Reply to College professor -“I am a white person who has incorrectly identified as Native my whole life.”

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "College professor -“I am a white person who has incorrectly identified as Native my whole life.”"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Every time I see something like this I am mostly surprised that no one takes issue with the fact that being a heavily "performative" member of some minority is necessary to succeed in academia.  At this point, it is almost rare to see a plain old white person with a tenure track job in Humanities.  It's not about affirmative action, but about the necessity of someone working in a field to have some kind of life narrative to go along with their career and legitimize their interest in the subject and their standing in the community. It should make people wonder how good today's scholarship can be when one has to wear big earrings and long straight hair in order to have one's research on industrial pollution taken seriously.  
[/quote]

It's not rare at all. Have you been to Brown or seen any of the humanities department faculty web pages? There are very very VERY few Native scholars in academia. It's still extremely white dominated. Give me a break.

-white lady with a humanities PhD[/quote]

You have completely missed the point.  There may be very few Native scholars overall, but what about scholars that have made their careers by studying and publishing on Native issues?  How many of them are white and have no family connection or some sort of life history connection to Native populations?  Not a whole lot, certainly not the younger ones.  And if you look at the tenure track scholars - the generation coming up - you will see that nearly all those successfully working in an area connected to a particular group of people also have some kind of connection to that people.  It's become necessary to have that kind of street credit to have one's research taken seriously, even when it doesn't in fact have any relevance on the actual published work.  And if the area being studied involves a minority population, then activism is practically considered professional development.  This is NOT about minority representation in academia - it is about a shift toward only members of a group being able to study issues related to that group.  You will find the same shift in French departments, Russian departments, and everything else.  And no is questioning whether or not a person must be a member of a group in order to study a group, or whether that is even advisable.[/quote]
It depends on the area of research and the conclusions being drawn, but I think it’s legitimate to think a woman is going to be in a better position to write about women’s issues, extrapolate from that as you will.[/quote]

It's academia, not personal essay writing.  Publications are based on research, facts, logical arguments, statistics, math, etc.  A woman might know more about what being a woman feels like, but is she really  more of an authority on the effects of toxic waste on fertility, or mental health outcomes for female prisoners with postpartum depression?  My point is that good scholarship stands independently, and the types of subject areas that are currently trending toward only recognizing scholarship by members of a particular group, are dealing with matters that are not in fact relevant to one's DNA, but to one's research skills.  Perhaps you don't understand how scholarship works - it's supposed to be unbiased.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics