Tag: race

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The Martial Races

In an interview this morning, the president said deportation might be the appropriate punishment for football players who kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality and the extent to which the American promise reflected in the lyrics to the song does not extend to African-American people. That’s not a good thing for the president of the United States to be saying.

On the one hand, he’s a madman and he doesn’t think before he speaks. But on the other hand? Well, on the other hand it reminds me of one year in grad school when the prospective students were visiting:

The players are J, a prospective student, and H, a current student two years behind me, a friend, and a guy who had immigrated to the US from an Asian country as a teenager. Also me and A, both white, American-born grad students.

During one of the meet-and-greets with the current students, the four of us were standing around talking and J asked H where he was from. H named the Asian country where he had grown up. “Ah,” said J, “I could tell that you belonged to one of the martial races.” We were all a little dumbfounded and I don’t remember how we changed the subject or recalibrated the conversation.

A and I had some words with J later. To everyone’s relief, he ended up enrolling in a different graduate program, one that, as it has emerged in the last few years, rather tolerates racialized comments towards Asian and Asian-American people.

When I talked with H about the whole incident later, he was inclined to give J the benefit of the doubt, suggesting that perhaps he had just been nervous and blurted out something really stupid because of that. And I remember saying to H that maybe that was the case, but that for J to have blurted out a comment out of a 19th-century ethnography textbook, it would have to have been not only in his brain but pretty close to the tip of his tongue to be the thing that he blurted out when he was at a loss for words due to a moment of pressure or social anxiety.

And here we are. Every rational fiber of my body and brain is trying to tell me not to worry that the president of the United States just admitted that he is considering deporting people who protest police brutality: it’s impractical (what country would agree to take political deportees from the US?); the institutions of our country are still, I hope, too strong for that to happen; and (again, I can only hope) citizens would flood the streets and prevent it from happening. But all the same — and I do not resort to Holocaust analogies lightly — nobody in Germany really thought that its own citizens would get deported, even as this kind of rhetoric surged on the political stage.

Maybe his off-handed comment about deporting football players who protest police brutality was just that, a stupid, off-hand comment; but it reflects something in his brain and on the tip of his tongue. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, the president has shown us all along who he is and he continues to show us; we need to believe him and we need to be prepared for what may c0me next.

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Race and Titles at Yale

This morning the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article on the simmering-to-a-boil race situation at Yale. It focuses partly on two administrators who have been the focus of much student ire, Nicholas Christakis, the Silliman master whose wife sent a mass email to students defending the wearing of offensive Halloween costumes; and Jonathan Holloway, the dean of Yale College and the first African-American person to hold that position. Students are angry at both of the Christakises over the email, and at Holloway for not doing enough generally to address a fraught racial climate in the college.

The article refers to Christakis as “Dr.” and to Holloway as “Mr.”

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The CHE’s policy on courtesy titles appears to be one out of the 1950s: It refers to medical doctors, but not to doctors of philosophy, by the title they earned. At Yale at mid-century, it was, indeed customary to do the same. The operating assumption was that anyone teaching had a PhD and anyone learning did not, and so everyone could be called Mr. just the same while everyone would still know his place in the pecking order.

It’s not like that at Yale anymore, nor should it be in the Chronicle. Faculty members at Yale and other universities are now customarily called “Prof.” or “Dr.” There is much more diversity of training and education and many more PhDs in non-professorial positions within the university (contingent faculty, student life, support services, and various other offices) who deserve the same respect as the faculty. People who have earned the title should be able to use it, especially in an academic universe in which not everyone with a PhD gets a professorial position anymore.

And, crucially, in an article on race it creates a terrible contrast to refer to a white administrator as “Dr.” and a black one as “Mr.” This isn’t an article that in any way has to do with Christakis as a physician or Holloway as a historian. In this context they both function as college administrators and so they should be treated equally when it comes to referring to them by title. If it were an article about Christakis saving Holloway’s life after he had been struck by a falling gargoyle on campus then it might be appropriate to refer to the two men as the CHE did here; I would still find the policy of MD = Dr., PhD = Mr. to be a silly one, but that would a matter on which people of good faith could disagree. In this case, in an article about race and how black people are treated and perceived in the academy, it creates an insidious optic. And the optic matters.

Yes, it is a slight in every sense of the word: An insult and a very small thing. However, in the current climate, the small things really do matter and not only because they are small-scale reflections of attitudes held on the grand scale. If all the participants in these conversations were to treat each other equally with the same common courtesies that would go a long way to at least creating a climate in which the bigger issues could begin to be addressed.