What should the mission of a truly modern African-American Studies department be?
The answer common in such departments is that the principal mission is to teach students about the eternal power of racism past and present. Certainly it should be part of a liberal arts education to learn that racism is more than face-to-face abuse, and that social inequality is endemic to American society. However, 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.
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/09/by_john_mcwhorter_while_this.html
If African-American studies was a legitimate subject, I would probably have taken a course or two when I was in college. I am generally a big fan of learning different cultures. When I was in Hawaii, instead of lying on the beach, I spent a day in a large center of various Pacific people native to the islands – and not just Hawaiians, but also Maoris, Samoans, Tahitians and other Polynesians. (In case you are interested: it’s on the same island as Honolulu. Just go straight north on the highway from Pearl Harbor.)
I’ve gone to all sorts of places off the beaten path to learn about the customs and traditions of people many haven’t even heard of, so there’s no reason why I wouldn’t want to learn about American blacks.
The problem is that AA studies are Grievance studies. Attending an AA studies class as a white man is is like being a man who in the middle of a support group for divorce women who are bitter that men don’t want them anymore after gaining 250 pounds. You know you are going to be screamed at and blamed for all that is wrong with their lives.
I remember reading a couple of years ago that a white girl was ganged up against by blacks who yelled and screamed at her, and even thew light objects, such as crumpled paper, at her. The girl tried to run away, but the Professor blocked the door and said that she has to be willing to accept this abuse for a few minutes just to understand what blacks go through every minute of their life.
Really? Are blacks always surrounded by screaming white gangs who throw stuff at them? Care to show me one example of that happening to someone on a daily basis, much less 24 hours a day?
Honestly, I can’t imagine intelligent blacks majoring in AA studies. What’s your career goal? If you are smart, you probably want to do something with your brain. Just as a talented athlete would be upset to see his talent go to waste, a high IQ person would want to learn rather than complain.
More than anything, curiosity is a sign of intelligence. Whining and especially looking for ghosts under your bed who prevented you from succeeding is not.
Those majoring in African-American, as well as Women’s, Latino and Gay, studies have got to be – on average, of course – the dumbest students in any university.
You can’t whine your way into an A in biology. You can in AA studies. Why wouldn’t all the low-IQ, high-self-esteem students major in AA?
But that’s the worst combination. When a dumb person has high self-esteem, they are unbearable. And it is exactly that (not to mention race hate) that is promoted in African-American studies.
“When a dumb person has high self-esteem, they are unbearable.”
You couldn’t be more right:
http://vdare.com/sailer/080225_michelle_obama.htm
I graduated from a Virginia university that offers a degree in “Filipino-American Studies.” That’s even more useless than AA studies.
“I remember reading a couple of years ago that a white girl was ganged up against by blacks who yelled and screamed at her, and even thew light objects, such as crumpled paper, at her. The girl tried to run away, but the Professor blocked the door and said that she has to be willing to accept this abuse for a few minutes just to understand what blacks go through every minute of their life.”
And yet, when a couple of white frat boys dress up as the Jackson Five in blackface for Halloween, at an off-campus party, they get suspended from school without a hearing.
Watch the whole thing if you haven’t already. It’s must-see material.
A friend of the family was accepted to an ivy league school, and then proceeded to major in Jewish Women’s Studies. What a waste!
Why do these departments even exist?
OK I’ll answer it: Because important history is almost exclusively the domain of dead white males. (Asians are largely absent due to self-imposed isolation and a lack of eminent, larger than life figures such as Newton, Galileo, and the Founding Fathers).
Well, the popular canard involving racial disparities in test scores states that Blacks and Hispanics do poorly on standardized tests because of cultural bias. After all, these tests were created by White men so naturally non-Whites will not perform as well. If you follow this logic, then the next obvious conclusion is that modern sciences and math are also culturally biased against non-Whites since they too were created by Whites. What is a standardized test if not simply the testing of knowledge created and collected by Whites? In that sense, all Western knowledge is inherently racist as expecting Blacks and Hispanics to learn something that was not created by their group is simply just not possible.
So now you see why African American studies becomes important. It may not be useful to the world, but Blacks created it and Whites didn’t.
Part of the point of African-American studies programs is so that universities can increase the number of black professors without injecting too much incompetence into other departments.
But the main issue is that nobody wants to publicly call BS for fear of being labelled a racist and Watsoned.
Certainly it should be part of a liberal arts education to learn that racism is more than face-to-face abuse, and that social inequality is endemic to American society.
Please note that the purpose of a liberal arts education is purported to be to advance a leftwing social agenda. It’s interesting that for all the talk of a conservative revolution since the presidency of Reagan, the universities have become an increasingly powerful force in leftwing indoctrination. It has been a failure of the conservative movement to retake the universities.
There is another issue here: every last demand made by the civil rights movement has been met over the last five decades: de-segregration, affirmative action, forced busing, ethnic studies programs, diversity “training,” hate-crime laws, handing over South Africa to black majority rule on a silver platter, etc. Moreover, every elite institution in the USA takes an active part in pro-egalitarian indoctrination: the universities, the media, the government, etc.
Despite all this, we are told that there is still “racism” in America. Now, putting aside the fact that such claims are often demagoguery (and often fly in the face of reality), one might ask why the entire liberal-civil rights agenda has proven to be such a failure since we are claimed to be still a “racist” country. Could it be that there are inherent differences between the races which no amount of social engineering can overcome?
“Why do these departments even exist?”
Because idiotic parents are willing to pay for them. I’ll go further: because pussywhipped American fathers get cowed by their wives into paying for them.
I knew a well-heeled but by no means rich Irish-Catholic family whose son got accepted into Georgetown. Get a good degree from Georgetown, keep your nose clean and you are on your way to a prosperous life.
He chose women’s studies as his major, I kid you not.
They paid $100K for a kid with a useless major. This was a few years ago. Today it would be $250K.
We have this fat and padding in our universities because we are a crazy rich country with money to burn, so instead of requiring that average IQ people get jobs as plumbers and carpenters, we give them useless expensive degrees.
Oh excuse me, I forgot about the recession, and the coming fall of the US.
We are a poor bankrupt country that sends its average IQ kids to universities to get useless degrees.
Never mind…..
I remember when I first started hearing about women’s studies and african american studies. And I thought, “Please, God, Don’t let those bastards start a whiteness studies”. Well, they did. And they’re exactly what one would expect.
Another thing that bothers me about African-American studies is that it’s so provincial.
One criticism of Americans that I agree with is that we are very provincial and know little of other cultures.
The bloopers I have heard Americans come out with are howlingly funny. I once heard a (white) American woman say that Czech culture is similar to Arabic culture. Any respectable Czech who hears that would have decked her.
So teaching Americans to focus on one ethnic group in America strikes me as encouraging that ignorance. I could see a minor in AA studies as part of an American history major, but not a major.
I am a graduate student at Duke. I work in a hard science field though I suppose I’ll keep the details minimal. (They’d bore you anyhow.) But the funding for the Resentment Studies programs is only partially obtained from tuition. The rest actually comes through taxing the grants given to the hard sciences. The National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Department of Defense, National Institute of Health and so on grant money to departments researching biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, etc. Ultimately, of course, they get money from tax payers.
But the university taxes the grants to these useful, productive departments. At Duke, that tax is a solid 40% of every grant. The university then turns that money over to the various useless departments. Women’s Studies, Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transsexual/Questioning Studies Department, and the Chicana/Chicano Studies. (I kid you not about the names.)
This process actively hurts the real research that goes on at schools. There is a serious lack of funding left over after the school takes its huge cut and throw it to the dogs. The sciences could be using it to hire more professors, post-docs, grad students, to buy better equipment or classrooms. But instead it’s given to the professional victims.
And of course this is what one thinks of today when thinking of the humanities. Isn’t that sad? It’s not the classics or history. These are worthwhile, since they provide a cultural grounding when taught properly. If we want to better understand our heritage as Westerners, these fields are essential. I hate to see them swamped by the new “leftist chic” programs that are increasing in number every year. E.g., I know that the G/L/B/T/Q department is one of the most popular among the “humanities” degrees at this school.
I predict (and sincerely hope) that the sciences will eventually secede from the university system. They have to if they want to remain competitive globally. We’ll likely see the rise of smaller “institutes” with a narrow focus, maybe just one branch of science, which will fill in for universities as they become more and more just agents of political indoctrination.
Phaidon,
What you say echoes things I’ve heard. It reinforces my feelings that the US is doomed. We can’t possibly compete against China. And I’m not one of those HBDers who idolizes the E. Asians and thinks they are all geniuses. They’re not. But if only 400 million of them are productively engaged, they’ll drive us into the dust.
That’s why I think that the only thing that will make us adopt sane policies is if our Chinese creditors take us into the woodshed and force us to do the things we can’t or won’t do ourselves.
Your idea is excellent, but wasn’t that the idea behind MIT and CalTech? And haven’t both MIT and Caltech been infected by the corrosive PC bug?
As long as the government is going to be the dumping ground for worthless AA hires, there is going to be a demand for these degrees. It is certainly better for the government employee to have a degree (probably Summa Sum Laude) from a real university instead of the degrees from diploma mills so many government employees get caught with when their backgrounds are really checked.
Phaidon, Jay
“What you say echoes things I’ve heard. It reinforces my feelings that the US is doomed. We can’t possibly compete against China.”
I agree. I actually woke up from a liberal slumber when living in China.
The problem was that I came home to attend grad school and found it (at least in the real fields) chalk full of Chinese and Indians — and not even of the recent Americanized, often dual loyal, sort.
Liberals, as one faction of the corrupt elite, are either in secure positions or have grown up with wealth and don’t see the problem. They are too busy revolting against their tradition. On top of this our business leaders are short term thinkers.
I remember in the late 90’s when the arguments for “globalization” (ie outsourcing) started coming out. They said the same thing: “Don’t worry, we don’t need industry. We can all be inventors and creators and let the Chinese and Indians do the making.” Hubris, stupidity, liberalism: The US is special because of democracy/diversity power; other countries won’t just rip the tech like the US often did from Britain or just use the US installed technology (and educated researchers) to out-compete us; all people in the US have the capacity to be inventors and creators.
So we have: an economy soon to be based on a questionable green industry and Health Care, now that the Finance industry turned out to be a pyramid scheme, a falling educational level that needs to be subsidized by importing foreign brains, and little industry to employ those less creative and research inclined and so a need to create government work programs and meaningless positions. And of course, let’s not forget, our great unifying diversity programs to promote national self-interest.
….
Right now I am banking that by mid century EthnoHan Civilization will confront the Multicultural west. So I am doing what I can to see that Han nationalists come out on top and that there are people like me to pick up the pieces after. It’s questionable, but I can no longer trust that West Caucasians will act correctly by themselves.
chuck,
How, specifically, will the confrontation between Ethnohan and multi-west manifest?
nikcrit,
It need not be a confrontation. It depends on how much the later resists the power change.
But first it will start as a purely economic shift followed by a cultural power shift. This will continue until the Chinese have the confidence to be more assertive; it will then depend on how the western elites’ interests line up — and on the ideological differences.
The relatively few Chinese in the West will make using China as an opposition-unifier rather tempting.
Anyways, hopefully the change it will be more like how the US displaced GB and not how Germany tried too.
I see Obama is set to snub the Dali Lama; it’s been nearly 2 decades since a president decided not to meet with him. Read: Chinese loans and a weak US economy.
I also see the US is also putting more in AFRICOM. While marketed as anti-jihad, I have read a number of reports to suggest that it’s in case of competition over African natural resources — which, when the continent develops a bit more, will become the new Middle Eastern Oil.
But I always assume that 1) people naturally group and 2) group competition (whether soft or rough) is inevitable (and beneficial when soft). So, if you have a progressive- utopist view of things, take this with a grain of salt.
“They paid $100K for a kid with a useless major. This was a few years ago. Today it would be $250K.”
When my son was in kindergarten I started telling him I would only pay for his college if he studied something useful as in profitable. Otherwise he could just start working.
“Right now I am banking that by mid century EthnoHan Civilization will confront the Multicultural west. So I am doing what I can to see that Han nationalists come out on top and that there are people like me to pick up the pieces after. It’s questionable, but I can no longer trust that West Caucasians will act correctly by themselves.”
I don’t think it will be a confrontation. It’s not like the Vandals at the gates of Rome, which is a completely whack analogy on so many levels.
We are bankrupt. They own our debt. The whole idea of US reading the riot act to THEM about human rights is such a joke, which we do every year with our laughable State Dept. Human Rights report. Did we protest at the violent put-down of the riots in Uighur country? Nope. We kept our mouths shut.
I don’t actually mind the idea of China forcing us to clean up our act. What I do mind is this thought, which I’ve voiced previously: that the force us to take 100 million “excess” Chinese.
It’s not a totally crazy thought.
nikrit, Chuck:
I clicked too fast. What I meant to say more clearly is that when a country owns your debt, you are checkmated.
When you are checkmated, you are defeated.
What China will wants, China will get. All over the world. They are already in Africa, re-enslaving the place.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1063198/PETER-HITCHENS-How-China-created-new-slave-empire-Africa.html
Chuck,
All of a sudden, Detroit’s decline is in the news. This is curious, as Detroit’s condition has been no secret for at least 20 years. I guess it’s so bad even the MSM can’t ignore it.
Daniel Okrent, liberal pill, just wrote a cover story for Time that you can look up and read yourself. It’s referred to in this piece:
http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty506.htm
Never mind the hysterics, it’s the facts that count.
Detroit, for those of you of tender years, was America’s muscle city, the heart and soul of its industrial might. Now it’s a shell.
This is the future of America: an Afro-Hispanic sinkhole with a growing Islamic minority.
I think that we would have a hard time competing with the Chinese even if we were still 85% white, and still had control of our borders and culture.
But a country with an Afro-Hispanic majority, no control over its borders and culture, faced with competition like China, is doomed.
Chuck says,
“But I always assume that 1) people naturally group and 2) group competition (whether soft or rough) is inevitable (and beneficial when soft). So, if you have a progressive- utopist view of things, take this with a grain of salt.”
For the record, I do NOT have such a view; more the opposite.
Related question: “doesn’t US military might somewhat counter or at least complicate that forecast. (I emphasize that I’m asking more than challenging here; bit outside my element…).
This is not a military issue. To see it that way is to misunderstand the issue profoundly.
I stated that as a question and noted that i’m outside my element here; still, isn’t military might usually factored into diplomatic relationships among powerful nations, even if it’;s not imminent that such force would be used?
I realize that, and yes; although I believe that this issue is essentially not a military one, but a cultural one, it has a military dimension.
And of course our military is also affected by the “diversity” plague:
http://www.hometownannapolis.com/news/opn/2009/06/14-47/Guest-Column-The-cost-of-a-diverse-Naval-Academy.html
But at the end of the day I don’t think that the Chinese will have to fire a shot against US – they own our debt.
I have no statistics on China’s military capacity, nor do I know of a place where reliable data can be found by non-specialists. But I wouldn’t be surprised to wake up and find Chinese warships in the Persian gulf one day. Or off the coast of Somalia. Or Australia.
Sorry, the link is to an article that expired. Here is a link that gives you an idea of what the author was talking about:
http://www.brucefleming.net/Interviews/usnews.com.txt
nikcrit asks, “doesn’t US military might somewhat counter or at least complicate that forecast”
Absolutely not. Economics is the basis of military power. The ONLY reason the United States is a military superpower is because it is an economic superpower. If our economic situation deteriorates then so does our military. The United States currently spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined. Without this spending we couldn’t even maintain our military much less upgrade it. Don’t forget that during the cold war it was the collapse of the soviet economy that brought them down.
Nikcrit,
About your earlier questions. SPSS is common in the social sciences and some fields of biology. Some use programs like SAS.
What types of analysis did you do?
Do a Google scholar search — type in something you are interested in and various types of analytical techniques: regression, ANOVA, structural equation modeling, ect. Just read through the studies and get a feel for how they do them.
lesacrudu,
I don’t do scientific analysis; used spss a bit back in humanties-field grad school. i’m mostly familiar with qualitative studies and criticism…thanks for the info.
I think the best way to level the competitive playing field between the US and China/India is to start endowing Woman and Gender Studies departments in Indian and Chinese universities.
Jay,
“I don’t think it will be a confrontation. It’s not like the Vandals at the gates of Rome, which is a completely whack analogy on so many levels.”
I didn’t mean to imply that. To the extent that it will be a ‘clash of civilizations’ it will be like the US and USSR, which managed to co-exist.
The confrontation will be in terms of social-economic-political models via proxy states.
Within the West is where the clash will happen. Particularly Europe. Here, the color of the Nation will change and with it the culture. Our influence will dim — and, in my view, much of the national wealth — at least until a hypothetical new consensus is built. Further, there is always the danger that radicals will hijack the system while the guard is changing. But Muslims are different from most Hispanics, Blacks, and Asians.
I have tried to explain this before in my analysis of Western Imperialism. Part of the West’s character had to do with the cultural-religion. Christianity inherited a moralism (Right/Wrong) from the Jews and a Manicheaism (Good/Evil) from the Persians. Under the wrong conditions this can easily lead to excess. (In the form of: I know I am right, and you better change).
Christianity has mellowed and it has lost a good deal of that Persian Good/Evil sense. Further, it was always mixed with classical tendencies and also brought along much Jewish humanism to balance it out. And religions in general are socially/politically flexible — as the worldly is not their point.
Islam is a different creature with a different history. And many of the assertive tendencies have ripened and have adapted to Middle Eastern reality. Here, some might demand that Spanish is on equal footing with English and some might demand affirmative action till the end of time (unearned equality), but they are not the equivalent of Shari law.
Europe is where it will get interesting.
“The confrontation will be in terms of social-economic-political models via proxy states. ”
OK. Which are the proxy states you envisage?
If the US is going to decay, I doubt we’ll even have proxy states.
I must admit that whenever I prognosticate about the future, I am really just guessing, depending on my mood. No one knows what the future will bring. Anyway, I sure don’t. There are so many possible variables – a huge quake in California, disease….you never know. Hell, an asteroid might hit. But even apart from disasters, I just don’t know what the future brings.
So I’m always interested to hear what other race realists think.