I've had my share of professors who wasted time. My time! These mainly white men received a steady income. Many becoming tenured. And what follows if not investments in a primary home and maybe a summer home, two cars, soccer and piano practice for the children, and nannies and maids. All part of the American Dream! Moving up and out from the usual riffraff!
I remember one professor, a specialist in at least the white theorists (to read bell hooks, West, Baldwin, Cesaire, I had to sit with an African professor in philosopher), who talked about "deconstructive readings" and diffe'rance (Derrida). Another discussed Foucault's "docile bodies". We are all in a sort of "prison", made to accept our condition as normal. Given that idea, who would then consider the prison industrial complex as a place to rehabilitate the incarcerated!
Yet, neither white man in these graduate classes in which I was often the only black ever mentioned black people, indigenous people, Latino/a people. People of color! Instead, we read Spencer's The Fairy Queen, in one class, and, in the other, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.
I remember raising my hand and stating that I didn't see myself or my mother or my grandmother or my aunts in this book by the intellectual, de Beauvoir. Did de Beauvoir see me? In her day, would see have had lunch with my grandmother? Did she see that the majority of women on this planet weren't living the European Dream or the American Dream but where suffering the impact of colonialism and imperialism?
I've often thought about those days, working on my doctorate, and thinking how texts like the The Fairy Queen and The Second Sex freed those white men from facing the violence of racism and fascism, white supremacy. And it, turn, it was meant to clone others to avoid confronting that Western past too.
I couldn't help but think of the conquered and enslaved in this country , and how these are the kinds of professors authoritarians seek to flood high education classrooms today. Someone like J.D. Vance would have had these professors and would, too, have seen someone like me standing in the front of the classrooms he passed by. He would have thought of us as invaders. And if he had known I was a childless cat lady too... Vance, a Yale graduate, envisions the banning of 1619 Project from being taught anywhere. But Project 2025 is the future!
The intellectual white men I encountered decades ago wouldn't have dared to have students, predominantly white students, understand diffe'rance in Toni Morrison's Beloved. I can't imagine these guys having us read Foucault's Discipline and Punish with The Prison Writings by Leonard Peltier.
I think most of these professors believed they were doing something worthwhile. Nonetheless, how sad to have spent 30 or 40 years teaching students not to thinking. Not to challenge the status quo. Not to confront the reality of white supremacy, patriarchy, fascism, exceptionalism. But did these intellectuals really believe that an omission of truth, of that painful history, would remain at bay-- and maybe disappear? Did they really believe they could end "critical" thinking by teaching students to fear it!
How is this way of being in the dark considered being a critically thinking intellectual?
America produces gatekeepers! "Intellectuals" producing "intellectual" gatekeepers! It's a capitalist machine that grinds out docile bodies.
Authoritarians value this way of being intellectual.
There's something to be said about what James Baldwin called "real intellectual effort". If it is real, it aims to destroy "that myth of America to which we cling so desperately". It is the kind of intellectual effort that is fear, particularly in the US. The number one issue facing this nation is its desperate clinging to the notion of white supremacy.
The Other is an old term. Out of fashion now in discourse on racism or imperialism. But I think of the term as best describing how certain people are Othered. Think of J.D. Vance's "childless cat ladies". It's no less destructive than Hitler's references to the Jews as devils. Expect violence to follow. And why not? That's the pattern. That's the reason to even conjure the image of "childless cat ladies". An abomination, aren't they? Women not bearing children! How evil!
The rhetoric appeals to a certain portion of the population, particularly the Evangelical Christian white nationalists. Fifteen percent of the world's population still believes in its superiority over the majority. White skin is "God's skin". Others are susceptible to being exterminated and along those lines, Anglo-Saxon Protestants are the self-chosen. Well, "God" chosen.
Don't fret about the logic of it all!
In an essay, Morrison explains the way the Irish or Italians, fresh from Europe, shifted from being among the Other to becoming white. White Americans! Blacks and Latino/as, no! These groups of people became white, Morrison, states, when they pronounced the word, "n----r", thus distinguishing themselves from enslaved blacks and then "second-class" blacks during Jim Crow. In other words, as long as immigrants from white European nations traveled to the US, they could and would expect full citizenship into the white and thus free population. The logic of this theory would have the newly white citizens dismiss concerns of not being an Anglo-Saxon Protestant-- as long, of course, they shared in the myth of American innocence. Crusade for the American Dream. Approve of legal segregation, gentrification, the denouncement of Affirmative Action as well as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Broken treaties and the slaughter of millions of indigenous people is what had to be done. Attend Powwows for atonement, if you should begin to feel anything but proud to be an American.
Besides, kidnapping and enslaving Africans was granted by pope! The Roman Catholic Church! The philosopher Hegal reiterated that the Africans had no history. And he was, as we know, a great intellectual! Slavery was big business, and it did wonders for the betterment of white Europeans and Western civilization.
And what of American imperialism? The Manifest Destiny doctrine in which a nation full of its innocence grants itself the right to take land (before Nazi Germany and modern-day Israel) and resources from the Other, undeserving of land and resources and the wealth that made millionaires of Robber Barons and Fred Trump. Millions upon millions of black and indigenous and Latino/a lives were sacrificed and the resulting wealth and benefits were attribute to a divine entity.
And still today, it shouldn't be a tossup between the 186,000 dead Palestinians (the 2024 The Lancet report) is suggesting is the actual number of deaths versus the Israeli government's insistence on its right to defend itself. According to Advocates Aurora Research Institute in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, "applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza". For we are talking about a huge number of dead in the rubble. We are talking about people who survived the US-made booms but who are dying from communicable and non-communicable diseases. There are dead fetuses and newborns because of the malnutrition of the mother or the death of the mother. lost during and after childbirth. The extensive lack of health care in Gaza, the shortest of food and water, is inhumane.
But somehow, Israel and the US think this is an intellectual effort, this killing and maiming of innocent people!
Real intellectual effort should be on the side of those who resist tyranny.
There is a continuum from supremacist nationalism to fascism, writes Jason Stanley. Fascism is the archenemy of intellectual effort. That Haitians, the first black nation to take back its freedom from European enslavers and thieves of their resources-- these Haitians now eat the cats and dogs of neighbors in Springfield, Ohio, isn't to be questioned as something straight out of the racist discourse that makes up the narrative of white supremacy. White Americans are in danger and should be fearful of these violent Haitians, running amok, killing cats and dogs. Next, will it be human beings? White human beings?
Consuming innocence! That's what these Haitian "immigrants" are all about. Even if they are workers and citizens of the town. They will be forever the "immigrants," "from s---hole countries," come to the US to do harm to out "way of life." They are here in the US to destroy our innocence!
In the 21st century, ignorance of the Other, particularly of black immigrants, continues to narrative the story of American Exceptionalism versus them. Them Others!
What's changed? The Manifest destiny doctrine presented the "idea that it was the destiny of the United States to control and dominate North America." It wasn't a new idea, writes Robert J. Miller, since the doctrine "grew naturally out of the principles and legal elements of the Doctrine of Discovery". Take whatever you want! Kill at will whoever needs killing. Have the journalists and later the historians justify it as the right to American freedom. Democracy for no one, except white male Americans, which means, no democracy in effect.
Fascism is sticky. It clings. Americans don't want an intellectual discussion surrounding the foundation of racism, sexism, classism. Juggle distractions, one after another. Childless cat ladies. Cat- -and-dog-eating Haitians.
Then, as now, it's all about diffe'rance. Difference. Othering. Preserving American innocence. Ignorance.
