George Yancy

The following counter-essay was sent to the Chronicle of Higher Education.  It did not respond.  It was also sent to the student editors of The Emory Wheel.  They did not respond.  George Yancy, however, did respond... or sort of.  The counter-essay is posted here.  After all, who else would publish it?  The Washington Post?  The Washington Examiner?  The New York Times?  No way, Jose!  

The Ugly Truth of Being a White Professor in America… Who Dares Exercise Free Speech

Well, I was going to title this essay, “A Simple Solution for Professor George Yancy:  If You Can’t Take the Heat, Get out of the Limelight,” but decided instead to paraphrase Yancy’s latest contribution to the great racial divide, “The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America,” published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.    

Because I disobeyed a direct order from my bosses at American Public University to cease responding to criticism lodged against me, I was fired, uh “separated from the university.”  That was my last job in higher education.  In fact, for openly expressing my opinions, I was essentially fired from most of my other professorial jobs, including at Elmira College, Fitchburg State University, Davenport University, Bennett College, and Grambling State University.  Document accounts regarding each of them are published on The American Dissident website.  

I am white.  I never got tenure.  Generally, I have to self-publish my essays because I place truth above pc-compliance.  Yancy is black.  He got tenure, a lucrative sinecure at Emory University.  He gets to publish his essays in the New York Times and Chronicle of Higher Education.  Editors in general do not possess a sufficient appreciation for vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy, to publish essays like mine.  Will the new Emory University student editors, Michelle Lou and Richard Chess, fall in that line?  Likely.  My experience indicates that most student editors do fall in that sad line.  But there’s always hope… or so they say.  

Professor Yancy incarnates today’s pc-culture of stereotypes and double standards, where the main issue tends to be racism, racism everywhere.  And indeed his latest essay is the same unoriginal racism, racism everywhere.  In it, he lists a litany of racist insults he received.  And, of course, I do not deny that he received them, nor do I excuse them.  After all, I am against the use of ad hominem, a puerile and intellectually-lazy substitute for reasoned counter-argumentation.   Calling whites racist is ad hominem.  

Sadly, Yancy is stuck, fully entrenched, in the past.  After all, he seems to make his living out of that entrenchment.  He writes that “Years ago, Malcolm X asked, ‘What does a white man call a black man with a Ph.D.?’ He answered: ‘A nigger with a Ph.D.’”  Racist stereotype!  Need I write that again for the ignorant with PhDs in pc-culture?  Racist stereotype!  All white men do NOT call all black men with PhDs, “niggers with PhDs.”  Yancy’s stereotyping of whites is insulting and downright racist.  And yet the editors of the Chronicle of Higher Education and New York Times are quite content to push that insulting anti-white racist narrative.  Why?  Readership?  Indoctrination?  

The litany of insults, including “dear nigger professor,” stems from Yancy’s op-eds.  But why does Yancy choose to ignore the points made by those like me, who did not employ ad hominem insults, but rather point-by-point counter-argumentation?  Why did Yancy choose not to respond to my email correspondence, satirical cartoon, and counter critiques:  “Blancophobia: A Case Study” and “The White Bad/Black Good Derangement Syndrome”?  Will he respond to this critique, which I shall also send to him and the student editors of The Emory Wheel?  Why do academics like him seem to abhor and reject vigorous debate?  Rarely do I ever receive a response from an academic whom I’ve criticized.  And I’ve criticized so many of them over the past several decades.  When I do receive a rare response, it tends to be fully aberrant in nature, completely avoiding the points I made, like the one recently received from Poet/Professor Dan Chiasson of Wellesley College and New Yorker contributor.  

In the interest of transparency I will also now forward to The Wellesley News, and to The College Police, the borderline harassing note you sent to me yesterday, and copies of the racist cartoons you attached. Please cease and desist contact with me and everyone associated with the College.

What was my crime?  Well, I’d sent Chiasson three cartoons critical of the New Yorker, as well as an essay critical of his poet colleague Frank Bidart.  In fact, not one English professor at Wellesley College deigned to respond to that essay.  My “borderline harassing note,” whatever the hell that means, can be examined on the three-cartoon link.  Well, I digress… or maybe not.  

Professor Yancy needs to open his eyes.  He writes that after the publication of his New York Times op-ed, “Dear White America,” that “I needed police presence at my invited talks at other universities. It all felt surreal—and dangerous.”  But what about white conservatives like Coulter, Yiannopoulis, Shapiro, Murray, and others who needed police presence before he needed it?  Did he give a damn about that?  Not in the least!  He notes that “Some of my students of color have asked me, ‘Why talk about race with white people when at the end of the day everything remains the same—that is, their racism continues?’”  

What the professor fails to do, however, is evoke the existence of continued and encouraged black racism against whites.  For him and likely for those pc-brainwashed black students, such a thing does not/cannot exist.  Uncomfortable facts like black on white racist crimes, black slaveholders, and black slave traders do not/cannot exist.  Educated professors ought to stick to the facts and decry stereotyping and double standards.  Instead, Yancy and far too many of them reject facts and espouse stereotyping and anything else that fits the woe-is-me black narrative.  Yancy needs to be exposed, not espoused.  

Surprisingly, the professor notes, “It is probably true that I would not have my job were it not for affirmative action.”  Sadly, he cannot really deal with the implications of that statement, instead arguing that Affirmative Action “is not anti-white, but pro-justice.”  And yet it has clearly become anti-white for whites rejected by colleges or employers because blacks have been accepted or hired, thanks to Affirmative Action.  It sadly also places a big question mark on every black person accepted or hired because of the color of his or her skin, quite anti-MLK indeed.  And it is not as simplistic as the professor imagines.  

Yancy is a racist stereotyper and needs to be outed in his privileged ranks.  Other professors need to stand up and decry his stereotyping.  Where are they?  Where are they?  Yancy states, “It is as if white people are driven by a colonial desire to possess everything. Du Bois asked, ‘But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?’ He answered, ‘Whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!’”  Well, I have no “colonial desire” whatsoever to “possess everything.”  What an absurd, if not infantile and simplistic thought!  Apparently, “whiteness,” for example, does not include the ownership of South Africa, where racist blacks are now the owners of that country and murderers of white farmers.  

Clearly, severe indoctrination is a solution to the racial divide, but is it really a solution?  White students must be indoctrinated early on in the pc-principles of privilege and colonialism.  But what about black students?  They are being indoctrinated to hate white students and to be victims.  That part of the indoctrination process will not work to solve the divide.  The other solution is currently being adopted in South Africa:  genocide and the absence of diversity (i.e., the creation of a black-only nation).   In other words, that solution is separate nations for separate races.  Again, the pc-diversity solution is really a non-solution because its result is racial division ad infinitum.  

Finally, a solution for Yancy’s feeling of being “traumatized” would be, if you can’t take the heat, get out of the limelight, and don’t keep putting yourself into it with op-eds.  Other blacks do not echo Yancy’s complaints because they have learned to build backbone and have become staunch individuals.  Yancy concludes his diatribe with the same evocation he’d made in his previous op-ed, regarding what he wished he had said to his students:  “Fuck it all! It is not worth it. White people will never value my humanity.  So, let’s end this class session on that.”  But will the black Yancys of America ever value my humanity?  Well, actually, I don’t give a damn if they will or won’t, nor do I give a damn if white professors ever will or won’t.  I give a damn about truth, freedom of speech, and vigorous debate, not pc-compliance…