Naomi Schaefer Riley has been bumped from the Chronicle of Higher Education ’s group blog for sharing her thoughts on black studies scholarships:
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.
That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.
The Chronicle received innumerable letters protesting the publication of her racially insensitive article. For his part, Rod Dreher can’t help wondering “how she manages to keep up her racist chops, give that she’s been married for some time to a black man.”
Read Naomi’s article here .
