Harris-Perry, Race, & the Group's Legacy

In one respect, the lacrosse case was extraordinarily unusual: actions of campus extremists don’t often get much attention outside of campus walls. The national media doesn’t cover higher-ed ideological or pedagogical issues all that much; and when it does (as in the recent controversy over Title IX and sexual assault policies), it often covers the issue poorly. The behavior of the Duke faculty in the lacrosse case attracted so much attention largely for accidental reasons: the case itself was a media firestorm, and then the Group of 88’s inability or unwillingness to apologize for what they did seemed unjust.

Yet on the rare occasions when the world of higher-ed ideas does seep into the public consciousness, the result is an almost stupefied horror. The best recent example (about which I’ve written over at Minding theCampus) came when the American Studies Association formally endorsed a boycott of Israeli institutions of higher education—a flagrant violation of academic freedom that the ASA justified, in Orwellian language, as the protection of academic freedom. (The other rationale: according to the ASA president, describing the organization’s penchant for boycotts that allegedly promote human rights, “one has to start somewhere.”) 

The ASA move earned widespread rebuke from editorial boards, politicians, and more than 100 college presidents—the people at universities whose jobs depend on dealing with the public, and therefore are particularly sensitive about their schools looking like hotbeds of out-of-touch extremism.

The Group of 88 statement, and the ASA anti-Israel resolution, exemplify the pernicious effects of groupthink—the phenomenon best described by Mark Bauerlein in which the position regarding commonly-held beliefs shifts toward the most extreme perspective, because of a lack of dissenting viewpoints on campus.

Since academics of the anti-Israel or race/class/gender types have little influence outside campus (they have, of course, enormous influence on campus), their actions get noticed only by their colleagues or their school’s administrators. And since tenured and tenure-track jobs are so precious in today’s academy, very few groupthink-type academics leave the academy to take non-academic positions. Their ideas, it seems, are hermetically sealed on campus.

One of the very few exceptions to this pattern, however, is Melissa Harris-Perry, the MSNBC host who has been much in the news lately. Harris-Perry holds a Ph.D., from Duke, where she studied under William Chafe and Wahneema Lubiano, and is listed as a full-time faculty member in Tulane’s Political Science Department. As I’ve noted previously, Harris-Perry has a very close relationship with several members of the Group of 88 (Karla Holloway actually appeared on her MSNBC broadcast), and offered a full-throated (and almost comically misleading) defense of the Group of 88 in a 2011 book. The book, indeed, faithfully reflects the extreme views on issues of race, class, and gender prevalent on campus but largely absent anyplace else.

But not on Harris-Perry’s TV program. The host recently did a segment on the Romneys, in which she, and two guests, mocked a Romney family photo that contained the entire Romney family, including a child of color adopted by one of the Romney sons and his wife.

It’s possible to imagine a segment on Romney and family values that would comport to the public policy focus that ostensibly characterizes Harris-Perry’s program. (For instance: Romney values the importance of marriage and family personally, but campaigned on a platform to annul, via constitutional amendment, around 100,000 marriages nationally, and leave kids in those families without married parents.) But Harris-Perry wasn’t interested in content.

The segment triggered widespread condemnation—as much for its sneering tone as for its content. (National Review claimed, in a report denied by MSNBC, that the network had instituted new editorial checks on Harris-Perry’s scripts.) Harris-Perry subsequently apologized via twitter, accompanied oddly by a hashtag, followed by a tearful apology on her program. But she demonstrated no problem at all with the content during the broadcast itself. The apology, therefore, seemed more than a little forced.

The backlash against the Harris-Perry segment reflects the media’s (and the public’s) predictable horror at getting a first-hand taste how issues of race are too often viewed behind campus walls.

As for one of Harris-Perry’s mentors on the issue of race in America? Here’s Wahneema Lubiano, offering her insights while speaking a few months back at Duke's "National Dialogue on Race Day":

If you can work your way through the jargon, the basic Lubiano argument is that racism is inherent in the capitalist system, and that referencing black-on-black crime is racist.

While Harris-Perry remains a moderate by comparison, the Harris-Perry/Romney vignette, like the far more substantial Group of 88 statement and ASA resolution, should provide a tip-off to journalists that they might want to pay a little more attention to just how extreme campus discourse in some quarters has become.