New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones on Tuesday announced that she rejected the University of North Carolina’s offer of tenure, and has decided to join Howard University’s faculty instead.
Say it with me, now!
“GO TO HELL, CAROLINA, GO TO HELL!”
Good Move, Professor!
“The university’s leadership continues to be dishonest about what happened and patently refuses to acknowledge the truth, to offer any explanation, to own what they did and what they tried to do,” Hannah-Jones said.
So, the same thing America’s leadership has consistently done…since 1619.
I would say there’s a couple hundred years in there where they weren’t really interested in hiding anything about what they did and what they tried to do. It only went underground once a critical mass of people began to question its validity.
2020 Pulitzer Price
Now just exactly how much does a Pulitzer cost?
She is not only brilliant, but a strong and proud black woman. She will undoubtedly carry on with her work, enlightening us with her research and her dazzling intelligence.
This is a loss to UNC on a number of levels. Not just in losing a genius, but in revealing their acceptance and indulgence of monied racists. They need to take a long look inward and make some necessary changes.
They should just teach history, don’t give it a name or theory, just tell what happened warts and outrages and glories and all.
Shorter Hannah-Jones to UNC: Fuck off, you ignorant honky bastards!
Now I’ll wait for the entire RWNM to explain how the Professor’s refusal of the tenure somehow is racist.
The founding of the US didn’t start in 1619. This is just a point of view, an opinion an interesting one at that. But on its face its bullshit.
Now if you want to amplify the effect of slavery on the colonies and the significant contribution African Americans have made to this country I’m all in.
I feel some empathy for the history department, which had recommended tenure from the beginning, and the student activists that brought it up and made it an issue.
But for UNC higher management? I only have a hearty “Ha, ha, ha. Oh, and fuck you.” They got their racism pointed out for the world to see, got humiliated and had their faces rubbed in it, and in the end, even after they groveled, got nothing.
Too bad, so sad.
There, you just gave it a name.
History.
But of course, that’s an obviously ludicrous suggestion for the simple fact that if you don’t give it a name the right wing outrage media will give it another, much worse, name of their own.
Or if it isn’t the name they will make up what is being taught and misrepresent it anyways.
Because the whole point is that these are not real issues. These are made up issues. Both in the sense that they aren’t problems and in the sense that many of the things the right claims aren’t true at all.
So they will just make up what they need to make up instead.
The only time we need to be concerned is when the name is actually misleading and/or turning off people. IMO, a good example of this is defund the police, which (1) does not describe what the supporters actually want to do (they don’t want to defund the police. They only want to move resources from policing to social welfare in handling certain issues), and (2) is actively reducing the support the actual policies get because the phrase scares people who aren’t even consuming the right wing outrage machine.
The point she’s trying to make there is that we can’t start the discussion of American history at the Continental Congress and Lexington and Concord. There are a lot of people who elide over all the events prior to the Boston Tea Party which are instrumental to understanding how we got to that point.
My US history textbook in high school was trying to rectify this (somewhat ham-handedly) by including a first chapter that was about 300% longer than the rest of the chapters which quickly covered everything from the Mayflower through the French and Indian wars (can’t say that slavery was much of a focus though). Augmenting that, my teacher recounted a tense parent-teacher conference where one father came in and and demanded to know why his daughter was being taught in “US History” all these things that aren’t US history (at least he wasn’t taught them when he was in school). My teacher said that the daughter came in the next day and apologized for her father’s limited perspective (paraphrasing) and she recognized the significance of what they were learning even if her father didn’t.
Ms. Hannah-Jones has done the right thing here—and the UNC Board has egg on its collective face.
Howard University is a big winner here.
The right wing noise machine doesn’t explain things, it simplistically mislabels them and then directs its audience to reflexively hate them.
Why is nobody making the obvious connections to attacks by Republicans on teaching fundamental facts about American history, namely how racism has shaped the nation, with Republican attempts to stop people of color from voting.
That is what all this shows is Republican values. Or, as has been said many times, the overwhelming support of White Evangelicals for Donald “grab her by the …” Trump is that 'values" in front of the word voter is and has always been code for race.
So I disagree with Republicans using attempts to teach and thereby address and mitigate racism as a distraction from other issues. Rather, to the Republican base, racism or White supremacy is the issue.
Or to put still another way, Donald Trump did not create his the Republican base but rather the Republican base created Donald Trump.
OF COURSE, she did. Why on Earth should she work for a University that tried to SHAME her? To pretend the TRUTH didn’t matter and ONLY offered tenure after they were leaped on by actual academics and students? They were lying twerps pretending that they were going to EDUCATE the ‘young’ but the young were going to take their money elsewhere…maybe where they actually teach HISTORY.
Donors have far too much power. After their name is slapped on a building, all they deserve is a “thank you” from the university and a tax deduction. They should get no say over what is taught or who is hired. I think the Koch brothers tried (and were more successful) at Florida State, where they finagled a highly unqualified person into an endowed chair in the business school.
