The “Black Studies” racket – a salute to the honesty of Naomi Schafer 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."

When the American journalist, Naomi Schafer Riley, started her 30^th April bog for the prestigious Chronicle of Higher Education with these words, she might as well have ended the piece with the declaration “I RESIGN!”. 6,500 despicable, cowardly, left-wing academics signed a petition calling for Mrs Riley to be fired for having spoken the truth – and the despicable, cowardly Chronicle duly sated their liberal bloodlust.

In the original article (which is very funny and which you can read here) Mrs Riley singles out three dissertation titles to support her case: “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth”, which purports to be a study of “historical black midwifery”; “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s”, in which the author writes, ““The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market” (er...?); and another which singles out black Republicans for their “assault on civil rights”.

Mrs Riley sealed her fate with this closing paragraph: 

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.

Even I know you just can’t say that sort of thing in academic circles in America or Britain any longer. The last thing these achingly right-on social engineers want is the truth getting out – they don’t want be distracted from their main purpose in life, which is to complete the work started by state schools of re-wiring the brains of the next generation so that it'll be unable to question the liberal-left orthodoxy de jour.

Where Reagan and Thatcher both got it so terribly wrong was to allow the Liberal-Left to follow the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci’s blueprint for capturing the commanding heights of our cultural life. (To be fair, these great right-wing heroes were busy sorting out their respective countries’ economies and battling the backsliding pseudo-conservative lefties in their own parties.) Most disastrously of all, the Left was allowed to expand and entrench its ruthless hold on our schools and universities. As the Telegraph blogger Ed West pointed out recently in a post entitled “Conservatism is doomed. Head for the hills”:

In fact among the under-30s or even under-40s people have been detached from conservative ideas in almost the same way as they have from religion. Bear in mind that for 40 years the 93 per cent of people who were educated in the state sector have been, effectively, indoctrinated by the Left’s ideas. For two generations and more people have grown used to the idea that most things are the state’s responsibility, and once this is established it becomes very hard to reverse, especially as so many people are on the state’s payroll… 

I presume that the current mania for squeezing more state school alumni into our universities (Clegg has been calling for lower entry requirements for state school products this morning) is partly down to the fact that private school pupils are far more likely to have been taught by conservative teachers, and therefore must be more difficult to indoctrinate at college.

Courses in ridiculous pseudo-subjects such as Black Studies, Gender Studies and Queer Theory serve two purposes – to get people who are intellectually incapable of benefitting from higher education into universities, and to churn out the next generation of profoundly ignorant, divisive, pestilential, trouble-making, education-hating, resentment-mongering lefty activists.

Naomi Shafer Riley (whose website you can visit here) – Illegitimi non carborundum!