White Education Blogger ..... Fired for Calling Black Studies ‘Left-Wing Victimization Claptrap'

[SoCalDem]

White Education Blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley Fired for Calling Black Studies ‘Left-Wing Victimization Claptrap’
May 9, 2012 By Janet Shan 1 Comment


White Education Blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley Fired for Calling Black Studies Left Wing Victimization Claptrap


Naomi Schaefer Riley was fired after characterizing black studies as “left-wing victimization claptrap” from her blogging job at The Chronicle for Higher Education. Riley’s essay entitled ‘The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations’ prompted a petition signed by 6,500 people calling for her dismissal from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The racially charged post was published on April 30, in response to an earlier article which listed the dissertation topics of five PhD students, which ranged from the history of black midwifery and housing policy.

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.

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?

snip

We should note that Naomi Schaefer Riley is married to Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, who has also insulted the black community in an article critical of historically black colleges and universities. I guess birds of a feather flock together.

Here’s the Twitter stream on Naomi Schaefer Riley’s column:

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[RZM]

1. FWIW, Jason Riley is himself black n/t

[zbdent]

6. Too bad for her she isn't in the "good old days" then ...

where she would never be allowed back into the "white community" for having dated, let alone ***GASP*** MARRIED a black man ...

[HiPointDem]

8. Of the right-wing variety. works for murdoch. and so did she. now she's with a

conservative think-tank.

she admittedly didn't read the dissertations she presumes to trash. Her only qualification to write about education is a BA & a career made on trashing it from the right, funded by folks like Murdoch.

[Ian David]

2. I bet I know which one of them gets tied to the bed. n/t

[exboyfil]

3. Aren't columnists supposed to be provocative?

Whether you agree or disagree with the opinion is firing her the correct response? You have created a martyr. It would make far better sense to engage her in the marketplace of ideas. For example one of the dissertation students could write a response that could run in the column as well. That is academic debate. Let her bring her intellectual guns to that response, and we will know her capability from the response. This is like the first salvo in a discussion - perhaps a meaningful discussion about the merits of these programs. Any academic program should be held up to scrutiny.

[EFerrari]

5. No, this is not an academic debate.

Academic debates usually aren't premised on insults. On the other hand, useless arguments with racist rightwing ignoramuses often are.

[exboyfil]

9. Then you flush her out by having one of the three dissertation

students she insulted right a reasoned response more in character of The Chronicle. Give her a chance to respond.

Firing her is the wrong response. If she fails to engage in a meaningful debate then sack her. You have created a martyr that will ride her martyrdom for all it is worth.

[EFerrari]

10. Her employer decided she was a liability

which they had a right to do. If I had a rightwing racist speaking for my venue, I'd can their ass, too.

She can attempt to "ride" this as much as she wants only now she has to do it with this dismissal on her record.

[HiPointDem]

11. She's written her response. She admits she didn't even read the dissertations. She's a winger

bomb-thrower. People like that (not conservatives, but bomb-throwers that don't even do the research and can't write in an academic tone) have no business writing for Education Week.

She is an affiliate “scholar” at the Institute for American Values, a conservative think tank that is run by David Blankenhorn, who most recently became famous for his embarrassingly fact-free testimony at the Prop 8 trial....

Oh, and in college, Riley was the editor the Harvard Salient, the campus conservative rag. I was searching for some of her writing from back then, but the Salient doesn’t have back issues available online. I did, however, find a reference to her work there. While in college, she wrote an article attacking National Coming Out Day, telling gay students to stay in the closet because no one cared about their homosexuality...

http://ted.gideonse.com/?p=4968

He quotes her "response":

"Finally, since this is a blog about academia and not journalism, I’ll forgive the commenters for not understanding that it is not my job to read entire dissertations before I write a 500-word piece about them...there are not enough hours in the day or money in the world to get me to read a dissertation on historical black midwifery."

[EFerrari]

12. Very nice catch. Thanks.

[HiPointDem]

4. That woman is a fool and a liar.

"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."

The thesis wasn't about the "government promoting single-family homes in black neighborhoods." It was about racialized policy in housing. Which can still be seen today in the disproportionate fraction of black sub-prime mortgages and foreclosures.

http://socialistworker.org/2010/03/15/dreams-shattered

I don't necessarily think the woman should be fired, but I'm wondering how such a snarky & historically ignorant column got published in Ed Week in the first place. The tone is more akin to that of the Rush Limbaugh show or some internet chat room argument.

[HiPointDem]

7. Worse than a fool, it seems. Provocateur.

Bad Faith: Naomi Schaefer Riley and the War on Public Education

http://anfortaswound.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/bad-faith-naomi-schaefer-riley-and-the-war-on-public-education/

[HiPointDem]

13. Part of the attack on public education:

The first thing I want to suggest is that Naomi Schaefer Riley was never really working for the Chronicle....Riley is more accountable to the Castle Rock Foundation and the Scaife Foundation and the Bradley Foundation than to the Chronicle... She may have been writing for the Chronicle, but she is more or less a paid political operative for Big Conservatism.

And what has Big Conservatism been up to lately? As Sara Robinson notes in this piece, a subset of conservative talking points are starting to cluster around public higher education. Robinson focuses on Rick Santorum’s laughable assertion that the UC system no longer teaches American history–an assertion that, at the time, we all laughed at on Facebook and then gleefully refuted with almost no effort. But Robinson was not amused:

I’m a native-born speaker of right-wing code. And what I heard in Santorum’s ramble was, frankly, hair-raising. To my ears, it was a very loud and clear tip-off that conservatives are gearing up an all-out frontal assault on funding for America’s public universities.

Robinson’s point is that Santorum’s statement wasn’t an isolated gaffe, but rather a sign of the beginning of “the War on Public Universities.” As she makes clear, conservatives are organized. When they start talking about something, it’s not by accident...

http://anfortaswound.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/bad-faith-naomi-schaefer-riley-and-the-war-on-public-education/