The separate universe that is Academia is now taking leave of Earth entirely. Vanderbilt is becoming the roosting place of some of the most intolerant ranters in academia. Coming from notorious places like Cornell, the Duke (lacrosse “rape case”) English department and the University of (we will continue to discriminate on the basis of race) Michigan, Vanderbilt has decided to sweep the ghettos of the American university system to gather together, on one campus, the most prejudiced, hate filled, virulent race baiters this country has produced.
We begin with Houston A. Baker and wife Charlotte Pierce-Baker. To get a flavor for Houston Baker I refer you to Joe's Dartblog and the intemperate rant that "convicted" the Duke lacrosse players of rape, sodomy and strangulation … because they were white. The hatred demonstrated by his rant reveals something putrid on this man's soul. It is particularly instructive now that the Duke players are virtually certainly the victims of a particularly modern version of racism; a collusion between politicians going for the "black" vote, radical academics and the "drive by media" who collude to smear the one remaining valid victim in America, white males.
Here is Vanderbilt’s proud announcement
Hortense Spillers is the author of Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. "Spillers is best known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory."
A reviewer at Amazon had this to say: Bringing together some very familiar (and endlessly cited) essays, such as "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe...", as well as essays from more obscure locations, and unpublished work, 'Black, White, and in Color...' illuminates Prof. Spillers' resolutely unorthodox and powerful thinking around the racialization and gendering of the brutal history of the United States, from the genocide of American Indians to the enslavement of Africans in the "New World".
If anyone has any personal knowledge of any of the other recent hires, I would be interested in hearing about them.
5 comments:
Hello Virginian, I am the author the Amazon review of Prof. Hortense Spillers' wonderful piece of scholarship, Black and White in Color. For twenty-five years, Prof. Spillers work has animated American literary discourse. If my review of her book led to some of your conclusions about faculty hiring, I can only say that the university's already strong Black Studies program will only get better.
I am a white male and a doctoral student in African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. I feel compelled to take you to task regarding your prediction of Vanderbilt as "the next racist university". In order to be a racist, one has to have a certain amount of power. In this society, Black people in this country do not possess the institutional power to be racists. They never have.
Also, consider that Black solidarity and Black affirmation are not linked to the hatred of another racial/ethnic group.I think you would find a better articulation of this in the books on white privilege and white identity, written by white people (not all academics by a longshot) regards...tim
http://www.angelofhistory.org
Tim said:
"Black people in this country do not possess the institutional power to be racists."
Tim shows advanced stages of having been indoctrinated. If he was able to understand common words by their common meaning, he would understand what The Virginian meant. Rather, he chooses to use an unconventional and not widely accepted alternative definition for the term racism. Conveniently, those who redefined the term racist did so in a way so that it could not apply to them. Yes, that would be a racist definition of racism.
Some efforts of black solidarity are not linked to hatred of others; some most definitely are. Consider, as just one extreme example, the New Black Panther Party, which is designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Then we have the whole study of "Whiteness". The goal of Whiteness studies is not a celebration of whiteness but rather a "deconstruction of the race". Sounds really loving, Tim.
It's not too late to switch to a field of study where you might obtain some useful knowledge.
Hello Tim,
I have heard the excuse for black racism before: “lack of power means that they (pick your group) can not be racists be definition.” Not even a nice try, my friend. If it makes you feel better, perhaps it will do as emotional therapy, but defining the problem away is neither logical nor is it ethical.
And, even in your own terms, the question of “power” slips out of your grasp. Thanks to the opinion makers in the media, the race studies academics, and decades of accretion of “white liberal guilt” the “power” is on the side of the aggrieved minority. All so-called “dialog” of race in the public square takes place in the context of white guilt and black moral superiority due to centuries of oppression. Moral bullying is nothing new, but to pretend that blacks lack power is laughable. It’s what got Nifong to pursue the Duke Lacrosse players despite ironbound alibis and DNA evidence absolving the “powerful white rich kids.” He was kowtowing to the aggrieved black vote and the moral bullying of radical black professors at Duke. Meanwhile the Duke administration caved, just not far enough to satisfy the black – and white - racists on its campus.
Want an experiment? Try discussing slavery in its global historical context in your classes rather than a purely American perspective. Discuss the issue of slavery among white Europeans, the taking of white and black slaves by Arab slavers, the enslavement of blacks by blacks and the black slave gatherers who sold members of other tribes to white slave traders. You might also throw in a study of black power in places like Haiti after the revolution and how well that worked out. See how far that gets you, bunky.
Anonymous claimed that I show advanced stages of indoctrination. I have been an auto-didact since the age of 17 and have only fairly recently entered into Black studies in its academic manifestation. The most rigorous texts on whiteness have shown that whites are an ethnic group.
Ethnic groups may well act in self-interest.
Consider the recent abolishment of affirmative action in Michigan. That was made possible by white ethnic solidarity, by white resentment, as if affirmative action actually prevented white people from being admitted to colleges, or getting jobs.
The unfortunate term 'minority' will, within the next fifty years refer to European-Americans. It is thus easy to understand the growing agitation and anger from neo-conservatives who are trying desperately to cling to whiteness as an identity.
As T.S.Eliot said, "the center cannot hold".History is what hurts,and the whiteness at the center of US social, economic, and political life has resulted in the new white nationalism. Why? Because whiteness (and this refers to no individual persons)is slipping away and more and more white people are aware of the need to consolidate whiteness because it simply cannot hold.
Can you imagine the liberatory and emancipatory potential if white people divested themselves of ideological whiteness?
I have no doubt that you might accuse me of self-hatred. I am not ashamed to be white, I feel not a twinge of guilt. That is because I know that whiteness, torn from its sordid imperial and colonial past, will be refashioned as a ideological bloc that believes in radical social democracy (a Constitutional formation) and an egalatarian society.
Anoymous suggested I look at slavery in a global context, something in which I have studied for years. Please understand that even the most "radical" accounts of the US slave trade readily acknowledge the complicity of Africans trading/selling other Africans to the West. What is overlooked is that among West African groups, slaves, having been won in a war or as punishment for crime, were considered a part of the family who enslaved them. They were not treated as animals or as objects as was the case in chattel slavery in the US, Brazil, and what was becoming the Caribbean.
I would not deny the North African, Islamic slave trade which went for two thousand years. However, enslaved Africans in this context were indentured servants and could purchase their manumission after a brief time.
It required the monstrous ingenuity of Europeans and those becoming Americans to strap Africans over the opening of a cannon, then firing it, or to whip pregnant African women to death but preserve the foetus. The extent of barbarity practiced by Americans displays a staggering moral deficiency on the part of slave owners and, from the 1880s onward, the unblinking hatred of lynch mobs, America's first 'homegrown' terrorists.
Enslavement was two hundred and fifty years of terrorism directed toward Black people. How could this history of unmitigated violence not dehumanize those who perpetuated it?
regards...tim
Tim,
Thanks for making my point. I really love it when a racist of your persuasion creates a "happy darkies" story with the slavemaster being other blacks, arabs, or anyone but whites. Yessir, nothing to see in black-on-black slavery but one big happy family.
And actually, Tim, I don't accuse you of self-hatred. You hate the devils you have created in your own mind too much. You love your enlightened self too much; have too much regard for yourself and, having seen the light of white guilt, you are now proud to proclaim your solidarity with all the black myth makers.
Why not give me the one that Major Owens made in a speech on the floor of the House about the 200 million slaves throw overboard so that sharks still swim the old slave trade route. Surely that is in your repertoire.
And, Tim, slavery was an economic issue. It took a lot of people to run the typical plantation; something that would not have been economical if you had to pay as well as feed the workers. There was a great deal of evil in slavery, but to suggest that slave-owners deliberately butalized their workers is as silly as claiming that corporations deliberately put sand in the gears of their machines.
A final note, Tim, biographical information does not buttress your arguments. It's a form of moral preening and is done as a substitute for facts or logic.
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