The blog post that shock up the black plantation industry, sent them into a hissy fit and gave them the vapors. Posted in full for archival purposes, from Naomi Schaefer Riley, Chronicle of Higher Education [1][sic]:
You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece [2] on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.
That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.
Then there is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s.” Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government’s promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today. (Not much of a surprise since the entirety of black studies today seems to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don’t tell them about the black president!) She explains that “The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market.” The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.
But topping the list in terms of sheer political partisanship and liberal hackery is La TaSha B. Levy. According to the Chronicle, “Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.'” The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?
Seriously, folks, there are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates. But it’s clear that they’re not happening in black-studies departments. If these young scholars are the future of the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.
Reax: Johnathan Last, Weekly Standard [3]:
Now, the Chronicle of Higher Education can fire and hire whomever it pleases—for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. That’s its business; that’s its prerogative. But the publication ought to at least have the sand to admit what it’s doing. They didn’t fire Naomi Schaefer Riley because of what she wrote. They fired her because their readers didn’t like it.
The great irony, of course, is that the whining and gnashing of teeth from the “Black Studies” crowd only reinforces Naomi’s point about the “discipline.” You’d never see chemists or physicists or mathematicians worked into a hysterical mob by a critical blog post. Because they study actual fields of knowledge—and don’t simply tend the garden of their own feelings.
Further reax, William E Jacobson, Legal Insurrection [4]:
But after the petition and nasty online comments, McMillen gave in to the mob:
[…]
This sort of cowardly behavior is all too common. Witness the corporations who run at the slightest hint of a Color of Change or Media Matters boycott.
Rumor department has it that Ms McMillen will be renaming her blog from Brainstorm to Parrot. That is if her masters, give her permission.
Even more reax: Mollie Hemingway, Ricohet [5]:
And how did academia respond to some extremely mild criticism? They flipped out. They kept flipping out. They lost their ever-living minds [6].
They claimed she was bullying kids (which is, apparently, what we now call people my age who are getting their doctorates). They were super upset that she hadn’t read the dissertations for a brief blog post riffing on a sidebar from a Chronicle article. (Really.) Then they thought she couldn’t criticize dissertations because she hasn’t written one (worse, perhaps, she’s written dissertation-length books that people have actually read and enjoyed). Finally, they said she was racist. One comment I read from the Chronicle web site suggested that Riley, who is white, really needed to sleep with a black man. A classy comment, I’m sure you’ll agree, even if Riley and her black husband weren’t expecting their third child in a few weeks.
Mrs. Riley addresses significant problems which plague the black population. Yet in the long tirade, passed off as comments, nobody actually takes issue these. The comments seem intent protecting the black studies program, but rather indifferent to actually addressing any real problems besetting the black population. How sad.
The plantation masters need black studies program to help maintain the victim mindset, which will precludes blacks leaving the liberal plantation. Nothing gets a black madder than a suggestion that he look in the mirror to see the source of much of his own problems.