the Chronicle and The Game of Ethnic Identity

Well, I just heard back from the Chronicle of Higher Education. They're paying me 500 dollars for my piece. I'm very excited about this. They even are doing a kill fee if we can't agree on a final version. The article will draw some fire, but I'm quite happy I wrote it.

Jobs: Took a look at the Job Information List at the MLA. Sigh. It's about what I thought. "Ethnic" literature rules. What does this really mean? Actually what it means is minority hires. Now, as somebody who took tear gas at the white house long ago, I'm not exactly a conservative. But this ethnic thing is weird. Obviously, many middle class whites are feeling guilt. About what, I'm not sure.

Do I feel guilt about being white, do I take responsibility for 400 years of slavery? No. One side of my family fought in the Union army. We kicked Southern butt for four years. The other half didn't get here until World War I. So, no, I don't feel guilty at all. My family was part of the solution, not part of the problem. My mother and father were teachers. Were they enslaving poor black people and chaining them in the basement? No, not that I remember.


But some of these ridiculous liberals make themselves feel better about their own status by hiring minorities. And the trouble with this is that we're not talking poor black people being hired from Watts. What we're talking is the children of BUPPIES. Many of these people will say things like, "Hire me because I'm black and pay me more because of it." This is really cynical. And how it serves the ends of social justice is beyond me.

Very few of these people have social agendas that are progressive in any real sense.

I'm absolutely disgusted by this. Indeed, one of the black new hires at the University of Minnesota,told me that the U doesn't give a rat's ass about undergraduate education. It doesn't matter to her anyway. She's too busy with speaking engagements to really care. Indeed, another African American student asked her to be her advisor. She said she was too busy with lecture tour to do it. Is this person the child of sharecroppers? Hardly, her father was in the diplomatic service.

There's also a native American writer at the U. Well, sort of. He's blue eyed and went to Princeton. He's buddies with somebody I know from Harvard. This guy is really pleasant. He turns on his native american identity when it helps him get a job and to get more money. I teach Native American students all the time. They can't turn off their identity. It's who they are. This guy is a sham.

What's really disgusting is that if you look at the salaries of these two (and you can because they teach at a public university), they are much higher than those of their peers. It's not because of their scholarship, but, rather, because of their ethnic identity.

This is gross.


It's almost enough to make me conservative. Well, almost. There is that old liberal idea of a social safety net and a race blind society that I actually do believe in. Silly me. It's identity power politics, baby. And over what? A few fifty thousand dollar a year jobs that essentially are about teaching 18 year olds not to have comma splices. How does this help poor people in any meaningful way? It doesn't. This is what the US attempt at social justice has become.


Shame, shame.


More later, if I don't throw up.

Doug