Read this fascinating article in InsideHigherEd by Oso Raro, a professor of “cultural studies, literature, and film” somewhere in North America. (“Oso Raro,” you will have guessed, is a pseudonym.) (HatTip to Linda Seebach)
It’s a remarkable piece in many ways, complaining as it does about the predictable consequences of race-based hiring (“when, if ever, will faculty of color be real intellectual members of the community, and not just tokens of diversity and tolerance?”) while calling for more of it.
You may want to re-read this post (I’m assuming you’ve all read it), since Ms. Raro discusses the same controversy I discussed there.
Oso Raro asks:
“When can we stop the fiction of pretending just because student X is “brown” and I’m “brown,” we automatically understand each other, like dolphins? When, in other words, will our years and years of labor be appreciated for what it is, hard and good and honorable work? When, in other words, shall we breathe the fresh, clean air of individualism, which includes the noble as well as banal?”
I’ve run these questions through my mind over and over, and there’s only one possible answer: when individualism , once and for all, takes the place of “race” in guiding the way we think about people.