"What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap..."

Great post in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Naomi Schaefer Riley on the scandal of Black Studies departments and other race and gender based academic niches. It's so good I'm reproducing it in full:

The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations. 

April 30, 2012, 10:24 pm 

By Naomi Schaefer Riley

You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them. 

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia. 

Then there is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s.” Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government’s promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today. (Not much of a surprise since the entirety of black studies today seems to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don’t tell them about the black president!) She explains that “The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market.” The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess. 

But topping the list in terms of sheer political partisanship and liberal hackery is La TaSha B. Levy. According to the Chronicle, “Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights? 

Seriously, folks, there are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates. But it’s clear that they’re not happening in black-studies departments. If these young scholars are the future of the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.

She's exactly right, of course. Black Studies is really "Far left Black Victimology". The same goes for Women's Studies and LGBT Studies, etc. It's just whack-a-loon lefty politics in academic blackface/drag. There are many important aspects of black life in America-- the disintegration of the black nuclear family, the educational collapse of inner city schools, the horrendous violent crime-- that are critical topics for research. Honest research on these matters would obviously lead to questions about liberal government programs/policies that foster government dependency and replace the husband/father in poor black families, and with Democrat-licking teachers' unions concerned more with teacher sinecure than student success, and with "crime prevention" fantasies (midnight basketball!) that serve only to employ bureaucrats who dream up crime-prevention fantasies and that have turned our inner cities into war zones with violent death rates for young black men that exceed the death rates of American soldiers in Fallujah.

What are the chances of seeing honest research-- research that might upset the pretensions of the liberal academic elites-- done in Black Studies departments? About the same chance as seeing a delegate at the Democratic National Convention who's not receiving some kind of government check.

Zippo.

So, you ask, how was Ms. Riley's perceptive essay received in the Chronicle of Higher Education?

She was fired. She was fired specifically for writing the post.

Read all about it.