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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.
He helpfully provided an example of how things are supposed to work:
Now was that a discussion, or was it badgering ? He didn‘t seem to be fond of the ‚both sides‘ method then.
He‘s an abused spouse by the end. There‘s that language of harm that seemingly came out of nowhere from the mouths of his students. Poor guy doesn‘t have the tools to explain what happened to him, let alone articulate why his students might be wrong. He seems pretty light skinned, and he‘s not even a woman or queer. He clearly was less on the side of blacks than Keisha was. Ergo, he is the oppressor in that relationship, and that's all she wrote.
He's a damn coward. He spouts all the nice line about what the seminar is supposed to achieve and how the students are supposed to use their talents and experience and be guided (not led or taught, mind you) to the proper conclusions.
And then the new generation of grifter starts holding his feet to the fire, and he abandons the kids (they're 17 is all) to the thought police while he goes home to cry about how he's the victim here. If he had any spine, he would have fought for them. No, when it looked like his cosy sinecure of being a Telluride lecturer would actually require him to do something, he folded as Keisha wanted.
I'm even beginning to doubt his story; I find myself suspecting that he was quite happy to let Keisha do all the heavy lifting in organising the course while he joked around with the kids, told them stories, and did the Wise Elder bit. Just this time it turned out that this Keisha had an agenda of her own, not the plan he wanted her to follow.
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