Question: What needs to change in academia?
Harris-Lacewell: The academy has changed, especially if you sort of think about the elite academy, but in a way that I’m not sure is great. So maybe it’s important, but really imperfect in some important ways. So I would say the biggest change in our discussion of race is that we talk about race as a social construction. We keep pointing out that race is not a biological reality. And except for Skip Gates at Harvard who is taking everybody’s blood sample and determining our DNA relationships around race, and thereby reasserting this kind of “blood is race”, everybody else has moved on past DNA, and past blood, and is thinking much more carefully about how race gets constructed through our laws, cultural practices, common self-understandings, those kinds of things. And that’s really important, except that it’s not how most people actually experience their lives. So I’m empiricist, right? I’m a political scientist who’s out there in the world empirically trying to grasp how people are experiencing their own lives. And I guess I’d have to say race feels really real on a day-to-day basis even if it’s a socially constructed identity. When you have to get your hair done and you need a Black barbershop, that feels real, not socially constructed, right? When you’re pulled over by the police and you’re nervous because he’s a White guy and you’re Black, that feels real. When Don Imus calls you a nappy-headed ho, that feels real. That doesn’t feel like, oh, this is just a part of this kind of, you know, fluid notions of human identity that emerge across . . . Maybe, but I am concerned that part of what happens when the academy shoots off that way is that it fails to be able to talk about people’s life experiences; the kind of humanity with which we understand our race and experience our racialized cells. That your Black body moving around in New York; your Black body on the train in Mississippi; your Black body sitting on the Beach in California evokes different behaviors, attitudes, opinions than the White body does. And that, I think, we lose when we focus exclusively on the socio-historical constructions of race.
Discuss
Steven White on February 21, 2008, 12:55 PM
I think she is right in general—historians and sociologists do tend to study race in detail in a highly theoretical way, but race does in some small ways influence our lives.
I'm disturbed though by the fact that every example was negative and about black people. That needs to change in academia too—when a black cop pulls over a white person its a different relationship too.
Another point that needs to be made is that I don't think academia is really the place for people who are interested in these practical moral issues. If it were I think they would wield there massive influence and be up in arms over the expierience of those "black bodies" deteriorating from malnutrition in Africa more than the black body on the train in Mississippi. But it seems mostly just Jeff Sachs and Paul Farmer who are doing that in the "elite" academy.
Steven White on February 21, 2008, 5:55 PM
I think she is right in general—historians and sociologists do tend to study race in detail in a highly theoretical way, but race does in some small ways influence our lives.
I’m disturbed though by the fact that every example was negative and about black people. That needs to change in academia too—when a black cop pulls over a white person its a different relationship too.
Another point that needs to be made is that I don’t think academia is really the place for people who are interested in these practical moral issues. If it were I think they would wield there massive influence and be up in arms over the expierience of those “black bodies” deteriorating from malnutrition in Africa more than the black body on the train in Mississippi. But it seems mostly just Jeff Sachs and Paul Farmer who are doing that in the “elite” academy.
Robert Graham on March 3, 2008, 8:37 AM
Sadly, I think what needs to change in academia is illustrated in Dr. Lacewell's comments. She mentioned another professor who is working on DNA and then she implied that this professor is the last to work on such a meaningless project. She said that everyone else has moved on. She did not explain what this other professor was working on but rather took a cheap shot in an attemtpt to elevate herself. It is difficult to know exactly what she means by her assertion that everyone else has moved beyond DNA but one might assume that she is minimizing the biological basis of behavior. If she is doing that, then she needs more biological training. Her assertion that going to a black barbershop is a real experience that impacts the way people see themselves is, of course, true. But the same can be said for all our experiences. We make choices based on who we are. What needs to change in academia is that we need professors who are more intelligent, be they black or white.
Robert Graham on March 3, 2008, 1:37 PM
Sadly, I think what needs to change in academia is illustrated in Dr. Lacewell’s comments. She mentioned another professor who is working on DNA and then she implied that this professor is the last to work on such a meaningless project. She said that everyone else has moved on. She did not explain what this other professor was working on but rather took a cheap shot in an attemtpt to elevate herself. It is difficult to know exactly what she means by her assertion that everyone else has moved beyond DNA but one might assume that she is minimizing the biological basis of behavior. If she is doing that, then she needs more biological training. Her assertion that going to a black barbershop is a real experience that impacts the way people see themselves is, of course, true. But the same can be said for all our experiences. We make choices based on who we are. What needs to change in academia is that we need professors who are more intelligent, be they black or white.
Simon-Pierre Lauzon on March 18, 2008, 4:01 PM
Yes, but who could draw conclusions about the real impact of race on your living in society when society is so different from place to place. No concept could encapsulate how a black man can be treated a certain way in new york and a different one in california, all at the same time.
Plus she needs to get out of the USA, her concepts of how "real" races feel are totally subjective to her socio-cultural environment.
Simon-Pierre Lauzon on March 18, 2008, 8:01 PM
Yes, but who could draw conclusions about the real impact of race on your living in society when society is so different from place to place. No concept could encapsulate how a black man can be treated a certain way in new york and a different one in california, all at the same time.
Plus she needs to get out of the USA, her concepts of how “real” races feel are totally subjective to her socio-cultural environment.
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