On Race and Academia
In this piece, FAIR Advisor John McWhorter assesses the impact of affirmative action from firsthand experience. “As an academic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account.”
He talks not of the early years, but of being a grad student in the job market for a tenure-track position. “Deep down, to me, it felt I was on my way to being tokenized, which I was, especially given that my academic chops at the time did not justify my being hired for a top job at all… It became increasingly clear to me that my skin color was not just one more thing taken into account but the main reason for my hire.”
What he realizes along the way is that “There is a widespread cultural assumption in academia that Black people are valuable as much, if not more, for our sheer presence as for the rigor of what we actually do.”
McWhorter writes of the “Sisyphean task” he then had to undertake in the years after his hire…”a self-rescue operation, an effort to turn myself into a good hire after the fact. That backfilling of needed skills is a lot to ask of someone who also needs to do the forward-looking research necessary to get tenure.”
In recounting his journey, he goes back and forth, noting, “Perhaps all of this can be seen as collateral damage in view of a larger goal of Black people being included, acknowledged, given a chance — in academia and elsewhere…” yet, “an unintended byproduct of what we could call academia’s racial preference culture: that it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others.”
McWhorter cannot accept this exchange, seeing it as “never truly proper in terms of justice, stability or general social acceptance.”
Assuming that other efforts are made “to assist the truly disadvantaged,” such as taking into account socioeconomics (which “would accomplish more good while requiring less straightforward unfairness”), McWhorter believes the SCOTUS decision was correct.
