Professor Meets World: Saida Grundy and her comments about white college men

[1StrongBlackMan]

97. Wow ...

Read the comments after the article. It's DU re-visited!

Why is it assumed that when a white person disagrees with the potus that they must be a racist?

Why is it when non-whites dress in 'white-face' it is considered freedom of expression, but when whites dress in 'black-face' they are considered a racist?

Why were the young men at OU called racists for singing a song when black leaders call whites 'honky', 'hymie', etc. are heralded for their courage?

It is assumed she is a racist based on her statements. If we cannot define her as a racist based on her statements why are white people consistently called racists for making similar statements?

You don't get to have it both ways .... either she made racist statements which makes her a racist or her thoughts/statements cannot be used to define her as a racist .... but that means EVERY individual must be provided the same.


willrich354 > Joseph Colorado • 5 days ago

Racism= Power + Prejudice. This is exactly the problem the article and commentators are highlighting: that often the precise language or jargon in academia doesn't translate perfectly to non-academic audiences. Non-whites don't have the same social, political, or economic power writ-large to impose any negative views of whites on society. On the other hand white people have 500+ year old social, political, and economic systems that allow their prejudices to be carried out.

We can call her comments prejudice perhaps, but they don't have the same social power that a white male's voice may have if he said the inverse of her statement. Her tone or statement may be wrong but it is qualitatively different than the OU men you mentioned.


AngusMcP > willrich354 • 5 days ago

I disagree. While racism can be structural, it can also be individual. And certainly as a tenure-track professor, Grundy has a lot more power than some random undergraduates at a midwestern cow college.


willrich354 > AngusMcP • 4 days ago

Your disagreement doesn't make it less true. Individual action only matters within the social/structural context that it happens in. There is copious amounts of research that details the acute lack of power that scholars of color, especially black women/queer folk, have in the academy in relation to their "random undergrads" because academic institutions tend to uphold these students' views when conflict arises (ooo see, there's power again).


AssociateProfessor > willrich354 • 5 days ago

Again with the spurious definition of "racism". I reject the definition of racism as prejudice only with power. That definition is created whole-cloth to clothe the racist speech of certain groups with a robe of respectability, and is itself a racist double standard.


willrich354 > AssociateProfessor • 4 days ago

Spurious? As I stated to the person above, your rejection doesn't make the definition of the concept any less true. The white (also themselves racist) sociologists/anthropologists who coined the term in the early 20th century explicitly created it to describe the systematic(!), wide-reaching(!) abuse of Jewish people in Europe and America. The -ism at the end of the world implies that it is an system or state of being similar to capitalism, sexism, fascism. Fascism didn't work both ways, neither does sexism, they primarily benefited one class of people. So sorry It's not black people's/ black academics' fault that you haven't read about the history of the term to know what it means. Now go tell a physicists that you reject their definition of an electron or gravity.

Sounds really familiar!