what happened to them. I wanted to see “Kimberly Akimbo.” I’m afraid I have lost touch with modern pop, and from a distance the whole “Six” premise sounded kind of unpromising to me (a singing Anne of Cleves?).

But after 15 minutes I was already itching to give it a standing ovation. Each wife comes out, in her way, as a proud, self-directed figure. For one, I love that my daughters will get this slice of history from the point of view (even if stylized) of the women, and even more that the women are cast as people of color(s), fostering a view of them as humans rather than racial types. In this, the whole show is a kind of lesson in antiracism, regardless of whether a viewer is consciously aware of it. In that way, it is a quintessentially modern work of musical theater. My daughters can sit through “A Man for All Seasons” some other time.

Beyond the lessons “Six” teaches, the performers manage some of the deftest work on Broadway I’ve ever seen. All six sing, act and move during almost the whole show at top-rate levels — I don’t even know how they remember all they have to do during the hour and a half — and the score does its job and then some: Every song in “Six” pops even if the genre isn’t your everyday soundscape.

So, “Six” can change your lens in an antiracist (and antisexist) way — while also turning you on to art, wonder, curiosity and excitement.

And this got me thinking about how much less vibrant, or even constructive, the antiracist mission feels at universities. Remember when, in 2020, the new idea was for them to “center” antiracism as their focal mission? One may have thought this was more trend than game plan, but it remains very much entrenched nationwide. According to the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm, first-year law students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison just this semester were required to attend a “re-orientation,” learning that explained that white people have a “fear of people of color and what would happen if they gained ‘control’” and will never be free of “racist conditioning.” A University of Notre Dame “inclusive teaching” resource from last year notes that “anti-racist teaching is important because it positions both instructors and students as agents of change towards a more just society,” emphasis theirs, with the implication that this mission has unquestionable primacy in a moral society. Statements that antiracism (and battling differentials in power more generally) are central to university departments’ missions are now almost common coin. I just participated in a discussion of antiracism as universities’ central focus at the University of Texas at Austin and am regularly asked to do so elsewhere.

And I think the persistence of this centering of antiracism at universities is kind of scary.

It may understandably seem, after these four years as well as the ones preceding, that for universities to maintain antiracism as the guiding star of their endeavors is as ordinary as steak and potatoes.

But in the spirit of John Stuart Mill advising us to revisit even assumptions that feel settled, imagine a nationwide call for all universities to “center” climate change as the singular focus of their mission. Or STEM subjects, historical awareness or civic awareness, each of these positioned as the key to serious engagement with the challenges of the future. We might imagine the university is to “center” artistic vision or skill in public expression, or even physical culture.

Note that all of these centerings would be about things most consider good, and even crucial, but the question would be why the university, as a general rule, should make any of those things the essence of what an education should consist of. Any university that did so would openly acknowledge that its choice was an unusual, and perhaps experimental, one.

One might propose that antiracism deserves pride of place as a kind of atonement for the sins of slavery and Jim Crow. But while getting beyond evils requires being aware of them, redressing past injustices — in fact, redressing just one past injustice — is not the basic mission of a university. The Scholastics of the Middle Ages “centered” education on Christianity, with the idea that education must explore or at least be ever consonant with the essences of natural law and eternal grace. Today we may view this focus as antique or unintentionally parochial. But it’s not just Christianity: We should question the idea that that any one issue, even one that feels urgent at this particular moment, must be regarded as the heart of education.

I found Bradley Cooper’s biopic of Leonard Bernstein, “Maestro,” incurious in a related way. To build an entire film around Bernstein’s being gay or bisexual — with “West Side Story,” his masterful teaching on television and even the radical politics that led to the famous Black Panthers fund-raiser in his home left out or barely perceptible — is an almost boorish reduction of a life, soul and talent. Cooper’s focus reflects neither how life felt to Bernstein (which I have heard about from friends of his) nor how he should be presented to those new to him.

Imagine if Cooper was directing “Oppenheimer” and J. Robert Oppenheimer happened to be gay, and the film had focused on how he and his wife dealt with that rather than, well, what actually made his life significant. This is what it looks like to me for universities to make antiracism their core mission. Antiracism is important, but for a whole world to revolve around it yields a distortion of what America is, and what actual humanity, be it Black or white, is or can be.

I am especially dismayed by the utter static joylessness of the endeavor. The primum mobile is glum accusation, with observations considered most important (to the extent that they lend themselves to this mission). A curiosity focused mainly on condemnation is not truly curiosity.

A long time ago at a university function, a Black scholar was telling me about his dissertation. It described how in the 19th century in one state, Black people with a certain disability were offered fewer resources than white ones with the same disability. It isn’t that such injustice should not be chronicled, but for one, it would be hard to say that what he had discovered was exactly surprising. And I couldn’t help noticing the guy’s gloom. He talked about this dissertation, the product of years’ work, in the tone one would harbor to talk about bedbugs having been discovered in his house.

But near me, another Black scholar was talking about her study of a (very white) operetta composer of roughly the same period, whose work indeed contains richnesses often overlooked. This scholar was elated, intrigued, driven — and although I was polite and made sure to hear the gloomy guy out, I couldn’t help feeling that the woman studying operetta was expanding her mind more, not to mention getting more out of life. (I should mention that her work also involved issues related to Black people.)

In the foisting of an antiracist agenda upon the life of the mind, I see increasingly constricted space for what knowledge truly is. Our universities are becoming temples of a kind of dutiful score-settling, where the motto is less something about truth in Latin than “j’accuse.” It’s a narrow, soul-crushing abbreviation of what education is supposed to be.

Source: On Broadway, ‘Centering’ Antiracism Is Delightful

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Article of interest recap

2024/03/25 Leave a comment

For the 1st time, Canada will set targets for temporary residents After trimming growth in Permanent Residents, imposing caps on international students, Minister Miller reverses course again and reduces the number of temporary foreign workers. Taken together, marks a significant repudiation of previous decisions and ministers, ironically making it easier for a possible future conservative government to impose further limits should it choose to do so. And including temporary foreign workers and international students in the annual levels plan is long overdue.

The Coalition for a Better Future’s report Fragile Growth: An Urgent Need to Get the Basics Right reiterated productivity and related economic challenges.

Scotia Bank’s Raising the Bar, Not Just Lowering the Number: Canada’s Immigration Policy Confronts Critical Choices makes the case for a charter focus on economic immigration and increasing productivity.

Parissa Mahboubi’s Canada’s immigration system isn’t living up to its potential. Here’s how to fix it provides a familiar list of recommendations, along with the puzzling one for more business immigrants given that government is notoriously bad is assessing entrepreneurship as previous programs have indicated.Life in Canada is ‘more expensive’ than most immigrants expected, new poll finds. Not surprising findings from Leger, highlighting a declining value proposition for immigrants.

Daniel Bertrand of the ICC argues Stop undervaluing the contributions that international students make to Canada, noting the need for “a much more strategic approach, modelled after the economic immigration process, with a points system that prioritizes these more valuable areas of study.”

No surprise that Trudeau rules out Quebec’s request for full control over immigration (Trudeau dit non à confier les pleins pouvoirs en immigration au Québec) with Michel David noting the Les limites du bluff. More detailed explanations of the reason behind the refusal in Marc Miller émet de fortes réserves sur les demandes de Québec en immigration, my favourite being, with respect to family class, « C’est très difficile de légiférer l’amour, [et de] demander à quelqu’un d’épouser quelqu’un qui parle uniquement français ».

Citizenship

Using coercion, Russia has successfully imposed its citizenship in Ukraine’s occupied territories, horrific example of citizenship as an instrument of war and denial of identity.

India’s new citizenship law for religious minorities leaves Muslims out, confirms the Modi governments overall approach of Hindu nationalism.

Omar Khan, in Ramadan heralds a political awakening for Canadian Muslims, notes the need for political responsibly among Muslim and other Canadians “it’s a responsibility to recognize that proper understanding between communities comes through dialogue, not ultimatums. There should be no litmus tests for elected officials wishing to address Muslim congregations. Those with divergent opinions should be engaged, not frozen out.”

David Akin assesses A closer look at the growing diversity of Conservatives under Poilievre, highlighting the party’s recruiting efforts (and quoting me).

Other

John McWhorter continues his contrarian streak in No, the SAT Isn’t Racist, making convincing arguments in favour of standardized testing.

Marsha Lederman highlights the increased censorship in the Exodus from literary magazine Guernica reveals the censorship the Israel-Hamas war has wrought in terms of free and honest artistic expression.

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

McWhorter: When We Do, and Don’t, Need a New Phrase to Describe Reality

2024/02/01 Leave a comment

Always interesting, particularly his discussion of American Descendants of Slavery as legitimate distinction among African Americans (but not linked to anti-immigration activists):

In my last newsletter, I argued that it is unsuitably awkward for the word “plagiarism” to be applied both to the stealing of others’ ideas and the copying, perhaps accidentally, of boilerplate text without citing its source. To the extent that most would consider the former an egregious transgression and the latter more of a lazy misstep, English would benefit from using a different term for it.


It also bears mentioning that the way we use and process the word “plagiarism” teaches a couple of lessons about language and society more broadly. For one, the word can be taken as a reality check against a prominent idea concerning language. Put simply: Yes, specific vocabularies can channel the way that we think, but only to a limited extent.


The idea that language influences thought is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. One of its titular proponents, Benjamin Lee Whorf, noted for example that in the Hopi language, the word for the water that you drink is different from the word for water in nature, such as in a lake. To him, this difference suggested that the Hopi process reality differently from English speakers, and that more broadly:


Users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.


Psychologists have since shown repeatedly that differences in how languages’ vocabularies label experience do condition very small differences in thought patterns. In Russian, for instance, there is not one word for blue, but two: one for darker blue and one for lighter blue. An experiment has shown that this does make Russians, when presented with a gradation from dark to light blue, a tiny bit more sensitive to the transition point between the two. Having explicit labels for the two shades alerts one a tad more precisely to the difference between them.


But again, these are very small differences in perception. No experiment has demonstrated that differences in language affect our minds so profoundly as to result in significantly different world views. It is culture — i.e., reality — that does that, not the specifics of how narrowly or broadly a word happens to apply.

Our prior discussion of the word “plagiarism” demonstrates this. Just as English having a single word for dark blue and light blue does not prevent us from telling the difference in color between a navy blazer and a robin’s egg, the fact that “plagiarism” covers both idea theft and careless cutting and pasting does not mean that we can’t tell the difference between the two. In fact, we process it quite readily, and our disagreements over that distinction drove much of the debate over plagiarism by the former Harvard president Claudine Gay.

Nonetheless, the past few years have seen an uptick in suggestions that we use new terms to refer to things and, especially, people, the intent being to refashion how we perceive them. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, an extensive set of suggestions is making the rounds among volunteers. One such suggestion is that volunteers say that people “have” a disability rather than that they “suffer” from it. A similar recommendation on a similar list (since taken down) from Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Center emphasized person-first language to such a degree that one would have to refer to earthquake victims as people who have experienced an earthquake. In both cases, the idea is to avoid essentializing people as sufferers or victims.


The problem with terminology like this is that because the correspondence between words and reality is only ever approximate, these novel ways of speaking would not affect our understanding of the world. To say that someone “has” a disability hardly distracts us from the fact that the person, inherently, suffers because of it — this is baked into the very concept of disability whether we utter the verb or not. Similarly, saying that someone experienced an earthquake will never change our perception that a person whose home was reduced to rubble is a victim. (Never mind that it is unclear what the benefit would be if it actually did.)


Our discussion of “plagiarism” is also useful, however, in that it demonstrates that there are times when clarity makes the addition of a new word or phrase to our vocabulary useful. For example, there was a time just a few decades back when there were no established terms for “sexual harassment” or “date rape.” People typically understood “rape” and “sexual assault” to be violent attacks by strangers. What we now call date rape was often dismissed by society as “not the real thing.”


The idea was embedded in our language as well as our culture. Any fan of old plays and movies has seen women depicted as warning each other with a click of the tongue about men who are “all hands” or the like. One of the cringiest Broadway songs I know of is in the 1951 Phil Silvers vehicle “Top Banana,” when a woman sings a song, “I Fought Every Step of the Way,” about what we now know as date rape, but brushes it off as something she simply had to endure. It’s far better that we now have clear labels for what happened to that character. (In a cruel irony, the actress who sang the song, Rose Marie, saw it and her other numbers cut from the film version after she refused the producer’s advances.) The subsequent adoption of the terms “date rape” and “sexual harassment” obviously hasn’t made such acts go away. But it has facilitated their discussion, condemnation and prosecution.

A similar example is raised by the acronym ADOS, for American Descendants of Slavery. The movement bearing this name advocates making a distinction between Black people with ancestry within the United States and Black people with ancestry in the Caribbean and Africa but not the United States. Their proposition is that if the government should ever grant reparations for slavery, they should go only to ADOS, rather than to all Americans of African genetic descent. Although I am unenthusiastic about reparations as a concept, I agree with this game plan if they are ever granted, and feel that a new, non-acronym term distinguishing the native-descended subset could be useful — certainly better than on-the-fly hacks like “Black people from here,” “real Black people” and the like.


I should note that some of the ADOS idea’s most fervent supporters have fostered outright divisiveness between the two subsets of Black Americans and have been linked to anti-immigration activists. I cannot walk alongside them. However, if this divisive strain fades and what remains is an explicit term for Black Americans descended from slavery, it will be useful to any number of discussions. I dispute claims that all Black Americans must march under the same label because skin color means experiencing racism regardless of whether one’s roots are in Ghana or Gary, Ind. Racism is an unnecessarily gloomy and unconstructive keystone for a racial self-conception, especially in the 21st century.


The messiness of the term “plagiarism” that we discussed last week, then, shows us that to speak is to be ever aware not only of Webster’s-style definitions, but of the buzzing richness of context. And it also shows that at times it still can be useful to bolster that context by adding additional, helpful labels to our existing stockpile. There is, as always, a world in every word.

Source: When We Do, and Don’t, Need a New Phrase to Describe Reality

Filed under Other Tagged with , ,

McWhorter: The Hidden Lesson of ‘American Fiction’

2024/01/22 Leave a comment

On my watch list:

Cord Jefferson’s film “American Fiction” offers a delightful portrayal of the white fetishization of Black pain — and also, in 2024, at least, one that is more satire than documentary. In the movie, an erudite Black author writes a baldly melodramatic “ghetto” novel titled “My Pafology” in protest of the way white audiences seem to go wild for such material — and to his surprise, nobody gets the joke and white audiences do, in fact, go wild for the book.


America had a conversation of this sort long ago — especially amid the debates over hip-hop in the 1990s and afterward — about treating inner-city violence, sexism and multigenerational poverty as “authentic” and entertaining. I think we can give the non-Black public here in the real world at least some credit. Today they would not embrace nakedly cartoonish tripe like the novel cooked up by the film’s protagonist, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, or the best seller “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto” by the Black author Sintara Golden that inspired his sarcastic stunt in the first place.


However, such exotification of Blackness has hardly disappeared entirely, and the film perfectly captures facets of the contemporary continuation of it. I was especially struck by a scene in which Monk finds that a bookstore has stocked his earlier novel, an adaptation of Aeschylus’ “The Persians,” in the African American section simply because he is Black.


I had the exact same experience.


Twenty years ago, I wrote a book called “Doing Our Own Thing,” a study of the increasing informality in public language in America since the 1800s. It mentioned race only in passing, yet I twice found it stocked in the Black studies (or some equivalent description) section of a bookstore. Apparently someone — at least twice! — blithely assumed that because I’m Black, the book must be an indignant shout-out on behalf of Black English, an appeal that Black people should be able to “do our own thing” (thang?). To the bookstore employees — and perhaps customers — the paramount aspect of a Black author was his Blackness.

But let’s face it: White people don’t get this view of us only from their own subconscious bias or objectification. Black people play a part in fostering this vision, too, in the ways we present our souls to the public. Not in silly novels like “My Pafology,” but more broadly.
Some of us enthusiastically portray microaggressions as grave harms to our well-being, despite the fact that the literature on microaggressions is mostly of questionable scientific rigor and yields only limited evidence that they injure this deeply, or even that most Black people experience them in this way.

Many of us also insist that there remains something insufficient and inadequately “representative” about the degree to which Blackness is depicted in popular culture. The implication is that Blackness is marginalized, held at least at half an arm’s length. Yet a random list of recent Black-oriented films and television shows — “Black Panther,” “Atlanta,” “Black-ish,” “Dear White People,” “Insecure,” “The Book of Clarence” — demonstrates enough richness and variety to make an old-time Southern segregationist retch. “American Fiction” itself has been widely nominated for major awards and features exquisite performances by Jeffrey Wright, Erika Alexander and Myra Lucretia Taylor in particular. An uninformed observer of Black representation in contemporary American popular culture would be mystified that anyone felt there remained any real deficit at all.


Meanwhile, some believe it is antiracist for Black people to portray ourselves as a people for whom standards must be loosened thanks to the legacies of our past. The SAT, for instance, has been presumed such a racist burden that it should be withdrawn — despite evidence that it has been better at identifying gifted Black students from disadvantaged backgrounds than alternatives.


Is it any wonder that white people listen to these kinds of reasoning and feel compelled to think of us as poster children and stereotypes rather than as whole people? There is a straight line from the positions I outlined above, often thought of as forms of enlightenment, and a well-meaning but Kabuki version of pity that becomes a kind of racism in itself.

Source: The Hidden Lesson of ‘American Fiction’

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

McWhorter: Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black

2024/01/09 Leave a comment

Of note:

Since Claudine Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard University on Tuesday, it has become an article of faith among some of her supporters and other observers that she was targeted, criticized and essentially driven from the job largely because of her race. The idea is that the people who questioned her abilities and academic integrity — be they Harvard donors who found fault with her leadership after Oct. 7 or conservative activists who led an inquiry into plagiarism in her scholarly work — were marked and even motivated by animus toward a Black woman attaining such a degree of power and influence.

The Rev. Al Sharpton denounced Gay’s resignation as “an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling.” Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wrote that the attacks against Gay “have been unrelenting & the biases unmasked.” Harvard’s Corporation, or governing board, noted the “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol.” And Gay herself, writing in The Times last week, referred to “tired racial stereotypes about Black talent,” and described herself as an “ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety” due to her status as “a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution.”

But I don’t think the notion that racism was substantially to blame for Claudine Gay’s trouble holds up.

As both Gay and Harvard note, she received openly racist hate mail. This is repulsive. But however awful it must have been for Gay to endure their abuse, those people did not force her resignation.

Nor does it seem that Gay was ousted on the basis of her race in the aftermath of her Dec. 5 testimony before Congress on the topic of antisemitism on campus. Of three university presidents who attended, only one resigned under duress shortly after the hearing, and she — Liz Magill of Penn — was white.

No, the charge that ultimately led to Gay’s resignation was plagiarism, of which more than 40 alleged examples were ultimately unearthed. And plagiarism and related academic charges have of course also brought down white people at universities many times. Ward Churchill was fired from the University of Colorado for academic misconduct, including plagiarism, in 2007 in the wake of his controversially assailing people working in the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns.” The president of the University of South Carolina, Robert Caslen, resigned thanks to a plagiarism episode in 2021. And the president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned due to questions of data manipulation just last July.

For many, the central issue seems to be that Gay’s plagiarism would not have been uncovered at all were it not for the efforts of conservative activists, which is true. The question then is whether the people who led the charge to oust Gay from her job — principal among them the right-wing anti-critical race theory crusader Christopher Rufo and the billionaire financier and Harvard donor Bill Ackman — were acting out of racial animus, or even an opposition to Black advancement.

And here things get slightly more complicated. Rufo and Ackman are unabashedly opposed to what both perceive as an ongoing leftward drift at elite universities such as Harvard. And both are opposed to the D.E.I. — or “diversity, equity and inclusion” — programs that are increasingly prominent on campuses, within corporations, and elsewhere. According to Ackman, D.E.I. is “not about diversity” but rather is “a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed.” Rufo and Ackman both believed that, in accordance with the precepts of D.E.I., Gay had been appointed as Harvard president more for her skin color than for her professional qualifications.

To analyze this position as mere racism, though, is hasty. No one is trading in “stereotypes” of Black talent by asking why Gay was elevated to the presidency of Harvard given her relatively modest academic dossier and administrative experience. It was reasonable to wonder whether Gay was appointed more because she is a Black woman than because of what she had accomplished, and whether this approach truly fosters social justice. There was a time when the word for this was tokenism, and there is a risk that it only fuels the stereotypes D.E.I. advocates so revile.

To put it succinctly: Opposing D.E.I., in part or in whole, does not make one racist. We can agree that the legacy of racism requires addressing and yet disagree about how best to do it. Of course in the pure sense, to be opposed to “diversity,” opposed to “equity” and opposed to “inclusion” would fairly be called racism. But it is coy to pretend these dictionary meanings are what D.E.I. refers to in modern practice, which is a more specific philosophy.

D.E.I. programs today often insist that we alter traditional conceptions of merit, “decenter” whiteness to the point of elevating nonwhiteness as a qualification in itself, conceive of people as groups in balkanized opposition, demand that all faculty members declare fealty to this modus operandi regardless of their field or personal opinions, and harbor a rigidly intolerant attitude toward dissent. The experience last year of Tabia Lee, a Black woman who was fired from supervising the D.E.I. program at De Anza College in California for refusing to adhere to such tenets, is sadly illustrative of the new climate. (Like Ackman, she believes that what he calls the “oppressor/oppressed framework” of D.E.I. contributes to campus antisemitism by defining Jews as “oppressors.”)

D.E.I. advocates may see their worldview and modus operandi as so wise and just that opposition can only come from racists and the otherwise morally compromised. But this is shortsighted. One can be very committed to the advancement of Black people while also seeing a certain ominous and prosecutorial groupthink in much of what has come to operate under the D.E.I. label. Not to mention an unwitting condescension to Black people.

Try this thought experiment: Harvard appoints “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo to become the new president of Harvard. She comes equipped with the strongest D.E.I. credentials imaginable, but with a very slender academic record. Do you imagine that conservative activists would sit back contentedly, merely because she’s white?

Or take a non-hypothetical example: After a successful tenure as the president of Smith College, Ruth Simmons became the first Black woman president of an Ivy League School when she took over Brown in 2001. Yet I am aware of no conservative crusade against her during her decade-plus in that office — despite the fact that she led a yearslong campuswide examination of the school’s role in the slave trade.

The idea that a menacing right-wing mob sits ever in wait to take down a Black woman who achieves a position of power is a gripping narrative. But its connection to reality is — blissfully — approximate at best. It is facile to dismiss opposition to modern D.E.I. as old-school bigotry in a new guise. The lessons from what happened to Professor Gay are many. But cops-and-robbers thinking about racial victims and perpetrators will help answer few of them.

Source: Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , , , ,

McWhorter: Black Students Are Being Trained to Think They Can’t Handle Discomfort

2023/12/15 Leave a comment

Of interest:

The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been roundly condemned for arguing at a congressional hearing on antisemitism that calls for genocide against Jews are not always susceptible to sanction on their campuses. (Liz Magill of Penn has since resigned.)

Less noticed has been how starkly their expectations of Jewish students point up how low expectations are for Black students on many college campuses — expectations low enough to qualify as a kind of racism.

Yes, racism, though it’s more of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that George W. Bush referred to.

Many leaders at elite universities seem to think that as stewards of modern antiracism, their job is to decry and to penalize, to the maximum extent possible, anything said or done that makes Black students uncomfortable.

In the congressional hearing, the presidents made clear that Jewish students should be protected when hate speech is “directed and severe, pervasive” (in the words of Ms. Magill) or when the speech “becomes conduct” (Claudine Gay of Harvard).

But the tacit idea is that when it comes to issues related to race — and, specifically, Black students — then free speech considerations become an abstraction. Where Black students are concerned, we are to forget whether the offense is directed, as even the indirect is treated as evil; we are to forget the difference between speech and conduct, as mere utterance is grounds for aggrieved condemnation.

It seems to me that, in debates over free speech, Jews are seen in some quarters as white and therefore need no protection from outright hostility. But racism is America’s original sin, and thus we are to treat all and any intimation of it on university campuses as a kind of kryptonite, even if that means treating Black students as pathological cases rather than human beings with basic resilience who understand proportion and degree.

This is certainly a double standard imposed on Jewish students, as my colleagues Bret Stephens and David French, among others, have argued. However, we must also consider the imposition of this double standard upon young Black people. To assume they can’t handle anything unpleasant infantilizes bright, serious students preparing for life in the real world.

Both expectations are offenses to human dignity, and universities must seek a middle ground. The answer is neither the crudeness of allowing all speech to pass as “free” nor the clamping down on any utterance that rubs a student the wrong way.

The contrast between how university leaders treat affronts to Blackness versus how they are currently treating affronts to Jewishness is almost chilling.

Last year, the legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, before he was to start an appointment at Georgetown’s law school, wrote a tweet implying that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was an affirmative action pick for the Supreme Court. “Because Biden said he’d only consider black women for SCOTUS, his nominee will always have an asterisk attached.” Shapiro also said that the Indian American judge he thought best qualified “doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get a lesser black woman.”

For two tweets, his appointment was suspended pending an investigation. Two tweets, that is, and expressing his assessment of racial preferences in the selection of a Supreme Court justice. Shapiro simply — and rather gracelessly — expressed an opinion. His appointment was reinstated — but only because the tweets were written before he was on the job, with it specified that had he written such tweets while employed, it would likely have been classified as creating a hostile environment. (Shapiro ultimately resigned before assuming the position.)

The geophysicist Dorian Abbot was disinvited from giving a talk on climate at M.I.T. when it was discovered that he had spoken against identity-based preferences in the past. The head of the department that had invited Abbot announced that “words matter and have consequences.” But the question is whether the words in this case were so injurious as to constitute abusive action — hardly an open-and-shut case — and more to the point, those were words Abbot was presumably not going to speak in his presentation. This was a medieval-style banning of a heretic.

Sometimes Black students must be protected not only from words, but words that sound like other words. In 2020, Greg Patton was suspended from teaching a class in communications at the University of Southern California. The reason was that one of his lectures included noting that in Mandarin, a hesitation term is “nèi ge,” which means “that …” and has nothing to do, of course, with the N-word. Several Black students said they felt injured by experiencing this word in the class.

The offense can even be 100 years in the past. In 2021 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, some Black students were upset when walking past a boulder on campus that was referred to as a “niggerhead” by a newspaper reporter in 1925, when that term was common for large, dark rocks. The school had the boulder removed.

In cases like those last two, it seems that Black students are being taught a performed kind of delicacy. If you can’t bear walking past a rock someone called a dirty name 100 years ago, how are you going to deal with life?

It surely feels like being on the right side of social justice these days means shielding Black students even from all but nonexistent harms while essentially telling Jewish students, who are being actually assailed verbally, to just grow up. But to train young people, or any people, to think of themselves as weak is a form of abuse.

The contrast in treatment of Jewish and Black students furnishes a teaching moment. In my view, the solution is not to decide whether to penalize all hate speech or to allow all of it regardless of whom it is addressed to. Administrators should certainly decry and penalize not just antisemitism but racism on campuses when it is severe and pervasive and constitutes conduct. However, anyone who has made the mistake of thinking that a healthy Jewish soul must endure ongoing calls for the extermination of Israel might at least consider that a healthy Black soul can endure a sour tweet, a talk by someone who has opposed racial preferences and even the Mandarin expression “nèi ge.”

Source: Black Students Are Being Trained to Think They Can’t Handle Discomfort

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

McWhorter: Don’t Call Ibram X. Kendi a Grifter and Paul: An Overdue Lesson on Antiracism

2023/10/06 Leave a comment

Starting with the more charitable take by McWhorter:

The headlines lately have been full of the news that Ibram X. Kendi of Boston University has dismissed about half of the staff of the Center for Antiracist Research, which he has headed since 2020. Meanwhile, the university has initiated an investigation into the operations of the organization, which has taken in tens of millions of dollars in funding with almost no research to show for it.

Kendi, after three years of megacelebrity as America’s antiracist guru of choice, is being widely described as having imploded or fallen. Many are evincing a painfully obvious joy in this, out of a conviction that he has finally been revealed as the grifter or hustlerhe supposedly is. But this analysis is a strained and even recreational reading of a story that’s much more mundane.

I am unaware of a charge that Kendi has been lining his pockets with money directed toward the center. Rather, the grift is supposed to be that he has profited handsomely from the dissemination of his ideas, including best-selling books, especially “How to Be an Antiracist” and its young reader versions; high speaking fees (reportedly over $30,000 for a lecture at this point); and various other media projects.

But Kendi’s proposals seek to face, trace and erase racist injustice in society to an unprecedented degree. What makes it sleazy that he be well paid for the effort? How many of us, if engaged in similar activity and offered fat speaking fees and generous book royalties, would refuse them? (As someone in the ideas business, too, I certainly wouldn’t.)

The idea that Kendi is wrong to make money from what he is doing implies that his concepts are a kind of flimflam. In this scenario, he is a version of Harold Hill out of “The Music Man,” using star power to foist shoddy product on innocent people to make a buck. The River City residents now are educated white people petrified of being called racists and susceptible to the power of books and speeches that encourage them to acknowledge and work on their racism in order to become better people.

Surely, one might think, Kendi doesn’t actually believe that one is either racist or antiracist with nothing in between or that, as he wrote, “the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination” or that all discrepancies between white and Black people are due to racism or that the United States should establish a Department of Antiracism with “disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”

There is no mutual admiration society between Ibram Kendi and me. He has criticized my writings in his book “Stamped From the Beginning” and in several harsh social media posts. To say that I find his ideas less than compelling would be an understatement, and I’ve publicly expressed as much.

The thing is that, whatever one makes of his beliefs, there is all evidence that Kendi is quite sincere in them. If some of us perceive duality and circularity in his thinking, that’s fine. A public intellectual is entitled to his views, and if an interested public wants to pay, in some form, to consider those views, then that should be fine, too.

He became a celebrity by chance. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, America developed a sudden and passionate interest in racial justice, sustained by the lockdown’s affording Americans so much downtime to reflect on the issue, as well as conditioning a yearning for connection in a common purpose.

Kendi happened to write “How to Be an Antiracist” in 2019, and it stood out as a useful guide to the new imperative. It became a runaway best seller, assisted by his star power, and he became one of the most in-demand public speakers in the country, soon founding the new Center for Antiracist Research. He simply ran with what he was given, as any of us would have.

Deliberate immorality is exceptional. It should be a last resort analysis, not the first one. Accusing Kendi of being a bad man is symptomatic of how eager we tend to be to see bad faith in people who simply think differently from us. To delight in Kendi’s failure as the head of the Center for Antiracist Research is small.

Source: Don’t Call Ibram X. Kendi a Grifter

And the harsher take by Paul, both with respect to Kendi and his enablers:

The recent turmoil at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, with more than half its staff laid off and half its budget cut amid questions of what it did with the nearly $55 million it raised, led to whoops of schadenfreude from Kendi’s critics and hand wringing from his loyal fans.

Kendi had become a symbol of what was right or wrong with America’s racial reckoning since the police murder of George Floyd. To some, he was a race-baiting grifter; to others, he was a social justice hero speaking harsh truths.

With little administrative experience, Kendi may simply have been ill equipped to deal with a program of that magnitude. He may have been distracted by a nonstop book tour and speaking engagements. Or maybe he just screwed up.

More interesting is that many major universities, corporations, nonprofit groups and influential donors thought buying into Kendi’s strident, simplistic formula — that racism is the cause of all racial disparities and that anyone who disagrees is a racist — could eradicate racial strife and absolve them of any role they may have played in it.

After all, this reductionist line of thinking runs squarely against the enlightened principles on which many of those institutions were founded — free inquiry, freedom of speech, a diversity of perspectives. As one Boston University professor wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal, that academia backs Kendi’s mission amounts to a “violation of scholarly ideals and liberal principles,” ones that betray “the norms necessary for intellectual life and human flourishing.”

Yet Kendi’s ideas gained prominence, often to the exclusion of all other perspectives. Kendi was a relatively unknown academic when his second book, “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” was a surprise winner of a National Book Award in 2016. It helped catapult him from assistant professorships at State University of New York campuses, and the University of Florida, to a full professorship at American University, where he founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center.

In 2017, The New York Times Book Review, which I was then editing, asked Kendi to create a reading list, “A History of Race and Racism, in 24 Chapters,” for our pages. I interviewed Kendi, who is a very charismatic speaker, about the essay on the Book Review’s podcast and again, about his reading life, on a panel, in 2019.

In “Stamped From the Beginning,” Kendi asserted that racist ideas are used to obscure the fact that racist policies create racial disparities, and that to find fault with Black people in any way for those disparities is racist. People who “subscribed to assimilationist thinking that has also served up racist beliefs about Black inferiority,” no matter how well-meaning and progressive, were themselves racist. In Kendi’s revisionist history, figures who had been previously hailed for their contribution to civil rights were repainted as racist if they did not attribute Black inequality solely to racism. Kendi accused W.E.B. Du Bois and Barack Obama of racism for entertaining the idea that Black behavior and attitudes could sometimes cause or exacerbate certain disparities, although he notes that Du Bois went on to take a what he considered a more antiracist position.

In 2019, Kendi took the ideas further, pivoting to contemporary policy with “How to Be an Antiracist.” In this book, Kendi made clear that to explore reasons other than racism for racial inequities, whether economic, social or cultural, is to promote anti-black policies.

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Kendi wrote, in words that would be softened in a future edition after they became the subject of criticism. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In other words, two wrongs do make a right. As practiced, that meant curriculums that favor works by Black people over white people is one way to achieve that goal; hiring quotas are another.

Among the book’s central tenets is that everyone must choose between his approach, which he calls “antiracism,” and racism itself. It would no longer be enough for an individual or organization to simply be “not racist,” which Kendi calls a “mask for racism” — they must instead be actively “antiracist,” applying a strict lens of racism to their every thought and action, and in fields wholly unrelated to race, in order to escape deliberate or inadvertent racist thinking and behavior. “What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what — not who — we are,” Kendi writes.

Kendi’s antiracism prescription meant that universities, corporations and nonprofits would need to remove all policies that weren’t overtly antiracist. In the Boston University English department’s playwriting M.F.A. program, for example, reading assignments had to come from “50 percent diverse-identifying and marginalized writers” and writers of “white or Eurocentric lineage” be taught through “an actively antiracist lens.” Antiracism also requires a commitment to other positions, including active opposition to sexism, homophobia, colorism, ethnocentrism, nativism, cultural prejudice and any class biases that supposedly harm Black lives. To deviate from any of this is to be racist. You’re either with us or you’re against us.

Yet, as the psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt points out, Kendi’s dichotomy is “incorrect from a social-science perspective because there are obviously many other remedies,” including ones that address social, economic and cultural disparities through a more fair distribution of resources.

When a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd in May 2020, Kendi’s book, with its propitious, here-is-what-you-must-do-now title, became the bible for anyone newly committed to the cause of racial justice. Schools and companies made it required reading. So many campuses made it their “class read” “all-school read” or “community read” that the publisher created a full set of reading and teaching guides to help foster them. (Employees at the publishing house, Penguin Random House, were told to read it as the first “true companywide read” to begin “antiracism training mandatory for all employees.”) Universities used Kendi’s antiracist framework as the basis by which applicants’ required “diversity statements” would be judged.

Kendi’s vision of antiracism had considerable influence in shaping the national conversation around race. As Tyler Austin Harper wrote in The Washington Post last week, “No longer a mere ambassador for academic antiracism, Kendi became a brand.”

Yet the same year “How to Be an Antiracist” was published, Henry Louis Gates’s “Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow,” presented a more nuanced assessment of the relationship between past and present. With its vivid examples of crude prejudice (the photos are not for the fainthearted), Gates’s historical excavation allows the reader to see a clear line between the pervasive bigotry of the past and the kind of ugly but marginal brand of white supremacy on display in 2017 Charlottesville. In contrast to Kendi’s contention that racial progress is consistently accompanied by racist progress, numerous memoirs, firsthand accounts, biographies and histories of the civil rights movement also document clear progress on race.

Contra Kendi, there are conscientious people who advocate racial neutrality over racial discrimination. It isn’t necessarily naïve or wrong to believe that most Americans aren’t racist. To believe that white supremacists exist in this country but that white supremacy is not the dominant characteristic of America in 2023 is also an acceptable position.

And while a cartoon version of colorblindness isn’t desirable or even possible, it is possible to recognize skin color but not form judgments on that basis. A person can worry that an emphasis on racial group identity can misleadingly homogenize diverse groups of people, at once underestimating intra-racial differences and overemphasizing interracial ones. The Black left-wing scholar Adolph Reed, for example, decries the emphasis on race-based policies. “An obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left and liberal types,” Professor Reed said in an interview with The New York Times. “There’s this insistence that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s existence.”

In short, a person can oppose racism on firm ethical or philosophical or pragmatic grounds without embracing Kendi’s conception of “antiracism.” No organization can expect all employees or students to adhere to a single view on how to combat racism.

Kendi asserts that whether a policy is racist or antiracist is determined not by intent, but by outcome. But the fruits of any efforts toward addressing racial inequality may take years to materialize and assess.

In the meantime, the best that could come out of this particular reckoning would be a more nuanced and open-minded conversation around racism and a commitment to more diverse visions of how to address it.

Source: An Overdue Lesson on Antiracism

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

McWhorter: On Race and Academia

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Another advocate of class and adversity-based policies, sharing his personal experiences:

The Supreme Court last week outlawed the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. That practice was understandable and even necessary 60 years ago. The question I have asked for some time was precisely how long it would be required to continue. I’d personally come to believe that preferences focused on socioeconomic factors — wealth, income, even neighborhood — would accomplish more good while requiring less straightforward unfairness.

But many good-faith people believed, and continue to believe, that it is a clear boon to society for universities to explicitly take race into account. The arguments for and against have been made often, sometimes by me, so here I’d like to do something a little bit different. As an academic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these experiences in interviews and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve never shared them in an article like this one. The responses I’ve seen to the Supreme Court’s decision move me to venture it.

The culture that a policy helps put into place can be as important as the policy itself. And in my lifetime, racial preferences in academia — not merely when it comes to undergraduate admissions but also moving on to grad school and job applications and teaching careers — have been not only a set of formal and informal policies but also the grounds for a culture of perceptions and assumptions.

I grew up upper-middle-class in Philadelphia in the 1980s. As early as high school, I picked up — from remarks of my mother’s, who taught at a university, as well as comments in the air at my school — that Black kids didn’t have to achieve perfect grades and test scores in order to be accepted at top colleges. As a direct result, I satisfied myself with being an A- or B+ student, pursuing my nerdy hobbies instead of seeking the academic mountaintop. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t affect my future in the way that it might for my white peers.

I have no reason to think affirmative action played much of a role in the colleges I went to for undergraduate and graduate work, as neither was extremely selective at the time. In the latter case, I was told by a mentor, a Black man, that race had been the reason I wound up in the top 20 pile of applicants for graduate study in linguistics in the department where I got my Ph.D. I had minimal experience with linguistics proper, and my G.P.A. was very good but nowhere near perfect. (Those hobbies!) But I have always thought of that as racial preferences the way they should have been, merely additive around the margins. I’d done well on tests like the G.R.E., my grades in language courses were top level and I had written a senior thesis that made it clear I had a linguistics frame of mind.

But things got different later. When I was a grad student in linguistics going on the market for jobs, I was told that I needn’t worry whether I would get bids for tenure track positions because I was Black and would therefore be in great demand. Deep down, to me, it felt like I was on my way to being tokenized, which I was, especially given that my academic chops at the time did not justify my being hired for a top job at all.

I was hired straight out of my doctoral program for a tenure-track job at an Ivy League university in its august linguistics department. It became increasingly clear to me that my skin color was not just one more thing taken into account but the main reason for my hire. It surely didn’t hurt that, owing to the color of my skin, I could apparently be paid with special funds I was told the university had set aside for minority hires. But more to the point, I was vastly less qualified by any standard than the other three people who made it onto the list of finalists. Plus, I was brought on to represent a subfield within linguistics — sociolinguistics — that has never been my actual specialty. My interest then, as now, was in how languages change over time and what happens when they come together. My dissertation had made this quite clear.

At the time I was not very politicized, and I assumed that my race had merely been a background bonus to help me get hired. Only later did the reality become more apparent, when I learned just who else had been on that shortlist. (I will never forget how awkward it was when I met one of them — older than me, with more gravitas in the field — some years later. I sensed that we both knew what had happened and why.) I had been hired by white people who, quite innocently, thought they were doing the right thing by bringing a Black person onto the faculty. I bear them no malice; under the culture we were all living in, I would have done the same thing.

Around this time I gave some really good talks, and some just OK ones; I always knew the difference. But I couldn’t help noticing that I would get high praise even for the mediocre ones, by white people who were clearly gratified to acknowledge a Black academic. And in the meantime, I was hopelessly undercooked for the position I had been hired for. I was not utterly clueless, but I simply didn’t know enough yet — and especially not enough to be in a position to counsel graduate students.

 needed some years of postdoctoral study. They say you don’t really know it till you teach it, and that’s largely true: Having never actually taught a class, I needed to teach some. I needed to hang around linguistics for a longer time in general. There are formative experiences key to being a real linguist that I had not yet had, such as long-term work with speakers of my language of focus, Saramaccan.

The doctoral program I had been in had gone through a phase of allowing students perhaps too much leeway in deciding which courses to take. Many students took this as an occasion to sit at the feet of their mentors and drink in what they knew. But my natural orientation has always been autodidactic, and so I basically went off into a corner and focused like a laser on one issue that particularly interested me — how creole languages form — while developing only a passing acquaintance with linguistics beyond it. With undergrads, I could coast on stage presence, but grad students know the real thing when they see it — and when they don’t. I looked like a fool.

I didn’t like it. But because I am obsessive, I ultimately dedicated myself to boning up and then some. I read and read and read. I spoke closely with as many linguists as I could. I took up new interests within the field. I did intense study of my language of focus. I taught classes outside my comfort zone. That is, I became a normal academic.

But it all felt like a self-rescue operation, an effort to turn myself into a good hire after the fact. That backfilling of needed skills is a lot to ask of someone who also needs to do the forward-looking research necessary to get tenure.

Of course, not everyone endeavors this Sisyphean task, and the culture I refer to has a way of ensuring others don’t have to. There is a widespread cultural assumption in academia that Black people are valuable as much, if not more, for our sheer presence as for the rigor of what we actually do. Thus, it is unnecessary to subject us to top-level standards. This leads to things happening too often that are never written as explicit directives but are consonant with the general cultural agenda: people granted tenure with nothing approaching the publishing records of other candidates, or celebrated more for their sociopolitical orientations than for their research.

I had uncomfortable experiences on the other side of the process as well. In the 1990s, I was on some graduate admissions committees at the university where I then taught. It was apparent to me that, under the existing cultural directive to, as we have discussed, take race into account, Black and Latino applicants were expected to be much more readily accepted than others.

I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program.

Perhaps all of this can be seen as collateral damage in view of a larger goal of Black people being included, acknowledged, given a chance — in academia and elsewhere. In the grand scheme of things, my feeling uncomfortable on a graduate admissions committee for a few years during the Clinton administration hardly qualifies as a national tragedy. But I will never shake the sentiment I felt on those committees, an unintended byproduct of what we could call academia’s racial preference culture: that it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others.

That kind of assumption has been institutionalized within academic culture for a long time. It is, in my view, improper. It may have been a necessary compromise for a time, but it was never truly proper in terms of justice, stability or general social acceptance. Whatever impact the Supreme Court’s ruling has on college admissions, its effects on the academic culture of racial preference — which by its nature often depends less on formulas involving thousands of applicants than on individual decisions involving dozens — will take place far more slowly.

But the decision to stop taking race into account in admissions, assuming it is accompanied by other efforts to assist the truly disadvantaged, is, I believe, the right one to make.

Source: On Race and Academia

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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