The Group of 88 Convenes a Conference

[Update, Tuesday 3.08pm: In an extraordinary decision for what's billed as a high-profile academic conference, organizers are prohibiting all taping of the event. I wonder how Bill Plante would respond to this?]

In most professions, credibility matters. Imagine how seriously people would take a seminar on best principles of corporate governance conducted by John Thain (or Bob Steel, for that matter). Or a speech from Bill Clinton on the importance of personal morality for elected leaders. Or an interview from Alberto Gonzales on how to prevent political factors from influencing Justice Department hiring decisions. Or a discussion on media ethics hosted by Jayson Blair and Judy Miller.

Any of the events above, of course, would be greeted with widespread derision, on the grounds that the past actions of these figures robbed them of any credibility to speak on the topics mentioned.

But the academy, as the Duke case revealed, operates under different rules. The race/class/gender majority that dominates most humanities and some social sciences departments is accountable to no one. Administrators either fear (Brodhead) or sympathize with (Christ, Mason) them; “diversity” officers provide them with built-in bureaucratic support. Most alumni and donors have little idea how they operate in the classroom or what kind of scholarship they produce. And their control of departmental personnel processes ensures that they can keep out anyone who challenges their preconceptions and bring in new hires who will reinforce their dominance.

These conditions help explain an event at Duke this coming weekend that in most other circumstances would be dismissed as comical. Several leading members of the Group of 88—the very same people who got things spectacularly, and publicly, wrong in a high-profile case in their own backyard dealing with issues of race and politics—are hosting an academic conference on . . . race in contemporary America, and specifically “how modern racial prejudice shapes policy.”

Of course.

The schedule of the conference reveals seven panels, only one of which isn’t transparently one-sided. That panel, coincidentally, is the only one not moderated by either a member of the Group of 88 or a signatory of the “clarifying” statement. George McLendon moderates “The Press, Politics, and Policymaking in the Obama Era,” which has as its featured member CBS’ Bill Plante. (The panel also, oddly, includes a member of the North Carolina State House of Representatives, who would seem to have little insight into national media matters—but who does supply the apparently needed “diversity” for the session.)

The other sessions could be subtitled, “The World According to the Group of 88.” Wahneema Lubiano will take time out from work on her perpetually forthcoming manuscripts to moderate a session with the typically impenetrable title of “Race, Gender and Sexuality: Intersections on Multiple Dimensions.”

Perhaps fellow Group member Sally Deutsch, who joins Lubiano on the panel, can use the conference to expand on her late March 2006 in-class discussion, in a class filled with lacrosse players, about the danger posed by white “alpha males” to black women. The other panelists are Purdue’s Niambi Carter, whose “current work looks at how sex (work) is related to the development and performance of race,” and Bonnie Thornton Dill, head of the University of Maryland’s Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity, whose “research focuses on the intersections of race, class, and gender with an emphasis on African American women and families.” As could be expected from a Lubiano-led panel, no evidence of diverse viewpoints exists.

Indeed, among the conference panelists as a whole (outside of Plante), organizers provided no pretense of inviting people whose perspectives that might challenge the Group of 88 perspective. Political science professor Kerry Haynie—last heard from explaining why he signed the “clarifying” statement with the intellectually nuanced response, “Get a freaking life! Quote me!”—heads a panel entitled, “A New Race Politics?” (The desired answer, of course, is no: the triumph of Barack Obama provides a serious problem for the Group’s victim-based perspectives.) Group of 88’er Paula McClain moderates a panel entitled, “Race in Comparative Perspective: Race, Racism and the World.” “The Color Lines and Health” is chaired by yet another 88’er, Sherman James. And James’ Group of 88 colleague, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, moderates a panel on “Racial Prejudice in the Modern World.”

The conference closes with a panel entitled, “Overcoming Racism? Debate On Policy Options.” Bonilla-Silva returns for a second round as a panel moderator, while the chosen panelists give a sense of what passes for “debate” about race-related public policy issues on campuses today.

• Sandy Darity’s “research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity.” His most recent article, published in Social Science Quarterly, championed the fringe position of reparations for African-Americans. To Darity, “the serious and hard task is one of persuading the U.S. public of the validity of reparations for African Americans”—so the public will force Congress(!) to adopt a bill for reparations of as much as $6 trillion, or around twice the amount of the FY 2008 federal budget.

• Lani Guinier has a name familiar to anyone who follows politics: the woman once considered by liberals such as Ted Kennedy and Carol Moseley-Braun as too extreme on race for a position in Bill Clinton’s Justice Department is now a tenured professor at Harvard Law. In recent years, Guinier has devoted herself to an assault on the principle of merit in education, recently remarking that “we need to redefine merit. Within each ethnic group talent is equally distributed among all people. All people have merit,” and, in any case, “diversity in problem solving groups trumps individual ability.”

• Melissa Nobles teaches at MIT, where her “teaching and research interests are in the comparative study of racial and ethnic politics, and issues of retrospective justice.” She is especially focused on instances when governments issue official apologies to minority groups—but, she has contended, apologies alone are never enough. “Action need not be synonymous with reparations as such, but it needs to be something more than a mere utterance, which, once said, dies.” Nobles is also a bit suspicious of democratic government, since “democracy is the rule of the majority and there are inherent disadvantages for minority groups within democracies.”

And so, in The World According to the Group of 88, the “debate on policy options” about race—in a country, again, that elected a black man President in 2008—focuses on whether African-Americans deserve (1) reparations, (2) “redefining” merit in such a way to grant minorities preferential admissions to higher education and job opportunities, or (3) an official governmental apology, followed by other governmental action. Here’s a prediction: for those in attendance at the panel, this “debate” will end with a preferred outcome of “all of the above.”

There remains, however, one item worthy of “debate” from this Duke event: which of his previous labels for the United States will moderator Bonilla-Silva use—“gringoland,” “the United States of Amerikkka,” or “Amerika”? For a $10 fee to cover the privilege of attending the session, Durham-area readers can find out.