Earlier this year, I wrote a column in response to demands for Asian-American studies (The Dartmouth, Jan. 31, "Thoughts on Ethnic Studies"). In it, I noted with concern the vulnerability of such programs to political ideologies and raised doubts over their intellectual merit. As the debate died down at the end of Spring term, people reassured me that ethnic studies meant simply the study of ethnicity. Others scoffed at me for believing that disinterested knowledge was either possible or desirable. So I decided to do some further investigation. The recently concluded "Race Matters" conference allowed me to hear about ethnic studies from its most prominent professors. What the likes of Evelyn Hu-DeHart and Carol Boyce Davies said leaves me with little doubt over the nature of their discipline. My initial remarks were perhaps too kind.
The fundamental agenda of ethnic studies, said Paul Lauter, a professor of literature at Trinity College in Connecticut, was the "transformation of the whole." Whatever "transformation of the whole" means, it seems to have very little to do with knowledge, learning or critical thinking. Lauter's remarks were hardly out of the ordinary that afternoon. Scott Jacobs '99, the first speaker in that panel on "How Race Matters Enter the Curriculum," used the clumsy term "proactive change agents." Hu-DeHart spoke of diversity as a political project whose goal was to expose the structures of power and white privilege in contemporary society. The problem with the university, according to her, is that all disciplines -- even chemistry and economics -- construct negative images of minorities. Davies concluded that panel with a speech on the urgency of "decolonizing the academy" and the need to extirpate "systemic racism."
The classroom is not the place for such thinking. Students are here to get a liberal education. Liberal, as I have pointed out in the past, has nothing to do with the Democratic or Green Parties and a lot to do with freeing the mind from the political and ideological biases that saturate the world. The ability to think disinterestedly is supposed to give one an advantage in life. Even budding social activists need to have a clear picture of the world they seek to reform.
Professors Lauter, Hu-DeHart and Davies, by their own admission, do not seek to teach disinterested thinking. They are by no means a minority. Like two Dartmouth professors with whom I spoke in the summer, they seek to make students hypersensitive to matters of race. If their goal is to eliminate racism, then this attitude of fostering race-consciousness is untenable. Students who are indoctrinated into viewing the world exclusively in terms of race will see racism everywhere. Progress in race relations is impossible if the world is viewed in terms of a vaguely-defined but nonetheless ubiquitous "white supremacist social structure. " This last catchphrase, which Hu-DeHart has perfected, is particularly egregious, for two reasons. If this "hegemonic paradigm" is "backed up by a complicit state apparatus" (these quotations are taken from her last visit here in February) and unconsciously supported by white people everywhere, then what hope does diversity have at all? No real evidence suggests that such neo-Marxist, Foucauldian bugbears exist. The clearest reason seems to be that some people, in their positions of power in academia, make them exist through a combination of rhetoric, politicized thinking and sloppy writing.
Hu-DeHart's second offense is even larger. This is the view, shared by so many other participants at the conference, that whiteness and white privilege are particularly wretched things scarcely distinguishable from racism. But what exactly is a "white" person? As I said in an earlier article (The Dartmouth, May 14, "Stereotyped Affinity Housing"), whiteness is not a homogeneous concept. Within the category of whiteness, you have Irish, French, English, German, Italian, Russian, et al., not to mention people of mixed cultural descent. "White" people have been fighting each other for far too long to have formed some grand conspiracy against minorities. There happen to be plenty of poor white people around who do not enjoy privilege and socio-economic distinction. And if a white person's "privilege" has been earned through self-improvement and honest labor, is it ethical to make him feel guilty about it?
My criticism of ethnic studies is not absolute: there are classes in ethnic studies out there that do in fact constitute a rigorous, disinterested study of ethnicity. But they are few and far between, as a careful study of course syllabi suggests. The problem facing the academy today is not white privilege or racism; it is race itself. Until ethnic studies mitigates (not eliminates) its obsession with race, turns away from politicization and revolutionary chance and focuses instead on reason and objectivity, I will remain an unbeliever.
