Sunday, April 28, 2024

Worth Reading in Full

4/19/24 Boston Globe.  The article is by a professor who grew up a black kid in a neighborhood so white:

"i could have been used as a landmark when giving directions.
Sadly, as one of the few Black kids in the neighborhood and one of the even fewer who spent any time with white peers, I was a daily target of racist bullying.". But the article is not a "I am a victim of white racism" rant.  It is how he has managed to get himself in trouble with a new class of racial bullies because he argued that speaking and writing standard English was empowering.

"Once, I committed the sin of saying that knowledge of standard written English may be valuable to all students, regardless of skin color. For this, I endured vitriol. Because standard English came from England and was used by imperialists and slaveholders, I was told, it was inherently racist to teach it to nonwhites. On a now-defunct academic listserv, I was accused of white supremacy, of being unconcerned with how such thoughts, coming from my Black body, were doing harm to other Black people."

Remember that there are black academics who are on the side of civilization and equal opportunity.  I suspect there are a lot of them.  Pretty obviously, you are not going to hear about them except in derision.  Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams are likely the only black scholars you can likely name in this category but they are not alone.  I have worked on gun rights history with a couple of others whose names I will not repeat on the small chance that they have  colleagues, or at least academic peers, who do not realize that they are "black faces of white supremacy.". A colleague where I teach now has given me reason to suspect him of academic rigor and commitment to equality of opportunity.

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