S ometimes societies just go batshit crazy. For ten years, 1966 to 1976,
China slid into the chaotic maw of Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution.” A
youth army called the Red Guard was given license to terrorize authorities
all over the nation — teachers, scientists, government officials, really just
about anyone in charge of anything. They destroyed lives and families and
killed quite a few of their victims. They paralyzed the country with their
persecutions against “bourgeois elements” and “capitalist roaders,” reaching
as deep into the top leadership as Deng Xiaoping, who was paraded in public
wearing a dunce-cap, but eventually was able to put an end to all the
insanity after Mao’s death.
America’s own cultural revolution has worked differently. It was mostly
limited to the hermetically-sealed hot-house world of the universities, where
new species of hierophants and mystagogues were busy constructing a
crypto-political dogma aimed at redefining status arrangements among the
various diverse ethnic and sexual “multi-cultures” of the land.
There is no American Mao, but there are millions of good little Maoists
all over America bent on persecuting anyone who departs from a party line
that now dominates the bubble of campus life. It’s a weird home-grown mixture
of Puritan witch-hunting, racial paranoia, and sexual hysteria, and it comes
loaded with a lexicon of jargon — “micro-aggression,” “trigger warnings,”
“speech codes,” etc — designed to enforce uniformity in thinking, and to
punish departures from it.
At a moment in history when the US is beset by epochal problems of
economy, energy, ecology, and foreign relations, campus life is preoccupied
with handwringing over the hurt feelings of every imaginable ethnic and
sexual group and just as earnestly with the suppression of ideological
trespassers who don’t go along with the program of exorcisms. A comprehensive
history of this unfortunate campaign has yet to be written, but by the time
it is, higher education may lie in ruins. It is already burdened and beset by
the unintended consequences of the financial racketeering so pervasive across
American life these days. But in promoting the official suppression of ideas,
it is really committing intellectual suicide, disgracing its mission to
civilized life.
I had my own brush with this evil empire last week when I gave a talk at
Boston College, a general briefing on the progress of long emergency. The
audience was sparse. It was pouring rain. The World Series was on TV. People
are not so interested in these issues since the Federal Reserve saved the
world with free money, and what I had to say did not include anything on
race, gender, and white privilege.
However, after the talk, I went out for dinner with four faculty members
and one friend-of-faculty. Three of them were English profs. One was an urban
planner and one was an ecology prof. All of the English profs were
specialists in race, gender, and privilege. Imagine that. You’d think that
the college was a little overloaded there, but it speaks for the current
academic obsessive-compulsive neurosis with these matters. Anyway, on the way
to restaurant I was chatting in the car with one of the English profs about a
particular angle on race, since this was his focus and he tended to view
things through that lens. The discussion continued at the dinner table and
this is what ensued on the Internet (an email to me the next morning):
On Oct 29, 2015, at 4:37 PM, Rhonda Frederick
<rhonda.frederick@bc.edu> wrote:
This is what I posted on my social medias, am sharing with you and your
agent.
Yesterday, novelist/journalist James Howard Kunstler was invited to give a
talk at BC (see his bio at http://www.bc.edu/offices/lowellhs/calendar.html#1028).
At the post-talk dinner, he said “the great problem facing African
Americans is that they aren’t taught proper English, and that … academics are
too preoccupied with privilege and political correctness to admit this
obvious fact.” No black people (I presume he used “African American” when he
meant “black”) were present at the dinner. I was not at the dinner, but two
of my friends/colleagues were; I trust their recollections implicitly.
Whether Kunstler was using stereotypes about black people to be provocative,
or whether he believed the ignorance he spouted, my response is the same: I
cannot allow this kind of ignorance into my space and I am not the one to cast
what he said as a “teachable moment.” I do think there should be a BC
response to this, as the university paid his honorarium and for his meal.
Here’s some contact information for anyone interested in sharing your
thoughts on how BC should spend its money:
Lowell Humanities Series at Boston College
(http://www.bc.edu/offices/lowellhs/about.html)
+++++++++++++++++
Rhonda—
That is not quite what I said.
I said that teaching black Americans how to speak English correctly ought
to be the most important mission of primary and secondary education for
blacks in order for them to function successfully in our economy. Moreover, I
said that anyone mounting an argument against this was hurting the very
people they pretend to help.
I stand by those statements.
Your attempt at Stalinist thought policing is emblematic of something
terribly wrong in higher education, especially since you were not present.
Jim
James Howard Kunstler
“It’s All Good”
So I was subjected to attempted character assassination via social media by
this Rhonda Frederick person — faculty or student, she did not say — who
admits to not having been present at the incident in question. This
is the new fashion in academia: slander by Twitter and Facebook. It
is fully supported by the faculty and administration. While they have been
super-busy constructing speech codes and sex protocols, it seems they haven’t
had any time for establishing ethical norms in the use of the Internet. As it
happened, I offered to come back and publically debate my statements about
the benefits of teaching spoken English to black primary and secondary
students — they’d have to pay me, of course — but received no reply on that
from Rhonda Frederick. I also received no reply from James Smith (smithbt@bc.edu), director of the Lowell
Lecture Series, when I emailed my objection to being vilified on the Web by
his colleague.
Now, as to the substance of what I said to this table of college
professors. I’ve written before in books and blogs about the issue of spoken
English and the black underclass, but for the record I will try to summarize
some of my thoughts about it (trigger warning).
True, there are various dialects of English among us, but it must be
obvious that they have different merits and disadvantages. There is such a
thing as standard grammatical English. It evolves over generations, for sure,
but it shows a certain conservative stability, like the rule of law. It tends
to be spoken by educated people and by people in authority. This implies
people in power, of course, people who run things, but also people at large
in the professions (medicine, engineering, etc.) and the arenas of business
and government. Standard grammatical English tends to be higher status
because competence in it tends to confer the benefits of higher living
standards.
It also must be self-evident that there is such a thing as a black English
dialect in America. With perhaps a few lingering regional differences, it is
remarkably uniform from Miami, Florida, to Rochester, New York, to Fresno,
California. It prevails among the so-called black underclass, the cohort that
continues to struggle economically. Despite its verve and inventiveness, this
black dialect tends to confer low status and lower standards of living on those
who speak it. In popular mythology and culture, it is associated with violent
criminality and other anti-social behaviors. If you don’t believe this, turn
on HBO sometime.
I argue that black people who seek to succeed socially and economically
would benefit from learning to speak standard grammatical English, not solely
because it is associated with higher status and living standards, but because
proficiency with grammar, tenses, and a rich vocabulary help people think
better. After all, if you employ only the present tense in all your doings
and dealings, how would you truly understand the difference between now,
tomorrow, and yesterday? I submit that it becomes problematical. You may not
be able to show up on time, among other things.
Some of my auditors have argued that “code switching” allows black
Americans to easily turn back and forth for convenience between two modes of
speech, black and “white” (i.e standard grammatical English). I’d argue that
this is not as common as it is made out to be. Not everybody has the skill of
entertainer Dave Chapelle, a master amateur linguist (whose parents were both
college professors).
It’s my opinion that American primary and secondary education does not put
enough emphasis on teaching standard spoken English to those deficient in it.
The pedagogues have been hectored and browbeaten by the hierophants in higher
ed not to press the matter. It is not regarded as important (probably because
the task seems too painful and embarrassing and may hurt some feelings). The
results are plain to see: academic failure among black Americans. (Not total
but broad.) Instead, we concoct endless excuses to explain this failure and
the related economic failures, the favorite by far being “structural racism”
(despite having elected a black president who speaks standard grammatical
English).
Now to the touchier question as to why this is. After all, other ethnic
groups in America are eager to fully participate in the national life. For
example, I gave a talk to a large honors freshman class at Rutgers University
a year ago. Due to the current demographics of New Jersey, the class was
overwhelming composed of Indian (Asian, that is) youngsters, many of them as
dark-skinned as Americans of African ancestry. They had uniformly opted to
speak standard grammatical English. They were all succeeding academically (it
was an honors class, after all). They were on a trajectory to succeed in
adult life. What does this suggest? To me it says that maybe some behavioral
choices are better than others and the color of your skin is not the primary
determinant in the matter.
Here’s what I think has happened to get us where we are today (second
trigger warning). I think the civil rights victories of the mid 1960s
generated enormous anxiety among black Americans, who were thereby invited to
participate more fully in the national life after many generations of
hardship and abuse. (If you argue that this was not the sum, substance, and
intention of the Voting Rights Act and Public Accommodations Act of 1964-65, then
you are being disingenuous.) However, they were not comfortable with the
prospect of assimilating into the mainstream culture of the day. They either
didn’t believe in it, or feared it, or despised it, or worried about being
able to perform in it.
Many would attribute this anxiety to the legacy of slavery. Can a people
get over a particular historical injury? American blacks are not the only
group traumatized by circumstance. When do you decide to move forward? Or do
you nurse a grievance forever? Anyway, it was not a coincidence that in the
mid 1960s a new wave of black separatist avatars arose around the time of the
civil rights legislative victories. Malcolm X, Stokely Charmichael, the Black
Panthers, to name a few. That was the moment when much of the black
population slid into what has become essentially an oppositional culture,
determined to remain separate. Language is part of that picture.
The diversity cult of the day is a smokescreen to disguise this
fundamental fact of American life: much of black America has simply opted
out. They don’t want to assimilate into a common culture — so common culture
has been deemed dispensable by the confounded keepers of the common culture’s
flame, the university faculty. Much of black America doesn’t want to play
along with the speech, manners, rules, or laws of whatever remains of that
common culture after its systematic disassembly by the professors, the deans,
and their handmaidens in progressive politics — heedless of the damage to the
basic social contract. We remain very much a house divided, as Lincoln put
it, and he could see clearly what the consequences would be.
Is it racist to try to air these abiding quandaries in the public arena?
Apparently so. And why is that? Because of the awful embarrassment of
political progressives over the disappointing outcome of the civil rights
project. Black news pundits such as Curtis Blow of The New York Times
constantly call for “an honest conversation about race,” but they don’t mean
it. Any public intellectual who ventures to start that conversation is
automatically branded a racist. Hey, I couldn’t even have a conversation at a
private dinner on the merits of speaking standard English with three college
professors whose life-work centers on race. They had a melt-down and used a
proxy (who wasn’t even there) to slander me on the Internet.
They are cowards and I am their enemy.
The third World Made By Hand novel
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(The Fourth and final is finished and on the way — June 2016)
“Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice,
bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly
provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet
devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” —
Booklist
My local indie booksellers… Battenkill Books (Autographed by the Author) … or Northshire
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