EDUCATION: The Inferiority of Blackness as a Subject « tressiemc

The Inferiority of

Blackness as a Subject


By Tressiemc
2 May

I am writing this very quickly while on the side of Interstate 20. I am also struggling mightily to not use my colorful repertoire of insanely rhythmic and appropriate curse words. Thank me later.

Today The Chronicle of Higher Education published a blog entry from Naomi Schaefer Riley entitled “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” I refuse to link. They do not deserve the traffic. Google it or take my word for it. 

Schaefer Riley is responding to an earlier Chronicle article lauding the first cohort of Northwestern University’s Black Studies program. So bemused is she by the mere titles of the dissertations of these young black scholars that Schaefer Riley can barely contain her glee as she proceeds to viciously, intentionally, and deliberately insult every single one of the scholars listed and everyone within the field of black studies. You can almost hear her giggling as she writes:

“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.”

What could be so utterly ridiculous of an academic topic to draw such ire from Schaefer Riley? For one, black midwives. I mean can you just imagine a critical examination of how black women give birth? How RIDICULOUS!

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.

Not only is black childbirth beneath her contempt but the very idea of literature about natural birth is also contemptible. It could be argued that is a particularly odd position in an age when public health schools are cropping up at every reputable university imaginable and scholars from across  disciplines are attempting to better understand the links between social realities and biological processes. Schaefer Riley will hear none of that! It’s liberal nonsense this whole idea that scholars might want to record the history and experiences of women having babies.

It’s not just childbirth that pisses Schaefer Riley off, though. So, too, does a critical analysis of housing, public policy, and race:

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.

This as our nation tries to recover from a protracted economic recession caused, in part, by persistent inequality in the housing market. Nope, not relevant. History happened THEN and this is NOW. And what happens to black people can in no way be generalized to any greater white human experience. You know, the only experience that matters.

Schaefer Riley goes on to deride, chide, and condescend to all of black studies through a personal attack on the scholarship of three young scholars who have the audacity to treat the black subject as a human subject worthy of interrogation.

The relevancy of black studies has never been so clearly proven as it is in Schaefer Riley’s gleeful attack.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about how Schaefer Riley constructed her argument.

She begins by responding to an innocuous article highlighting the work of doctoral students who just happen to be black and who just happen to be studying issues that impact black people.

Doctoral students.

That’s Schaefer Riley’s target: a group of accomplished, intelligent black doctoral students.

Schaefer Riley went after, arguably, the most powerless group of people in all of academe: doctoral students who lack the political cover of tenure, institutional support, or extensive professional networks. She attacked junior scholars who have done nothing but tried to fulfill the requirements of their degree program and who had the audacity to be recognized for doing so in academia’s largest publication. Their crime is not being fucking* invisible.

For that, for daring to be seen and heard Schaefer Riley eviscerates the hard work of  doctoral students.

And she does not even afford them the respect of critiquing their actual scholarship. That is beneath her. She attacks the very veracity of their right to choose what scholarship they will do. In effect, she attacks their right to be agents in their own academic careers.

She eschews their dissertation titles as laughable. She pokes fun at their subject matter. She all but calls them stupid.

And The Chronicle of Higher Education let her.

Maybe it has been awhile since you have been a graduate student. Maybe you have never been a black graduate student. Let me tell you a little about my experience of that.

You are almost always perceived as crazy and different for doing something few in your family or peer groups would ever consider doing. Even if you are among the best and brightest in college you are somewhat of an oddity in graduate school. You are either the voice of all black people or the voice of no one. You can be, in any combination and at any given moment: an affirmative action case, an overachiever, lazy, aggressive, scary, and your University’s poster child for diversity.

You are simultaneously invisible and in the spotlight…all the time. For five plus years. And you pay for the privilege because you care about the scholarship. You do the work. You jump through the hoops. You refine a research agenda, craft a research question that passes muster with your committee members, you spend countless hours reading, writing, collecting data, and learning your craft. Finally, it is time to present your baby to the world. And you do not expect to be coddled but you do expect that professional rules of conduct to which you have been taught to adhere will also apply to your colleagues.

You expect that completing almost all the requirements of your degree program will signal to the greater field that you, at minimum, should be respected as an intellectual peer.

You expect arguments to adhere, however symbolically, to the rules of logic.

You expect critiques to be confined to your ideas, not extended to your person.

You expect that when an academic publication promotes a scholar’s opinion that these very basic rules of engagement will apply.

If you are Ruth Hayes, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and La TaSha B. Levy you awoke today to find that none of those rules apply when the scholarship is yours.

For that The Chronicle of Higher Education is as much to blame as Naomi Schaefer Riley.

These scholars did not deserve to be publicly attacked in the largest academic news publication for daring to be visible and black with a dissertation title that Schaefer Riley finds hilarious.

It isn’t scholarship when the entire purpose is to ridicule.

I know we’re not using the “r” word after Obama being elected and all but it really is this simple: by elevating Schaefer Riley’s racially tinged attack on three emerging scholars, The Chronicle is legitimizing open season on black scholars for doing black studies. That’s racist racism.

It does go to prove that black studies remain critical to academe but it also begs the question: with colleagues like The Chronicle and Naomi Schaefer Riley who in the hell needs enemies?

*fine, fine, fine: one cuss word slipped through. Sue me. Just don’t write about me in The Chronicle!

ETA: There’s now a petition because every time I think about it I get angry all over again. Public shaming and bullying is never OK. Please sign and share.

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Woman. Friend. Daughter. Scholar. Armchair activist. Hell-raiser. Not particularly in that order.

As a PhD student in sociology I employ mixed methods to examine why students choose for-profit colleges, if for-profit credentials are socially construed as legitimate, and what these interactions means for social mobility and labor outcomes across and within national contexts.

I’m also very fond of Dolly Pardon, fancy coffee, juicing, brunch, 90s hip-hop, bacon, and the Delta blues.

via tressiemc.com

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Yes, Please Read Them, Asshole

by zunguzungu

Dunno if you’ve seen it and lucky for you if you haven’t, but a person named Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote a blogpost called “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and after people pointed out to her that her post was racist and stupid, she wrote a followup post entitled “Black Studies, Part 2: A Response to Critics.” which was infuriating enough that I broke down and actually wrote something in the comment thread, which you’re free to click through and read.

Before that, though, you should read this eloquent response from the graduate students whose work she attacked:

As graduate students in Northwestern University’s department of African-American studies, we were thrilled with the informative and important article by Stacey Patton forThe Chronicle of Higher Education that looked at the state of our discipline through the lens of an important academic conference bringing together the 11 African-American studies doctoral programs together for the first time.

So imagine our surprise when almost two weeks after The Chronicle’s original article appeared, The Chronicle’s Web site published a lazy and vitriolic hit piece by blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley that summarily dismisses our academic work while debasing us as something less than “legitimate scholars.” Riley then holds up our research as the reason African American Studies as a discipline should be “eliminated.”

Instead of taking her own advice given to her readers to “just read the dissertations,” Riley displays breathtaking arrogance and gutless anti-intellectualism by drawing such severe conclusions about our work and African-American studies as a whole based on four or five sentence synopses of our dissertation projects.  In fact, Riley has never read our dissertations, as they are in process.  Nor has she read a chapter or even an abstract of our work, but that does not stop her from a full throttle attack on our scholarship and credibility.

When Rick Santorum took his failed campaign for the Republican nomination for President to Iowa, he invoked blacks on welfare as a campaign issue—in a state where African-Americans make up only two percent of the population.  He said, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families.”

When Newt Gingrich had trouble drumming up interest in his failed political campaign, he began referring to President Barack Obama as the “food stamp president” and then told the NAACP that he wanted to address their convention to counsel, “why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.”

One can only assume that in a bid to not be “out-niggered” by her right-wing cohort, Riley found some black women graduate students to beat up on.  Despite her attempts to silence us personally, and indeed the discipline as a whole, her exhortations confirm the need for the vigorous study and investigation of black life in the United States and beyond…

Good lord, yes.

 

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Surly Urbanism

Musings from a budding urban ecology grad student trapped in Portland, OR

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Black Scholarship Matters

 

***I will warn those about to read this post. I am still INCREDIBLY angry at this so my rage may come through in a typo or three or gratuitous profanity...I'll try to moderate it, but this is your warning.

I was working peacefully earlier today on a paper for my urban sociology course, trying to draw some links between sustainable development policies (specifically smart growth and new urbanist policies) and gentrification. I took a break to grab a burrito and logged on to twitter in order to catch up on the variety of news, commentary, and ratchetness that is my timeline. One of my followers, @tressiemcphd (a good follow, btw, if you're into issues of education) was up in arms over a recent article in the "Chronicle of Higher Education" and wrote a blog post in response. Like her, I refuse to link to chronicle article because I don't want to give this person any more views than is necessary. The blog post gives a good rundown.

You can check my timeline if you're interested in exactly what I said. This post is to talk about something that the author of that offending post at the chronicle refuses to see or just ignores. Black scholarship matters. I mean Black scholarship as in research performed by Black academics and research that focuses upon the experiences of Black people, not only in the US, but around the globe.

On the first observation, the importance of having Black, and by extensions any minority or marginalized, scholars. While many of us give lip-service to the notion of diversity, I can honestly say that my intellectual development would have been severely limited had it not been for the myriad scholars and commentators I have been forced and voluntarily decided to read. I am a planner and a scholar of cities. I cannot better understand how our cities organize themselves, the complex interplay of politics, space, and place, or the nature of work and economic development if I am not willing to listen to and come to a basic understanding of how other people, groups, etc view and live the city. My knowledge and understanding of the city is  more rich because I have read feminist critiques of our economic system and how patriarchy manifests and reproduces itself through labor practices and space. I become a smarter thinker and can ask more thoughtful questions because I have read the writings of farmworkers and Latino activists. I cannot grasp the more subtle attributes of urban form if I do not read about the ways in which planners and political institutions encouraged and reinforced racial and income segregation throughout American history. And frankly, many of these topics, questions, and ideas would not have been pursued if it were not for the fact that there were scholars of all different types with different experiences and concerns that asked these questions. You do not have the development of feminism without women, you do not have the rise of varied forms of ethnic and racial studies without scholars and activists of color, and you do not have serious examinations of sustainability without the hard work of environmental justice advocates and scholars and attorneys of color that have represented the interests of poor and marginalized communities that bear the disproportionate brunt of environmental costs. In other words, our understanding of the world and the myriad processes that exist within it is much richer BECAUSE we have scholars that are incredibly different.

On my second point, the legitimacy of studying the lived experiences and history of Black peoples. In case you were unaware, I'm a Black man. That means any variety of things, but one thing it certainly means is that I am aware that the lived experiences of Black people in America are unique and deserve study. The first reason why Black life deserves study is because Black people exist and our existence, in the US and around the world, has been defined by a constant struggle for freedom and justice. We are the descendants of slaves, and from the first moment an African was captured and set loose on the US, our struggle has mirrored the struggle that of this country's halting steps towards liberty.

The history of Black people is largely the history of America. From the colonial and early national dependence upon slavery for economic strength (including the construction of some of our most prized monuments and cities, to the bloodshed of the Civil War, both World Wars, the industrialization of America, to the Civil Rights movement, the great dramatic periods of American history are intimately connected to the lives of Black people. Our modern understandings of justice and civil rights are entirely due to the struggles of Black americans. In other words, Black people matter! But we matter not only because we have played integral parts in the creation and evolution of this country. We matter because we are human, and our experiences have been and continue to be largely shaped and influenced by our Blackness. History and our own lived experience, chronicled in books, music, film etc show that our stories matter and our important, not just for us, but for everyone else. To have this essential piece of our humanity, the idea that we matter because we exist, and that we matter because history, rejected by this woman is not simply an attack on Black studies or 5 grad students, but it is an attack on Black people. It seems that no matter how often it is shown that Black people are treated differently (almost ALWAYS to our detriment) as reflected in study after study after study our experiences still don't matter. This is an outright rejection of not only Black studies, but of the black lived experience.

It is a rejection of me and my life. It is a rejection of the experiences of my parents, who suffered through the traumas of segregation and desegregation. It is a rejection of all Black people. And it hurts so much because I'm not surprised.

I'm out.

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As an elder I'm not surprised that the so-called Journal of Higher Education would print an article in reference to the inferiority of Afrikan ppl studying themselves. What else can we expect in bastions of institutions that reinforce the superiority, across all majors, of Europeans. Now, that this has been reinforced as something that remains in place, I encourage all of us to focus on validating ourselves and the Black Studies movement versus seeking validation from the European cannons held w/in places designed to uphold them as the only existing universal ever.
— Iya Adjua