We recently discussed the case of Saida Grundy, an incoming assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at Boston University who released a series of tweets denounced by many as racist and sexist, including calling white males the main problem on college campuses and admitting how she tries not to buy anything from white people. While many called for Grundy to be fired, some of us defended her racist and sexist comments as an exercise of free speech done outside of her teaching responsibilities. However at the time, I noted “released a series of tweets denounced by many as racist and sexist. “White masculinity isn’t a problem for america’s colleges, white masculinity is THE problem for america’s colleges.” Now we have such a case and it does appear to confirm some of our concerns that the same standard is not applied to those with opposing views. Duke University professor Jerry Hough has reportedly been placed on leave after posting comments online that were also denounced as racist. While Grundy was allowed to apologize for “indelicate” comments about whites, Hough is facing calls for termination and has reportedly been put on leave. [UPDATE: there are some stories indicating that Hough may have been on academic leave rather than “put on” academic leave. It is not clear from various reports.]
Hough was commenting on a New York Times editorial titled “How Racism Doomed Baltimore” and included an observation that Asian Americans don’t riot because “they didn’t feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard.” He also wrote that “every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration” compared to “every Asian student [who] has a very simple old American first name.” Just as with Grundy’s comments, it is not necessary to debate the merits of such comments. What is at issue is the right to voice such views outside of the classroom and off campus as a matter of free speech. As with Grundy, these views may also be part of Hough’s academic views as political science teacher. His bio states that “his current research centers on the establishment of the state, identity, markets, and democracy in the United States.”
He later defended his comments and said that “Martin Luther King was my hero” and insisting he is “strongly against the toleration of racial discrimination.”
Duke Vice President for Public Affairs and Government Affairs Michael Schoenfeld released a statement quickly that said that “The comments were noxious, offensive, and have no place in civil discourse.” Boston University was right to treat Grundy’s comments as an exercise of free speech. If Hough has been put on leave, Duke has positioned itself on the other side of the free speech divide and has decided that it will now impose disciplinary action for academics who espouse offensive or obnoxious views outside of the class room. The problem is a lack of a standard that explains where this line. It is not simply a question of what speech will be considered permissible outside of the classroom but how the school will limit principles of academic freedom and free expression under such a standard in both academic writings and classrooms. It is a dangerous and slippery slope. The greatest problem is that the uncertain standard creates a chilling effect on academics, particularly untenured academics in what views will be tolerated. In the academic world, such uncertainty can be devastating and strikes at the very heart of the academic mission.
Here are Hough’s full original comments:
“This editorial is what is wrong. The Democrats are an alliance of Westchester and Harlem, of Montgomery County and intercity Baltimore. Westchester and Montgomery get a Citigroup asset stimulus policy that triples the market. The blacks get a decline in wages after inflation.
But the blacks get symbolic recognition in an utterly incompetent mayor who handled this so badly from beginning to end that her resignation would be demanded if she were white. The blacks get awful editorials like this that tell them to feel sorry for themselves.
In 1965 the Asians were discriminated against as least as badly as blacks. That was reflected in the word “colored.” The racism against what even Eleanor Roosevelt called the yellow races was at least as bad.
So where are the editorials that say racism doomed the Asian-Americans. They didn’t feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard.
I am a professor at Duke University. Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration. The amount of Asian-white dating is enormous and so surely will be the intermarriage. Black-white dating is almost non-existent because of the ostracism by blacks of anyone who dates a white.
It was appropriate that a Chinese design won the competition for the Martin Luther King state. King helped them overcome. The blacks followed Malcolm X.”
Po …on second thought, ignore my previous comment as more rhetoric. Consider our engagement done. You avoid addressing any point I have made, instead re-interpreting them. That’s bad faith and there is no point in our continuing. Adios.
Po …again, I give up. I did NOT say you said white men and women do not have to work hard. You read that in to a comment to another commenter.
Please tell me what shape my apology to “African Americans” should take? How many times do I have to say I’ve proven my values by my actions, but you want words…so tell me what you’d accept. Meantime I’ll stick to the citations I’ve linked to guide me.
Ari says:
… I consider the trope of “White Privilege” as a blinding phenomena absurd. It is that white, or anyone who has succeeded otherwise, acknowledgement of our station(s) in life that motivates us to make life better for everyone. It is the opposite of discrimination due to blindness. The idea that all white men or women don’t have to work hard to overcome adversity is a lie.
——————————————————————
Ari, show me where i said that white men and women do not have to work hard.
Again, same advice I gave to David, attack my words. You keep making this about you, and I have said much way upstream that whatever I said was not directed to any one person in particular. You keep looking past that in order to make yourself the anti-white victim…your choice…embrace it. nothing to do with me.
Let’s start here and go forth:
Do you think we, as a nation, should apologize to African Americans, communally, for slavery and its evils?
po –
I say NO, and Hell NO!!!
David
To think I respected you for being a straight shooter! I always found you very intelligent, coherent and logical though very much biased. This ongoing exchange has revealed a side of you I cannot respect. You have revealed yourself to be no more than just another demagogue who will win an argument by any means necessary, lacking even the tongue in cheek (or downright idiocy) that characterizes Paul’s comments, or the inanity but sincere attitude of NIck’s comments.
You have kept moving the goalposts, offering red herrings, making ad hominem attacks, along with a great many other logical fallacies to go with it, hoping thereby to hide the fact that you have failed miserably to disprove my initial argument, and any subsequent one…now you are resorting to making yourself the victim of racism (and the irony of this is indeed lost on you), adamant you are in making me the racist!
Let the record show that I am the one who made the claim, twice, that you David are no racist. Although this whole exchange has revealed much about you, that perhaps you ought to look into. Calling me a racist is in lieu of putting forth a winning argument, which reveals that you have lost this argument fair and square. Thank you for acknowledging it..
There is something that characterizes those so willing to defend the victimizer over the victim, whether the victim is female, gay, black or a child. There are those on the opposite spectrum who would die for the rights of the abused, especially if the abused is female, a minority, gay or a child…like Noam Chomsky.
Attacking the value of his legacy, his knowledge and work is a wide open door into the glaring deficiencies of one’s own mind and heart. Unless you can counter his claims, I suggest you listen to him and learn.
po, you speak as if your words have no meaning. You say one thing that has implications, then contradict yourself by claiming that you never said it or that your words actually mean something other than what those words mean. For example, redress does not mean reparations. So what does it mean? I don’t have time to get into specifics. The one moving the goal posts is you.
As for Noam Chomsky, where did I ever attack the value of his legacy? When someone suggested he had no knowledge of history, I stood up for him and said that I respected and admired his knowledge of history. Are you upset that I pointed out that he is an anarchist? Are you upset that I said he supports the Palestinians, Occupy Wall Street, and therefore unsurprisingly supports any civil upheaval against the government such as the barbarians burning down Ferguson and Baltimore? I’m just connecting the dots for people who may not know him. I looked into him in the past because I had a daughter majoring in linguistics in college.
As for my pointing out your racism, that is no pejorative. You are as racist as any member of the Klu Klux Klan. You just can’t see it. Your own words reveal it when you say that you will not forgive a nation for your perceived injustices over the last 400 years.
I truly do not understand your fixation on the word “nation.” Our nation never forced slavery upon the black man. Our nation never created injustices. There were some individuals and some local governments that created injustices. The nation came together like the cavalry and through blood and treasure, stopped those injustices. And now you want the nation to come crawling to you on hands and knees, acknowledging the injustices that exist only in your mind, begging forgiveness, and providing some kind of redress to make sure it can never happen again. You are asking for something that is impossible to deliver without tyranny. As long as there is liberty and freedom, there will be room for discrimination by individuals and mistakes will be made. Suck it up and live with it. That’s life. We all suffer injustices like these.
Using the link pulls up a pay-wall, so use the Google pathway and you should be fine.
Po here is an example of what I mean by solution specifics: For Americans Who Served Time, Landing a Job Proves Tricky
I am a WSJ subscriber which may enable my reading the article while it is pay-walled to others. If that happens, try using Google and query on ” For Americans Who Served Time, Landing a Job Proves Tricky” , find the WSJ site link, (should be at the top) and you should be able to read the article. The article was published 5/18/2015.
The concept, which requires a court order an exception, on a case by case basis, gives me pause, however it should work with adequate supervision. It means if enacted here I’d have to spend all the time the service person is in my home right beside them, making cordial small talk. I do this anyway if the service person is not known to me personally, where ever they came from.
Paul C … I am firmly in the ranks of those who feel photo voter ID should be mandatory. Lacking it, under the old narrative of it “resembles” a “poll tax” we are essentially without control of our elections. I do not care what has been allowed in the past, only that everyone be treated equally now and in the future…and vis a vis elections, that means we ALL must acquire a photo ID and be able to verify where we live. The nice little ladies in Hijabs who screen me at every vote do a good job…and they ask for photo ID. It is not something that can’t be learned, it just requires one acquire the ID so as not be demanding special privilege.
davidm2575 … I consider the trope of “White Privilege” as a blinding phenomena absurd. It is that white, or anyone who has succeeded otherwise, acknowledgement of our station(s) in life that motivates us to make life better for everyone. It is the opposite of discrimination due to blindness. The idea that all white men or women don’t have to work hard to overcome adversity is a lie. No where is that more obvious that in government, where station privilege truly reigns….and it isn’t color based, but political. Anyone who spends much time in the military, as I have, quickly learns that rank isn’t a matter of color.
Po… I will agree that preparing a concrete proposal would be difficult and time consuming, with multiple edits necessary. However, you cited generalities, such as…
… confession and penance and working hard at making sure that the system doesn’t have any loophole that would allow the bad apples, and there are a great many of them, to sustain their policies of racial oppression.”
What confession would you have me make? What penance should I serve? Many of us evil white men and women have worked hard, in conjunction with black men and women, to close the loopholes. Yet, what do we have as a core issue vis a vis an alleged loophole? … Voter ID, of course, is cited as a “loophole.” It is ludicrous and contrived ….anyone who can get to a polling place can certainly acquire photo ID as well….so why is that called a unfair discriminatory practice? Where I live, a Black, Hispanic, and Arab majority area, every single one of us is asked for a photo ID and usually our voter registration card, before we can vote, and if lacking that, some other documentation supplants the requirement for the vote, which is then held in abeyance for review after we vote. The majority all have a photo ID so why should some be excused? Those who must use other documentation can vote and their votes are counted, so long as that alternative documentation doesn’t cite a parking lot as a residence, etc., or the documents themselves are discovered to be fraudulent. The poll workers here are uniformly of the same race or ethnicity as the majority in their given precincts. I’d suggest we are looking at the wrong “loophole” with this voter ID objection…spinning our wheels. Yet it is a popular theme. This is why I ask for more detail on closing a loophole.
You also cited:
… discusses federal investment in Baltimore and poor affiliated areas. This is one of the ways we solve these issues, by dedicating resources and time into the undeserved communities, not by over-policing them.
Federal “investment” is almost comical due to the poor results, poor oversight (the money is enough? Not.) and I suspect a lot of it vanishes to graft…certainly the case in Detroit under a one time mayor, now 28 year sentenced to federal prison for corruption and fraud, by his peers. We’ve now elected better men to office, and recently the 85% black population elected a white man as mayor…one who has credentials for management and leadership, in the city no less, just like his two predecessors, who were black. One result of the past two good mayors’ and the current mayor’s oversight has been the lifting of the federal court supervision of the police department, in August 2014, that had lingered 20+ years. [AG Holder was wrong about dismantling a police department because as the federal AG he doesn’t have that authority … he must petition a court for oversight, and that is by the court, not the AG or DOJ…who are merely plaintiffs….all oversight is by the court and its appointed overseer.] I consider this series of events to be remedial at least, if not “redress” however that is defined. These events focused on a problem and acted on that problem. It is quite simple that the population most in need of police protection are the poor minority families who live more in fear of the gangs than do they the police. The police were fixed, the gangs have not been….so far, but they’re having a tougher time now. If anything, throwing federal money, without strict oversight, at the problems, calling it investment, is a form of ignoring a problem….like that river in Egypt, denial. It serves politicians and hustlers as an excuse to not get very involved man to man face to face…those who live here must do that and largely we try to do so. I have no contention with programs that enable employment, whether prior felons or just poor Joe Sixpacks….again it is a matter of focus on a problem with concrete solutions. So when someone poses vast schemes to improve things, they must have more than half-vast concepts on exactly how to proceed. And those concepts need to including ordinary Joe’s in the execution of a program.
Anecdotally, I knew a man who ran a business in western Michigan who was a Holocaust survivor, his tattoo plain for all to see…and he hired only paroled prison inmates for his business. He was one very strong and tough man who could handle it. I did work for him as a mechanical contractor and considered it almost an honor that he hired my crew for the work he needed, and I had no issues with his employees who were helpful and willing to learn how to maintain their own equipment. Did what that businessman did, or what I did on his behalf, count as “investment?” There really are ways everyday people can find, focus on, and resolve a problem. But it requires more than just demanding a solution (or “redress”)…it requires actually doing it.
Aridog – a black woman was able to vote for Obama 6 time in the last general election. Served no time and was lionized by Al Sharpton. Who needs voter ID? There is no voter fraud!
And yes, there is hope after all. Healing requires cleansing the wounds. http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/make-it-right/healing-historys-wound?utm_source=YTW&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=20150522
And to close this chapter off, David, with as much clarity as is necessary given the topic, and in response to your comment “ …It sounds like you are saying that the Black man is justified to hate the white man and to be lazy and irresponsible and to burn cities until that point in time when the White man acknowledges the national crime that has been committed against the Black man. I offer this
http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/12/04/8-successful-aspiring-black-communities-destroyed-white-neighbors/
Ari
Sure, I could take time out of my busy life to write up a concrete and detailed proposal as to how to afford redress to black people, and perhaps will I do just that some day. Not today though.
I think the little I suggested above would make a very good start. Here it is again, as it was obviously missed the first and second times.
“…and the redress I ask for is not, as you fear, the dreaded word REPARATIONS, it is confession and penance and working hard at making sure that the system doesn’t have any loophole that would allow the bad apples, and there are a great many of them, to sustain their policies of racial oppression.”
and
“For everyone, here is a bit I heard today on NPR (boo!) that discusses federal investment in Baltimore and poor affiliated areas. This is one of the ways we solve these issues, by dedicating resources and time into the undeserved communities, not by overpolicing them. At the end, it features a man who came out of a prison bid to get a job working for the community improvement program that those funds supported. Now he is gainfully employed, proudly employed, and rather than feeling that there are no avenues for him, he is now a proud member of his community, with self-worth and ambition. We all gain from that.”
Jews get worldwide support and contrition, Japanese Americans get money and apologies, Native Americans get an acknowledgement of their plight and casinos, Armenians get worldwide support and marking of the 100 year anniversary of their genocide… black americans got affirmative action…
yet to hear many whites, especially those on the right, it is downright theft!
po – personally I owe blacks nothing either financially or as an apology. And the blacks who are alive are not owed an apology for slavery, supposedly the War of Northern Aggression was fought over slavery. If that is true, then the debt is well and truly paid.
Lost a post to Ari.
My sole point in the argument I’ve made is that slavery and subsequent prejudice in the USA is a multi-faceted phenomena. I don’t agree wholly with everything in the article, but acknowledge their resources as better than mine. So I listen. I will also listen to any concrete & detailed proposal with specifics cited for “redress” of the historic wrong. May not agree with them, but I will consider them as part of this discussion. I can only live my life and treat others as my conscience guides me, with no more influence I suppose than any other ordinary man. Those who question my life & my beliefs, I suggest I’ve had a better view of it than they do. I have no reason to exaggerate and I am in no contest to “win” any debate.
Aridog wrote: ” I will also listen to any concrete & detailed proposal with specifics cited for “redress” of the historic wrong.”
I will too, but when I keep asking for just a few specifics and get more racist rhetoric instead, then I must simply conclude that the whole proposal is simply hate rhetoric against the White man.
In court, the accused has a right to face his accuser and see the actual facts of the charges against him. In po’s court, there is no specific charge, no specific accuser, and no specific victim. The dialogue goes toward the ad hominem of how Whites can’t see it because their “White privilege” blinds them. They have some bizarre romantic notion that the white man has everything handed to him on a silver platter. When we go to get our first job, they think it is not sweeping the floors for minimum wage, but a nice White privilege job with good pay. Promotions supposedly come automatically without the White man having to even work hard for it. Anytime we want to move up, why we just go knock on a door, and the good White man inside will give us a job because we are White. They think that if only the Black man had the privileges experienced by the White man, then he too would be a highly paid worker.
As a White man, I only wish it worked for us the way they think it does. They have no idea that the White man has to scratch and claw his way to success. Nobody gives us anything. We have to work hard for it.
DavidM2575 … here is the basic article I linked. It lacks the embedded links in the article side bar, and I can’t remedy that. Yes, I am aware that regular use requires a subscription, however to view the article and its embedded links I did not have to subscribe using Opera browser. BTW, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr disputes the 4 million number often cited, citing the number as about 388,000 that actually were brought & sold in to slavery in North America.
The Gilder Lehrman article: Was slavery the engine of American economic growth?
Few works of history have exerted as powerful an influence as a book published in 1944 called Capitalism and Slavery. Its author, Eric Williams, later the prime minister of Trinidad and Tabago, charged that black slavery was the engine that propelled Europe’s rise to global economic dominance. He maintained that Europeans’ conquest and settlement of the New World depended on the enslavement of millions of black slaves, who helped amass the capital that financed the industrial revolution. Europe’s economic progress, he insisted, came at the expense of black slaves whose labor built the foundations of modern capitalism.
In addition, Williams contended that it was economic self-interest and not moral convictions that ultimately led to the abolition of slavery. It was only after slavery came to be regarded as an impediment to industrial progress that abolitionists in Europe and the United States succeeded in suppressing the slave trade and abolishing slavery.
Did slavery create the capital that financed the industrial revolution? The answer is “no”; slavery did not create a major share of the capital that financed the European industrial revolution. The combined profits of the slave trade and West Indian plantations did not add up to five percent of Britain’s national income at the time of the industrial revolution.
Nevertheless, slavery was indispensable to European development of the New World. It is inconceivable that European colonists could have settled and developed North and South America and the Caribbean without slave labor. Moreover, slave labor did produce the major consumer goods that were the basis of world trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco.
In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton provided over half of all U.S. export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured good that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.
Was the abolitionist crusade against slavery the product of a belief that slavery was an impediment to economic development? Not in any simple sense. Williams was wrong to think that by the mid-nineteenth century slavery was a declining institution. Slavery was an economically efficient system of production, adaptable to tasks ranging from agriculture to mining, construction, and factory work. Furthermore, slavery was capable of producing enormous amounts of wealth. On the eve of the Civil War, the slave South had achieved a level of per capita wealth not matched by Spain or Italy until the eve of World War II or by Mexico or India until 1960. As late as the 1850s, the slave system in the United States was expanding and slave owners were confident about the future.
And yet, there can be no doubt that opponents of slavery had come to view the South’s “peculiar institution,” as an obstacle to economic growth. Despite clear evidence that slavery was profitable, abolitionists–and many people who were not abolitionists–felt strongly that slavery degraded labor, inhibited urbanization and mechanization, thwarted industrialization, and stifled progress, and associated slavery with economic backwardness, inefficiency, indebtedness, and economic and social stagnation. When the North waged war on slavery, it was not because it had overcome racism; rather, it was because Northerners in increasing numbers identified their society with progress and viewed slavery as an intolerable obstacle to innovation, moral improvement, free labor, and commercial and economic growth.
Aridog wrote: “BTW, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr disputes the 4 million number often cited, citing the number as about 388,000 that actually were brought & sold in to slavery in North America.”
The 4 million number I quoted previously comes from an 1860 census. It is not the number bought and sold into slavery, but rather it is the number of blacks in 1860 that were living in States that had slavery. People often think of slaves as inhuman single individuals being whipped by their masters, but they were people just like you and me who had a life that included wives and children. The 450,000 brought over here in the slave trade had resulted in roughly 4 million by 1860 through them getting married and creating families.
Paul C. Schulte
1, May 22, 2015 at 10:08 pm
po – you know that Chomsky is only a linguist and he is only a political commentator because he gets the HuffPuff to listen to him. His grasp of American history is weak.
————————————————
Only Paul could say that with a straight face!
po – as a linguist, Chomsky’s take on the history of slavery is no better than my 3rd grade neighbor.
Paul C. Schulte wrote: “as a linguist, Chomsky’s take on the history of slavery is no better than my 3rd grade neighbor.”
Actually, to be fair, I find Chomsky to be very intelligent and very knowledgeable of history. Especially at his age, his lectures are fascinating. His interpretations of history are another matter.
Haha, Paul, just in confidence, I know, I am writing from one of those offices.
po – the Muslim Brotherhood has at least 4 offices in the White House. CAIR is a frequent visitor.
While the list of sources clears moderation, here is another link that sums up in one page what I am saying:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/make-it-right/infographic-40-acres-and-a-mule-would-be-at-least-64-trillion-today
40 Acres and a Mule Would Be at Least $6.4 Trillion Today—
What the U.S. Really Owes Black America
Slavery made America wealthy, and racist policies since have blocked African American wealth-building. Can
we calculate the economic damage?
Po – first there were never any mules mentioned and then the 40 acres was never really forty acres (no more than forty acres). second, the land must come from land confiscated from the Confederates during or after the War of Northern Aggression. How much of that land is available?
Fascinating, ain’t it Annie?