Since the notion that Afro-American studies labors under a permanent racist threat is obviously absurd, what were West and his colleagues really up to in crying “disrespect” and threatening to quit? Simple: making Summers do the “I’m not a racist” shuffle not only serves to deflect criticism and ensure that there’s no backtracking on racial preferences; it also scares the university into keeping up its generous level of support for Af-Am studies or even increasing it. And who knows, maybe it’ll get Princeton officials to come up with an even better deal if they think we’re really serious about quitting Harvard.
Because real racist bigotry is vanishingly rare on campuses, where the race police are out in almost totalitarian force, black academics have become talented at manufacturing racist insult out of encounters innocent of racism. Nervous white administrators usually play along. . . .
At Berkeley, where I teach, African-American studies department chair Percy Hintzen has repeatedly claimed a racist “lack of support” from university officials for, among other things, “allowing” two of his professors to transfer to other departments. As one of those professors (I once had a half-time appointment), I find the idea laughable that my disenchantment with the African-American studies department was a moral lapse that my administration bosses should have prevented. But Hintzen’s racial grandstanding over the years has resulted in his department getting a graduate program, despite low undergraduate enrollments and long-standing indications of a lack of scholarly gravitas.
The campus race game has largely prevented any sustained investigation into what--if anything--Afro-American studies programs actually accomplish academically. The assumption in the mainstream press during the West-Summers contretemps was that the intellectual quality of Harvard’s Afro-American studies was unassailable.
Unfortunately, that’s far from true. Survey the department’s undergraduate curriculum, and you find that most of the courses express the pernicious belief that victimhood defines what it means to be African-American--that to be black in America has always been a story of betrayal, disappointment, passivity, and tragedy, and that when things seem to be improving, it’s only an illusion. . . .
Notably missing from any of this spring’s 13 departmental offerings is a single text by a black conservative. Thomas Sowell has written important academic books and countless substantial essays on race over the past three decades, and Shelby Steele’s work is unquestionably weighty enough to merit the attention of young black minds, but Harvard’s Afro-American studies program ignores such thinkers, as if the invalidity of their ideas were self-evident (under a paradigm that assumes that indignation against the Man is the only legitimate way to be black, it probably is). Voodoo god Legba, yes; Sowell, no.
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