A Black Professor Trapped in an Anti-Racist Hell

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Moses Ochonu

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Apr 25, 2023, 9:23:01 PM4/25/23
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Cornelius Hamelberg

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Apr 26, 2023, 9:03:00 AM4/26/23
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Briefly


Re- “In 2022, however, I was told that the “Critical Black Studies” students would live and learn separately, creating a fully “black space.” My “Anti-Oppressive Studies” students were separated from them. Instead of participating in a summer community of 32 high-school students, my group was to be a community of 12 (that would dwindle to nine by the time of the mutiny).”


An expert on group psychology would probably say that this was surely the dangerous moment of separation, departure unto an apartheid-type segregation during which the other group’s identity must have festered, probably nurtured  - unopposed by the Black Power group…

Harrow, Kenneth

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Apr 26, 2023, 10:02:28 AM4/26/23
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Freedom cuts both ways. When i came to east lansing, for a job in michigan state university, in 1966, black people could not buy a house within city limits. That ended the year after i arrived. Dormitories were not segregated on campus. But when black students were given the option of choosing their own dorm, a black dormitory was formed which they opted for. Many said they were more comfortable living in a black student environment rather than with whites. 
Ken
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2023 7:18:20 AM
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Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: A Black Professor Trapped in an Anti-Racist Hell
 
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Toyin Falola

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Apr 26, 2023, 11:53:27 AM4/26/23
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Factors like class, race, nationality, gender, etc., shape comfort level. It applies to food, beverages, etc. Even in classes, students segregate and tend to use the same chair after the second week.

When I see a Yoruba person in the US, I want to speak Yoruba, and I will be shocked if this is misinterpreted as “tribalism”, as my intention is simply about codes of communication and linguistic retention.

How to isolate critical variables is the issue.

Harrow, Kenneth

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Apr 26, 2023, 11:53:27 AM4/26/23
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Thanks to moses for posting this piece. It was very disturbing. Maybe we need to hear from Keisha, the villain in this piece. But the impression one gets from it is that we are in the times of the Cultural Revolution, chinese style, where ideologically driven students are now prosecuting a war against established authority—in this case vincent lloyd, the author of the piece, the one who describes all the events to us.
We are in the grips of a new political age, i believe. The argument against the students and their leader, Keisa, is framed by republicans as a fight against wokism, and we have republican states’ governors in florida and texas seeking to destroy the university stronghold, that is its intellectual capital, with brutal authoritarian control. In the counter to this we have keisha and the students equally adamant that they are facing racist patriarchs who are blind to their own compromised authority.

Since moses sent us this piece, and unlike me is still teaching at a prestigious university, i would love to hear his take on the piece. I imagine he is, like myself, sympathetic with the perspective of the author, who seems to represent a reasonable, decent anti-racist position. But is there another side to this that we cannot hear? I suspect i would have a very difficult time crediting such a position, but still i know i want to hear it from one espousing it, and not as reported by its opponent.
Ken
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>
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Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Black Professor Trapped in an Anti-Racist Hell
 
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Cornelius Hamelberg

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Apr 26, 2023, 11:53:27 AM4/26/23
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Back in the day before Barack Hussein Obama became Commander-in-CHief of the US of A


“Separation, y'all, separation t y'all

Separation, separation !!!!!”


( Sort of like a two-state solution)


The Last Poets - It's A Trip

Michael Afolayan

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Apr 26, 2023, 5:40:34 PM4/26/23
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Ken -

What you do because you want to do it is different from what you do because you have to do it. Those same students who chose to live together as black students on their own volition would probably raise hell if they were forced to do so by some human authority. I guess it's a part of the natural human quest for freedom and unabated confraternity.

MOA






Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Apr 26, 2023, 5:59:37 PM4/26/23
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Living in a white dormitory,  with  invisible and visible
nooses hanging  on your door-  is a bad idea. 

The Black students of those days knew that,  and  chose 
protection, survival and  group solidarity for that moment.



Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries
2014 Distinguished Research Excellence Award in African Studies
 University of Texas at Austin
2019   Distinguished Africanist Award                   
New York African Studies Association
Founding Co -Chair. Sengbe Pieh AMISTAD Committee
Founding Coordinator, African Studies, CCSU
 

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Harrow, Kenneth

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Apr 26, 2023, 6:37:27 PM4/26/23
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You are right michael. There is a kind of historical irony that coming on the heels of the struggle to overcome redlining and discrimination, the fight for integration, is then succeeded by black students choosing to create a black dorm. 
I could easily understand our chinese students here at msu choosing a dorm with chinese students—there is the communality of language and customs, that many people would naturally want. The exceptional student would want to live with others, not with sameness, and there is that to be found here as well.
The interesting point lies in how we are to respond to that piece moses posted. It speaks to another time and day for people like me. I retired just before this new age with its adamancy emerged, and would not fit in at all. 
My close friend reports to me now that the rising tide of decolonialist theorizing is demonizing postcolonialism for having failed to free itself of the jackets of racism. The currents of antagonism we see in the article moses circulated embodies that struggle, and it looks, from the distance of my retirement chair, to be a painful internecine struggle. 
Ken
From: 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
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Toyin Falola

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Apr 26, 2023, 6:47:53 PM4/26/23
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Ken:

Different clusters of activists are now managing universities: if you escape from one cluster, you enter into the jaws of another. More attorneys are being hired on campuses. Academy is no longer what it used to be when I joined in 1977. And members of the younger generation are so rude at conferences. We were trained to criticize most politely, and there was no way I would ever say to my elders, “You have not read this book or that book!”

 

TF

Moses Ebe Ochonu

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Apr 27, 2023, 7:08:37 AM4/27/23
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Different clusters of activists are now managing universities: if you escape from one cluster, you enter into the jaws of another.

Oga, I like this. It perfectly captures the dilemma of navigating the pressure points of 21st century American academe.

Moses Ebe Ochonu

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Apr 27, 2023, 7:08:37 AM4/27/23
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I'm afraid that, as the author of the piece says, we're creating a self-devouring, stiflingly incestous cult of anti-racist Leftist dogma that demands and enforces largely performative conformity to certain anti-racist buzzwords and talking points. These extreme, puritanical anti-racist rhetorical scripts are barely substantive. They're virtue-signalling rhetorical techniques employed and consumed by people who increasingly and atomistically take a puritan approach to anti-racism. They strain to find fault and are never satisfied with other people's anti-racism unless it mirrors their own or is all-encompassing and proceeds from the premise that racism is omnipresent and is inexorably fundamental to all relational and structural phenomena in society. 

Virtue-signalling anti-racist dogmatic communities of the type described in the piece tend to take an absolutist, Manichean view that infinitely divides those who share the same broad progressive and liberal goals of inclusion and anti-racism into antagonistic silos. The result is the kind of suffocating thought conformity and showy ideological policing described in the piece, an environment that undermines thought diversity, self-critique, and the refinement of our own ideological positions in response to new information, changes in society, the ethos of coexistence, and new logics.

As the author says, this over-the-top anti-racist ideology is a trap, an ideological straightjacket from which there is no escape. It does not offer a way out. In fact, it discounts and disavows the search for anti-racist solutions, since the assumption that underpins it is that racism is so ubiquitous and, in a Foucauldian sense, so consciously and subconsciously deterministic, that it cannot be overcome or mitigated. 

This anti-racist extreme needs to constantly invent and reproduce an irredeemably racist world in order for it to retain its logic. In this combatively fratricidal thought space, even the standard liberal Left anti-racist consensus is interpreted as part of the racist superstructure of society. This is, quite simply, a recipe for a depressing sojourn in what the author calls "anti-racist hell." It's not a good place to be or to operate in, and many progressive spaces in and outside academia are taking on the characteristics the author graphically and depressingly describes for the summer seminar.

On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 5:47 PM Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

Toyin Falola

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Apr 27, 2023, 7:22:10 AM4/27/23
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Moses:

Change anti-racism to anti-tribalism to anti-religious dogmas; your statements apply.

All binary analysis, as good as it is, becomes flawed when applied to all situations.

BUT

Hegemonic retentions are grounded in those labels and cleavages. If you are following politics in Texas, you want to throw up. A bill passed the first reading that jobs and admissions must not be based on race, which is the other way to reinforce the age-old superstructure of race.

AND

How do we cope with inequities that will never end? The most depressing is that religious fundamentalists have already thrown me into hell, even before I die!

Dr. Oohay

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Apr 28, 2023, 6:31:53 PM4/28/23
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DEI(A): a field day for Identitarians!
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