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Notes -
A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell
Very interesting longform article about how a professor had a summer seminar for high school students taken over by his radical TA, in a course focusing primarily on anti-blackness - this despite Dr. Vincent Lloyd's confused self description:
What's striking about this is how miserable it seems to have made everyone involved:
hilariously, two of the asian students ended up being 'expelled' from the program, for reasons that were not shared with the professor.
Finally, about halfway through the seminar, the TA led a struggle session where all the students accused the professor of doing a lot of anti black harm to them, and then they all did their own thing without his involvement.
His entire career, indeed his entire life is built around the anti-racist grift. I cannot even articulate how little sympathy I have for it finally inconveniencing him. If you push for your struggle sessions, everyone should dearly hope that you are one day forced to stand as the enemy. In my preferred world, his ridiculous jobs wouldn't exist at all, but I'll settle for the grievance-based institutions he's helped build turning against him.
I think this is a bit extreme of a reaction. Yes, he certainly would fall within the academic left, but reading this, it seems like he definitely cared about the traditional pursuit of academic understanding and dialectic:
But then, perhaps there is something unspoken, unrealized here; that the "slow food" of academic discourse will inevitably be pushed aside for the "junk food" of dogma, some how, some way. Maybe if Lloyd had shut down those who were attempting to shut down others, maybe if he'd put his foot down more, then just maybe he could have salvaged his own course from epistemic closure.
So perhaps the ideas he followed would inevitably lead him to this, because there aren't enough principles to restrain them from the logical conclusion, but it does at least seem like things could have been better.
It's exactly what he should have done, and he didn't. Keisha was only supposed to be a teaching assistant. He sat back and let her dictate more and more of what would be covered, what could be covered, and if the students would even listen to him, without attempting to take back control or get the administration to rein her in. He let her bully and intimidate and silence students, and kick two students out. And then she led the mob that came for him, and he was shocked, shocked!
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