RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Harvard Graduate School of Education 14th Annual Alumni of Color Conference will be held from Thursday, March 3 to Saturday, March 5, 2016 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The conference will be organized around three anti-American themes: Designing a New Blueprint for Democracy; Embracing the Mosaic as Muse; and Building Capacity for Sustainable Engagement. These three themes are defined in almost wholly negative ways. The conference organizers reject the melting pot concept, refuse to explicitly identify with non-violence (Gandhian satyagraha), and do not hesitate to depict the black minority as oppressed and dehumanized (presumably even that elite group that are Harvard alumni of color). The conference’s “search for new strategies” is thus being erected on negative premises, without any expressed love of country or one’s fellow man.

Designing a New Blueprint For Democracy. Guidelines for submissions states the following: “Our steering committee acknowledges that the foundation for democracy in this nation carries a legacy of intentional exclusion, oppression, disenfranchisement, and dehumanization that has disproportionately affected communities of color. The successful future of American democracy requires understanding and analyzing the origins and development of social and political systems designed to prevent persons of color from fully participating in the democratic process.”

Did it not occur to the organizers of this conference that the very existence of the conference with its attack on American democracy as “exclusionary” is a testimony to freedom of speech and inclusionary values? The bitter spirit in the conference’s call for a “new blueprint” sounds like an intense replay of the venom heard in the 1960s from the likes of H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. In the light of advances in civil rights since the 1950s, it seems to this writer that the black community should be capable of a more balanced view of history. The steering committee should remember that over 300,000 mostly white soldiers died in the Civil War to end slavery. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed to assure the right of participation in the political process to African-Americans. All kinds of black run groups have formed since 1865 to promote the advancement of people of color in various venues. Some of those “activists” have been extremely intemperate in their rhetoric, and educated persons of all ethnicities should be wise enough and kind enough to eschew their methods. The Armed Forces was finally desegregated after WWII. Schools throughout the South were desegregated, and the SATs were established to discover minority talent that might otherwise be hidden from view. Affirmative Action laws which increased black educational and employment opportunities came into effect, and are still in effect.

A Kansas University professor who used the n-word during a class discussion about race is on leave while the university investigates a discrimination complaint against her.

Thus begins an article about one Andrea Quenette, a thirty-three year-old assistant professor of communications, whose career has just been permanently blemished, if not ended, because a small group of KU graduate students decided to “expose” her use of language they allegedly found personally offensive.

The outrage occurred during a November 12 graduate class discussion of the relation between black undergraduate retention rates and systemic racism. Addressing the issue of systemic racism at KU, Quenette noted that although “I don’t experience racial discrimination so it’s hard for me to understand the challenges that other people face,” she nevertheless had to admit that “I haven’t seen those things happen, I haven’t seen that word spray-painted on our campus, I haven’t seen students physically assaulted.”

According to all concerned, no student objected openly to her politically incorrect language violation at the time. After class, however, the students (plus another graduate student who was not in the class) signed a letter calling for Quenette’s termination. I assume they are asking only for the termination of her employment, though I sincerely doubt any of them would hesitate to demand the termination of a professor’s life, if they thought such a demand would stand up in the kangaroo court of academic review. (Give it a few years, kids; we’ll get there yet.)