Sunday, March 15, 2009
Opinion

Academia’s politically correct bigotry

 Among America’s literati and academics, “separate but equal” is encouraged and perpetuated because there are hypocritical writers and professors who have made their fortunes and careers on speci...

Cornel West, who said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks let American whites know what it was like to be black, teaches at Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies.
Richard Alan Hannon/Getty Images

By Stephanie Ramage

Every St. Patrick’s Day, I am reminded of the strange, tragic history that brought English, Scottish and Irish colonists, as well as African slaves, to the South. An odder mix than Celts and Africans would be hard to imagine, and yet mix they did, both culturally and physically.

For me, this line of thinking always leads to a brilliant American writer named James Baldwin, who explored such intermingling in spare and striking prose.

A few years ago, I had a hankering to re-read Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man.” So, with my 9-year-old son, I drove over to one of the big chain bookstores and made a beeline for the literature section.

They seemed to be out of Baldwin.

An African-American sales associate brightly informed me that no, they had plenty of Baldwin. I had been looking in the wrong section, she said.

“No,” I argued. “I was looking in literature. James Baldwin. One of the greatest American writers. He would be in literature.”

No, she said, he was an African-American writer. He would be in the African-American section.

At which point my son, who happened to be studying Martin Luther King Jr. at the time, piped in: “Mom, why do they make the black writers stay in their own section?”
 
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s wrong. Separate but equal is not equal.”

We walked over to the African-American section and saw them—row upon row of magnificent writers and poets: Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, and so many others, corralled in their own section, kept separate from the white writers with whom they could, if given the chance, certainly hold their own.

Once home, I immediately fired off an e-mail to a friend who is a respected academic and African-American writer himself. I thought he would be as outraged as I was. Instead, he seemed miff that I was messing with his marketing channel. He wasn’t as concerned about whether people saw him and other African-American writers as equal to white writers as much as he was about taking advantage of niche marketing that allowed him to sell more books. He was plugged into an array of special African-American networks that helped his career. His books are all about African Americans fighting for equality, but where his own career is concerned, he’ll take a niche marketing advantage over the advancement of racial equality any day of the week.

Equality, without consideration of race, gender or sexual preference, is supposedly the American ideal. Yet, among America’s literati and academics, “separate but equal” is encouraged and perpetuated because there are hypocritical writers and professors who have made their fortunes and careers on special minority designations.

All academics specialize in some particular area, but entire university departments or centers devoted to race, gender or sexual preference distort our history and our reality. Such set-asides are meant to appease academia’s cosmetically liberal—though certainly not truly liberal-minded—elite by erecting facades of diversity. But the very existence of such departments belies the integral role minorities have played in the making of Western civilization. How can we expect young people to see women like me, and blacks, Asians, Latinos and gays, as equal to white men, if white men are the rule and the rest of us are “special sections”?

We have women’s studies, Asian studies, Latino studies, African-American studies and gay and lesbian studies, though in reality these “studies” are part and parcel of larger areas of traditional study.

Instead of offering women’s studies, universities should help students see that women are intellectually equal to men by having them where they belong: in the syllabi of every discipline, from science to literature to history to philosophy. Devoting courses within departments to special groups is appropriate, but setting aside entire departments for special groups in the name of equality is intellectually dishonest. Scholarly rigor demands that we have the courage to seek the truth about the part minorities have played within time-honored traditional disciplines, not serve them up on the side as also-rans.

Consider, for example, the eminent scientist Sir Isaac Newton, who was very likely gay. His convoluted attempt to have his lover, Nicholas Fatio de Duillier, live with him at Cambridge says much about his time and about how one’s place in the scientific establishment influences the acceptance of certain theories. Asian poets like Li Po have influenced the work of English language poets, most notably Ezra Pound, for more than a century. Luis Walter Alvarez, a Latino from California, shaped physics as we know it today.

True equality means integration, not separation. Equality doesn’t mean merely getting the same benefits, it means accepting the same risks. It means competing with everyone else, and that means risking getting lost in a crowd of great thinkers, writers, scientists, artists and others—the overwhelming fate of the vast majority of whites. It’s a frightening prospect, sure, yet that is the only way that straight white males will ever see women, blacks, gays, Asians or Latinos as being truly equal to themselves.

But between now and then lies a battle with scores of writers and professors who have made their careers and fortunes thanks to special minority designations.

If ours is to be a truly post-racial society, special set-asides must end and writers and academics must have the courage to sacrifice their racial, sexual or gender niches and compete in the broader field of writers and academics. It is time minority thinkers proved to critics and skeptics that they are equal in deed as well as in word by abolishing the African-American, Asian, Latino and gay/lesbian studies departments. And it is also time that we did the same regarding women’s studies. Otherwise we are, as Attorney General Eric Holder said, cowards.

We have much to learn from each other, many bridges to build, much catching up to do. There is much to repent and to forgive. But we cannot do it if we continue to build our careers and fortunes on our differences. SP

Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.