Black studies: Too delicate for criticism?

last updated 8 January 2015

Censorship is alive and well in American universities, said John Fund in NationalReview.com. Last week, The Chronicle of Higher Education—a trade journal for academics—fired Naomi Schaefer Riley, whom it had hired as a blogger to provide conservative commentary on its liberal-dominated website. Her crime? She dared argue that black-studies departments should be eliminated, citing the silliness of five dissertations by some of the discipline’s most lauded students. One dissertation, entitled “So I Could Be Easeful,” was a lengthy complaint about the failure to include the black experience in “natural birth literature.” Schaefer Riley tore apart another essay that blamed the subprime housing crash on a conspiracy by white politicians, noting that “those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.” Her conclusion: Black studies is “a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap.” When 6,500 politically correct academics signed a petition demanding that she be fired, the Chronicle’s editor cravenly caved to the mob.

“Sure she was fired by an academic mob,” said Daniel Luzer in WashingtonMonthly.com. “That’s the Chronicle’s readership.” Those professors and graduate students spend their entire careers accumulating evidence and building theses that can be credibly defended. It’s no surprise that they would loudly object to such a smug and racially insensitive dismissal of an entire intellectual discipline. Schaefer Riley was fired for “journalistic malpractice,” said Ta-Nehisi Coates in TheAtlantic.com, not for being a racist. She later admitted she hadn’t actually read the very papers she mocked, saying there wasn’t enough money in the world to make her “read a dissertation on historical black midwifery.” In other words, she condemned black studies based on no evidence but the titles of five dissertations. After that admission, why would anything this hack wrote have any credibility whatsoever?

But would Schaefer Riley really have been sacked if she’d made fun of pretentious dissertations in classics or film studies? asked Kevin Drum in MotherJones.com. Classicists and movie fans might have been angered, “but it would have been the kind of outrage that blog posts and opinion columns provoke all the time.” Of course, there are many historical and cultural reasons why we should be sensitive about some “broad-brush cultural criticisms with obvious racial overtones.” But questioning the validity of black studies shouldn’t be off-limits. Treating that discipline like “a delicate hothouse flower” only reinforces the idea that it’s not serious scholarship.