Of Note
Posted by zunguzungu on October 15, 2009
I now, in retrospect, wish that I had included some kind of reference to the fact that footnotes are the dreamlife of a dissertation in that last post.
Also, I’ve posted a diatribe against John McWhorter’s diatribe against African-American Studies at Cliopatria, which you should click over and read. Short version of it is this: John McWhorter mis-characterizes what African-American studies does but left a trail of breadcrumbs that I googled back to the courses he anonymously pilloried and, with the help of one of the professors whose class he said dumb things about, show how winning an argument by attacking a straw man can sound impressive only if you carefully prevent yourself from knowing anything that contradicts your thesis.
Addendum: I’ve copied and pasted the post here (after the cut), too, cuz why not:
I found John McWhorter’s jeremiad against African-American Studies unimpressive when I read it, but then I’m sure I’m not his intended audience (What African-American Studies Could Be,” Minding the Campus, 30 September, and McWhorter, “What Should African-American Studies Students Learn?” TNR, 1 October).
He asks “What should the mission of a truly modern African-American Studies department be?” and then spends the rest of the piece complaining that all African-American Studies departments do is complain about racism. In his words: “the answer common in such departments is that the principal mission is to teach students about the eternal power of racism past and present…too often the curriculum of African-American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black.”
Constructing this straw man of African-American studies allows him to make sure that when he gets around to asking “whether this, for all of its moral urgency in the local sense, qualifies as education under any serious definition,” the answer can hardly be anything but no. Which is why, even though I don’t particularly disagree with his argument that the black conservative tradition is important and should be included studied rather than dismissed, I’m disgusted by the extent to which he gets to that point by saying preposterous things about what actual African-American studies departments actually do; there is an argument to be made for increased attention to the black conservative tradition, after all, but this kind of intellectual dishonesty is not it.
Most of his examples come from what he calls “the curriculum of one African-American Studies department in a solid, selective state school west of the Mississippi,” a department where, as he puts it, “racism is, essentially, everything.” If that were true, if this curriculum in this unknown school could so easily be summarized in a one-sentence rehearsal of demonology, then maybe McWhorter has a point. But how can we know? By withholding the name of the school, we’re forced to take his word that this description is accurate.
Luckily, google gives us the means of checking his work quite easily and, with the same joy with which I discover students who have plagiarized papers from the internet, I found within minutes that the school was UC Santa Barbara, and quickly found a full version of the curriculum that so incensed Mr. McWhorter right here. I would encourage you to click over if you want to see what a disservice McWhorter does to them, how basically he oversimplifies what is done in that department, omitting notice of everything that doesn‘t fit his caricature. For example, how does a class like “The Black Family in the United States” fit into his account? Perhaps he would like us to think that “Particular attention will be paid to the various forces that have influenced the structural and behavioral aspects of family life among Black Americans” is code for “Kill whitey cuz racism.” I could go on, but it’s just too easy; the idea that a handful of classes on black radicalism indicate a “fetishization of radical politics as blacks’ only constructive allegiance” is simply disingenuous it took all of three minutes to see how false his attempt to extend this as a generalization about the entire curriculum is.
I emailed a few of the professors that taught the classes he pilloried, and Janice Madden at Penn was nice enough to describe her course on “Racial and Sexual Conflict” to me, which he takes to task (again, without naming it or her specifically) as an indoctrination machine. For McWhorter, it is not enough that a hypothetical student in her class could write a term paper on “what people have done to get past obstacles”; instead, he bemoans the fact that the “material covered in this course gives precious little support to such an endeavor.” I’m trying not to put too much weight on the fact that while McWhorter bristles at the observation that racism and sexism even exist, he apparently views as impossible the obstacle of a professor who doesn’t actively encourage students to write a particular kind of paper and then spoon-feed them the resources to do it. That’s because it’s much more important to note how fundamentally off-base McWhorter’s characterization of the class’s purpose actually is.
McWhorter frames Madden’s course as “purporting to teach America’s brightest and most ambitious students about urgent realities” and I take that to mean he expects it to be a course teaching young black students how to succeed. If the course were this kind of how-to seminar, if it were about teaching the students themselves how to succeed, then perhaps the literature he cites would be appropriate. But Janice Madden sent me a copy of her syllabus (the same one he saw, I’m sure) and both made it clear that hers simply isn’t that course. Madden is an economics professor, and so, unsurprisingly, her course teaches her students how to do economics. In her words, “the course uses neoclassical economic theory and quantitative or empirical statistical studies” to address a disciplinary question: how “to sort out empirically and statistically the influences of differences in worker characteristics from the influences of current discrimination on racial and sexual differences in employment outcomes.” Teaching students how to do economics — how to use economic theory and apply empirical data to a problem — would seem to be a useful thing to teach students taking an economics class. And the emphasis, in that sense, is as much on how to use economics to solve a problem than on the problem itself. And the class not only doesn’t presume discrimination as an all-powerful plague on black people, but the entire point of the class is to question and analyze the extent to which it is. I n other words, since the point of the class is to use economic theory and statistics to determine the extent of discrimination, the possibility of the kind of answer McWhorter wants is practically built into the question.
It’s seems telling to me, in fact, that his version of her course is the much more political one; while he wants her to teach her students “about urgent realities,” her course actually teaches them to ask smart questions about those realities and to then use economic methodology to find answers. Madden, in other words, is setting out to do what an economics professor might very reasonably be expected to do: teach her students how to do economics. And in her email to me (and after reading her syllabus), it seems very clear to me that this is what her course, in fact, does. In her words:
“none of these choices about what is included is about a “political slant” but rather a disciplinary one. I make clear in my discussion of the term papers that the students must cover ALL perspectives on the topic they address and are NOT to write an advocacy piece…As an economist, I think it fair to focus on the economics literature and on the issues that economists of all political stripes address in that literature. A sociologist would no doubt teach different topics and use a different literature, as would a political scientist or a historian.”
Were McWhorter actually interested in the state of African-American studies, I imagine he would be above making cheap polemical points off of selective misrepresentations about the truth. But one of the responses I got from a UCSB professor said it all to me: “We know who he is…and what he stands for.
John Powers said
As an undergraduate I went to Pitt and flunked out in the 1970’s. A course I particularly remember was Black Pittsburgh which was taught in Black Studies department. I took the course primarily because I wanted to learn how to do research using original source materials. Part of that interest was a curiosity of what was behind the closed doors of the Special Collections at the Library. The university politics that led to the creation of the department was a few years in the past. So while I had no part in those politics I was vaguely aware of them. What I got in the course was first of all an opportunity to do real research, second a mind-blowing experience of hearing stories about Pittsburgh I wouldn’t otherwise had access to.
In case you ever wondered if your students will remember you; they will. Another reason for telling you about my very limited exposure to Black Studies, is that the department is now Africana Studies. I don’t really know the stories, but the way I’ve heard it is the change in department direction was resisted. And again the way I’ve heard it: change over my old professor Clarence Rollo Turner’s dead body. Turner died and the department changed.
There’s a history of struggle for inclusion of African American experience and accomplishment within the University. Africana Studies obscures how recent some of the struggles are–even present. A Ghanaian student studying Africana Studies asked me to explain the bitterness about the shift from Black Studies to Africana studies. This had happened at least a decade in advance of her studies. I was surprised she knew about the trauma, and surprised she would think I’d have anything smart to say. All I could say as a white guy a generation or more older was it’s hard to express how total the exclusion of Black voices was.
Since I gather you’re somewhat familiar with the area where I live, you probably know that August Wilson had a love-hate relationship with Pittsburgh. Now the city is loving him, with a brand new museum named after him, but Wilson left this world pretty much hating Pittsburgh. I Googled Pitt’s Africana Studies curriculum. I was happy to see a course listing, History of Black Pittsburghers and to think for nearly forty years students at Pitt have been giving voice to the real-lived experience of Black people here. Some of those stories are familiar or at least more accessible now. It’s hard to remember how deliberately and aggressively those stories were once suppressed.
zunguzungu said
Thanks for that, John. I find it incredibly sad when the African or African-American studies dilemma becomes a zero-sum either/or. It certainly doesn’t have to be.