The Ignorance of White Privilege

How many of you have ever heard of Naomi Schafer Riley? I doubt many of you have, however, she is a Harvard alum (magna cum laude) who once was a blogger for The Chronicle of Higher Education, at least until she was fired last month for the following posting. It’s funny how this posting was just brought to my attention today as I was just having a discussion on twitter about why I don’t like Duke Basketball. While my reasoning behind not liking Duke’s program (limited amount of black players, the majority of them being of the same mold i.e. light-skinned and clean cut) maybe slightly racist, I give people the ability of being racists at times and in arenas that afford them such a luxury, but one would never guess that a writer, although the whole nature of a blog is self-opinion, would openly adopt such a stance. So I did some research on Riley. From reading a few of her earlier postings I’ve discovered that Riley, like most of us, is upset with the rising costs of higher education and the inability of colleges and universities to justify these increases when students are leaving college with extraordinary amounts of debt and not the careers to pay off these debts in a way that the lenders deem fit. (Which reminds me, DEATH TO SALLIE MAE!!!!)

Looking at that posting with that in mind, I would be inclined to agree with Riley in SOME respects. I have long been of the opinion of wondering what those with degrees in Black/African American studies would do as a career. I really can’t think of much outside of teaching, writing, community activism, and or news correspondents, but that again that may be my own ignorance talking. But after the struggle that we as a people have gone through I would never say that Black Studies should be eliminated because if you look at it just from the establishment of this country whites had a 200 year head start on us as far as development and as the old folks say; “if you don’t know your history, then you are doomed to repeat it.” But what I find funny is that while Riley has the audacity to cite her 15 years as a journalist in academia as her expertise when her BACHELOR’S DEGREES are in ENGLISH and GOVERNMENT. This seems to me as though she is entirely self-taught when it comes down to the subject of academia, or doing like the general American, reading the thoughts of others and then formulating a general opinion. While Riley has the right to do that, just like she has the right to place her opinions in her journalism and not do the research to back up the subject of a thesis/dissertation like the graduate students whose studies that she has criticized and cited as irrelevant, but the problem that I have with her posting is that a white woman (although married to a black man) has no idea what it is like to be Black in America.

Before I get into an opinionated rant about Riley, I’ll go ahead and give my $19.11 on the article for those of you who haven’t read it. Riley goes so far as to label Black Studies as “a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap,” citing that the topics of dissertations within the field are “so irrelevant that no one will ever look at them.” The sloppiness and lack of professionalism in a journalistic piece is appalling. I wouldn’t be alone in thinking that no one outside of the physics community would read dissertations in that field, but I wouldn’t ever be so bold to call them irrelevant. Remember, at one point in time people who studied physics, astrology, and other advanced sciences were once thought of as “irrelevant.” But in her posting, Riley goes on to look at three dissertations (not in-depth I might add) and implores that the money by the Federal Government to fund studies such as these are a waste and would be better spent serving other areas of academia. By no means do I think that an entire area of study should be taken under a microscope based upon 3 (*Lil Wayne voice* count em up, one, two, three) instances, and I would think that such a respected journalist would do more research before taking such a hard-up approach to a topic she knows nothing about, but I guess my opinion is just as irrelevant to her. In addition, her 500 word posting goes further in-depth to suggest that Barack Obama’s presidency proves that racism no longer exists in America and the first step to eliminating the problems that Black America faces in their ordinary lives should not be “blaming the white man.”

“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.” 

What’s worse than the audacity of a white woman to make such a posting, is the fact that after faced with an abundance of commentary about the piece both positive and negative, is the fact that when she wrote a rebuttal on the post, she retracted nothing and stood firm in her opinion. Many have even come to her defense in stating that she has a black husband which is furthermore proof that she can’t be a racist (haven’t I said before that comments such as these are the number one indication of racism i.e. “I can’t be racist, I have black friends”). Now I’m not calling her a racist, maybe a few of her ideas are, but I won’t go that far because I don’t know the woman outside of reading her pieces. However as a Harvard educated woman, I seriously doubt that her husband is not on a similar educational level as that of her own and in that same breath think that she would learn a lot by reading the highly scrutinized thesis by Michelle Obama from Princeton in which she detailed how disconnected Black Ivy League students feel from both the Black community as a whole and that of their own institution’s community, before looking at her own husband’s experiences. In fact, I would like to know his opinion on her postings.

The fact of the matter is simply this, when it comes down to the comforts of everyday living, all men are not created equal. Blacks do not have the same opportunities as whites and are not free from the same stereotypes and prejudices. History has turned a blind-eye to this on MANY occasions, and now that we have expanded to having doctoral programs in which this has been studied and looked at in-depth it’s a waste of time? This does not mean that some of the problems of Black America are not completely and totally OUR FAULT, but that Black studies are indeed necessary to keep things from repeating themselves. In fact, for every dissertation that she found that furthers her point, I’ll be willing to bet that there are AT LEAST three that chronicles the more important problems of the Black community, as described by Riley. For the record, I do think that the chronicles of black midwives should be detailed in literature about child birth and its history, I do think that the housing crisis and its subsequent bail out did disproportionately affect blacks (in addition to Americans as a whole), and I do believe that African Americans such as Clarence Thomas who speak down on Affirmative Action destroy the whole Civil Rights struggle with their own ignorance, but I assume that Riley would also consider my thoughts as irrelevant.