Inside Higher Ed reports today that a gathering of “scholars and activists” who met yesterday at the Howard University Law School sang the praises of Google’s ambitions book digitization project.
Here at the historically black university, panel members applauded Google’s plan to scan and index 10 million books for the Web. Among those who will benefit are African Americans and Latinos who attend inner-city schools and lack a quality education, said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
“This project is so incredible because it helps level the playing field at the fundamental intersections of rights, knowledge and advocacy,” he said.
Mr. Henderson’s enthusiastic support of Google’s new “Equal Opportunity Library” is interesting in part because he and the member organizations of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights usually regard colorblind access to anything, access that treats all comers without regard to race or ethnicity, as discriminatory thumb-on-the scale maintenance of the “structural inequality” that continues to blight American life. To take just one example, they malign state initiatives designed to prohibit states and their agencies from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to individuals based on their race or ethnicity as efforts whose intent and effect is “to eliminate equal opportunity initiatives in higher education, employment, and contracting.”
Someone apparently forgot to remind Mr. Henderson at Howard that what he and his mean by “equal opportunity” is preferential treatment of (some) minorities.
They must tilt the playing field, you see, to make it level.
This will include textbooks deemed mandatory, written by Tenure candidates, and well ensconced “academics”, right?
I can’t wait to see the CVs of who’s going to be authoring the hard science/humanities “trade” books when royalty potential is slashed.