The consequences of perpetuating minority student victimhood
By: Richard L. Cravatts
(Continued from last week)
Another of Kane’s posts suggested that, due to race preferences, over 90 percent of Black students at Williams College would not have been admitted if it were not for their “Black’ness” [sic], and question why, while Williams College publicly condemned a white supremacist group, the college did not similarly condemn the Black Lives Matter movement and Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.
A second government professor at Harvard, Diana J. Schaub, also became a target for her alleged racism in suggesting that black people were responsible for some of the social and economic conditions in which they find themselves. Schaub, a visiting professor who was teaching a course at Harvard on African American political thought, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and has actually served as a visiting professor at Harvard before.
In a 2010 article in National Affairs, “America at the Bat,” as one example of what students found objectionable, Schaub noted that “The trend [of the absence of blacks in baseball] has been noted, lamented in some quarters, but nowhere adequately explained. My strong hunch is that the declining interest and involvement in baseball is a consequence of the absence of fathers in the black community.”
In a 2000 article in The National Interest, Schaub observed, “I suspect that the contemporary phenomenon of angry middle-class blacks derives in substantial part from the erosion of both Bible-based faith and faith in Progress. Charitable and hardy souls have been replaced by suspicious and fragile selves, hypersensitized to perceived slights and perpetually aggrieved.”
And in a 2010 article in the Baltimore Sun that tracked reasons behind Baltimore’s population loss, Schaub suggested that, “The decline of marriage, particularly among African-Americans, is all too familiar. Not as well-known is that Maryland has a very high abortion rate (third highest among the states in 2005 . . .). The breakdown by jurisdiction reveals that Baltimore City is driving those deadly numbers, and also that the abortion rate among African-American women is at least triple the white rate.”
The opinions—and even the facts—presented in these articles apparently were too much for some Harvard students, including a Crimson editor majoring in government who wrote that Schaub’s articles are, “if not outright bigoted, ignorant, and deeply concerning.” Kane and Negy, too, articulated opinions which caused great discomfort for many who want to reveal endemic racism where it may or may not even exist, primarily because academia is in the thrall of diversity and inclusion and is more committed to perpetuating the victimhood of minority students than it is for dealing with facts, statistics, and opposing views about personal responsibility and academic performance. Those moral heretics who dare to express alternate, even factual, views about race are summarily censured, maligned as racists, and sometimes even purged from the campus community.
In writing about the Kane situation, for example, the censorious Editorial Board of the Harvard Crimson actually called for the professor’s firing. “The posts are unacceptable,” the editorial said. “Our issue with them goes beyond mere differences in political opinion . . . [and] if the allegations that the posts authored by “Field” were written by Kane are true, the suggestion that 90 percent of Black students at Williams don’t belong there and the defense of literal Nazism have irreparably damaged Kane’s ability to serve as an instructor . . . He simply cannot serve as an effective preceptor — certainly not to the Black students whose belonging at higher education institutions (and evidently in this country) he allegedly challenges, but also not to anyone with a basic intolerance for bigotry. In short, David Kane, assuming the allegations are true, must be fired.”
In June, UCF students and alumni held a protest against Negy while holding signs that read: “If UCF Keeps Racist Teachers, Then UCF=Racist,” “UCF Fire Negy. He is leaving a negative impact on your institution,” and “Don’t Let Racists Teach.” The message here was clear: not that the protestors and professor could engage in debate and dialogue about the complex issue of race, but that self-appointed guardians of the truth had decided that the professor’s views were fundamentally racist and worthless, and that the only acceptable response was his termination.
The efforts to rectify racial injustice have included such efforts as affirmative action in college admissions, robust and obsessive diversity and inclusion initiatives at universities, and the creation of programs to directly ameliorate purported racism. These endeavors are seen as reasonable and justifiable reactions to lingering racism in American society and are ostensibly designed to give substantive advantages to blacks to compensate for their historic marginalization.
As demonstrated quite saliently by the experience of these professors, however, anyone who questions either the utility or even the moral, legal, and ethical justification by which these efforts are maintained can expect to be denounced as a racist—and especially now as the country is experiencing paroxysms of racial reckoning and atonement. To question the hypocrisy and fairness of affirmative action, for example, is to step on moral landmines. And to claim, as professor Negy did, that, despite the normal assertions about America’s endemic racism, there is actually something one could consider the be “black privilege” is the type of radical notion that can cause someone to be subject to condemnation and cancellation, just as he has experienced.
The frequency with which students, faculty, and administrators have moved to suppress, and punish, viewpoints about race should be alarming, particularly in the time since campuses were thrown into a race frenzy in the wake of the killings of black victims by police last spring. But in their zeal to create campuses they believe to be free of bias and hatred, and which serve as sanctuaries—safe spaces—for marginalized individuals, the campus censors have shut off intellectual engagement and often moved to suppress dissenting thought.
This poses a grave threat to academia because, as John Stuart Mill astutely observed in On Liberty, “to refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility,” something clearly lacking on the part of those on campus who cannot and will not abide opposing thought.
(FrontPageMag)
Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., is a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech, President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews.