“You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece 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.”
Unsurprisingly, that didn’t sit well with a lot of people, and now Naomi isn’t writing for the Chronicle any more. The Chronicle’s bounce statement is here, and Naomi’s rebounce is here. The blog world’s reac has been pretty much anti-bounce. At Reason, for example, Nick Gillespie takes an “I disagree with what you say (a lot), but I defend to the death (pretty much) your right to say it in the Chronicle of Higher Education” position and you can find similar statements collected by Andrew Sullivan under the title “Black Studies and the Chronicle’s Cowardice.”
For my part, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Naomi. Let’s look at what she said: “If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline [black studies], the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it.”
Well, the first problem is, Naomi doesn’t even bother to link to the “sidebar,” which I found here (subscription only). Secondly, the piece isn’t about dissertations “by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students.” It’s about the “first cohort” of black studies graduate students at Northwestern, which is not exactly the same thing, and it’s not a complete list, only those that author Stacey Patton chose to discuss. Furthermore, Patton only provides a paragraph or two of description. Furthermore furthermore, Patton describes five dissertations, and Riley only discusses three, omitting any mention of the other two!
So Riley relies on another person’s subjective sample, Riley misrepresents the nature of the sample, Riley discards 40 percent of the sample without mentioning that fact, and then complains about the academic standards of other people? What the fuck, to coin a phrase.
And what about the two dissertations that Naomi didn’t want you to know about? The first is by Zinga Frazer. “Fraser’s dissertation compares the political lives of the civil-rights leader Barbara Jordan and Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress and the first black presidential candidate, who confronted racism and sexism in their communities and in the chambers of power. ‘We need to look at the issues impacting black women: the aggressive politics of poverty and reproductive health and how the demonization of black women still operates today,’ she says. ‘Jordan and Chisholm tried to address those issues through legislation and by providing models of leadership.’”
OK, there’s enough political correctness there to put my teeth on edge, not to mention Naomi’s, but I can’t say that it’s not worth doing. And how about this one, by Dwayne Nash?
Dissertation title: “Stop and Frisk Police Policy on Trial: Testimonies of Racial Profiling in New York City’s Local Courts”
After seven years as a New York City assistant district attorney, prosecuting people of color took a toll on Mr. Nash. He knew that race plays a significant role in criminal law but felt he couldn’t change the system from within. Mr. Nash applied to graduate school so he could more fully understand the dynamics of racial profiling. His dissertation looks at the history of how New York City’s police officers and courts have used stop-and-frisk laws as a form of legalized racial profiling.
“Stop and frisk comes from a history that has very little to do with stopping crime and has a lot to do with how blackness is perceived,” he says. “I am hopeful that my project can be used by defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, and any lay person on the street who might have to navigate through one of these encounters.”
Does that sound like, possibly, a valuable and relevant piece of scholarship? I think it does. So why the fuck (again) didn’t Naomi mention it in her piece?
The whole tone of Riley’s blog post is that we should get rid of black studies because black people are incapable of higher level reasoning. If she wanted to attack political correctness in the academy as a whole, and in particular the proliferation of “we can criticize you but you can’t criticize us” programs, like black studies, like women’s studies, like gender studies, like queer studies, etc., etc., etc., fine. I don’t think we need any of these programs either.*
But that isn’t what she said. She took an aggressive, condescending tone, arguing for the elimination of black studies, on the basis of a highly selective, not to say disingenuous, presentation of the “facts.” She wanted to provoke, and she did so. Well, the blog world is full of snark. But when you get into the ring, it’s a bit silly to complain that your opponent punches too hard. Pugilism should be made of sterner stuff.
*If we did get rid of them, it would make almost zero difference. I’m sure you can find lamer dissertation topics than the three Naomi highlighted in any education, psychology, sociology, or anthropology department, not to mention any English department.
