Crying victim

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views January 28, 2002]

More follow-up on those highly paid black professors, whose delicate feelings were hurt when Harvard University's President Lawrence Summers questioned Cornel West's extra-curricular activities and grading methods.

Here's John Leo in his syndicated column, "Harvard President stumbles on campus race":

What Summers failed to figure out--and his naivete here is stunning--is that his little chat with West would immediately be defined as a racial incident. Sure enough, West and other stars of Harvard's black studies department threatened to move to Princeton. The circus came to town--Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton showed up to deal with (i.e., inflate) the supposed racial crisis.

In the words of conservative black scholar Shelby Steele, the "predictable choreography of black indignation and white guilt" began to unfold. "Political correctness is what whites have the authority to say about blacks, no matter what they see," Steele wrote. Even pushing for excellence from a talented but under performing black professor was a horrible violation of the rules of correctness, therefore a racial if not a racist act. If Summers had pushed a white professor to try harder, nobody would have cared.

The script calls for the offending white to cave in, and that's what Summers did.

In a New York Times commentary, "Can Crying Race Be Crying Wolf?" (1/13/02), Kate Zernike writes:

Even after a special summit meeting called to mend fences, Mr. West continued to vent his hurt feelings in public, calling in reporters last week to insist that he just might leave, anyway. Meanwhile, conservative editorialists mocked what the writer Stuart Taylor, in Slate magazine, called a "feast of victimology." . . .

Blacks on the more conservative end of the political spectrum are less sympathetic. They blame the Harvard professors for using race to get their way.

"People with the talent that these people have have so much more to offer the United States than shooting a gun at Larry Summers' feet and making him do the `I'm not a racist' dance," said John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley and author of Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. "It suggests that too much of modern progressive black thought is dedicated to crying victim rather than to trying to move ahead. These people are doing just fine, but as soon as there's any kind of crisis, the natural conditioned reflex is to pretend to be under siege."

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