All Articles Tagged "african american academics"
Cornel West Controversy Not Dying Down
(The Root) — It’s official. Dr. Cornel West has “stepped in it” with his controversial comments about President Barack Obama. West’s ”petty” lambasting of the president over his alleged racial allegiances and confirmed racial composition have resulted in a Twitter war among scholars, a viral video that literally went to every corner of the blogosphere and the complete demolition of West’s character in op-eds around the country. Google News is listing more than 100 stories about the controversy, meaning that instead of dying down, interest in the story is actually amping up. With West in one corner and Obama in the other, new and traditional media are lapping up the conflict between two of America’s icons — both loved and loathed by a wide variety of people for pretty much the same reason. The simultaneous embrace and rejection of blacks with intellectual and cultural capital, which challenges and confirms America’s complex history with African-American intellectuals, is playing out for the whole wide world.
Boycotting Jim Crow: The Original Anti-Segregation Movement
(Political Affairs) — PA: What inspired you to write Right to Ride?
BLAIR KELLEY: It was really sort of a dual idea that drew me to the work. First, when I was an undergrad and working on my senior thesis, I was trying to do a project on Lani Guinier, who had just been a big part of the news during the Clinton Administration who withdrew her nomination to be Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. I wanted to add an historical level to the project, which was my thesis in the Department of African American studies. I wanted to look back at voting rights and Black dissent more widely, back maybe to Reconstruction.
Questions of Racial Discrimination on Tenure Unsettle DePaul
(New York Times) — As DePaul University seeks to improve its academic standing and raise $250 million for capital projects and scholarships, public accusations of bias and discrimination in the tenure process continue to mount. On Dec. 7, professors and students protested this year’s denial of tenure to two minorities, Quinetta Shelby, a black professor of chemistry, and Namita Goswami, an Indian professor of philosophy. Of more than 40 professors who applied for tenure this year, 6 were denied, all of them minorities. Last year, the five professors denied tenure were four women and one minority man.
Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White
(New York Times) — Renown came to Jean Toomer with his 1923 book “Cane,” which mingled fiction, drama and poetry in a formally audacious effort to portray the complexity of black lives. But the racially mixed Toomer’s confounding efforts to defy being stuck in conventional racial categories and his disaffiliation with black culture made him perhaps the most enigmatic writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Now Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar, and Rudolph P. Byrd, a professor at Emory University, say their research for a new edition of “Cane” documents that Toomer was “a Negro who decided to pass for white.”
Scholars Reach into Pasts to Help Young Black Men
(Chicago Tribune) — When Waldo E. Johnson Jr., a University of Chicago social scientist, decided to put together a book on what’s hurting and helping young black men, he decided to collect the thoughts of several black scholars, many relatively young and with experiences not too far removed from their counterparts who are in peril. ”When I started the project about five years ago, (many of the contributors) were post-doctoral candidates or just starting their academic careers,” said Johnson, an associate professor at the university’s School of Social Service Administration. “They were largely unknown but offering some really amazing empirical scholarship on interesting issues.”
