Testimonies and Distortions to Serve the Cause

I stand with them and against segregation at Pitzer College

Testimonies, a journal dedicated to exploring race and policy, came out with its inaugural issue this past week. They've wasted no time coming after me. Two of their writers suggests that I am "White supremacist male patriarch," "simplistic," and "puerile" for arguing respectively that a proposed Pitzer College space only for black students and a text-neutral song isn't racist merely because it was once sung at a racist event. (I will be addressing the article, entitled "'Black' Space, My Space," in this post and the other, "Hail, White Privilege, Hail" in the next post.)

I congratulate the staff and editors of Testimonies on their first issue and hope to see many more, if only for the reason that I enjoy probing and refuting the more fallacious arguments they make.

My use of the word "fallacious," is, of course, deliberate. A fallacy is an often plausible argument that uses false or invalid evidence to make its conclusion. As Thomas Sowell puts it in his latest book, Economic Facts and Fallacies, the very notion of "race" itself may be fallacious given the rates of intermarriage between different groups. For what is race but a category of mankind that shares physical traits and how much bearing can those traits have when they have been mixed and matched by intermarriage?

As you all know well, I subscribe to the camp that believes race is but a construct and that efforts to create authentically racialized experiences are more often that not exclusive and discriminatory. The real manner in which we ought to treat people is on the basis of their individual talents and character.

When we do that, we find that the issue of racial separation largely takes care of itself. For instance, the love of my life is Vietnamese and several of my best friends are Indian, Chinese, Jewish, Korean, Filipino, and Mexican and my favorite author is black.

To further this end of a more meritocratic world, I must advocate certain positions, less I be inconsistent. These include:

• Coming out against scholarships like J.A.M.A., which give $5000 to a minority student simply for being born a minority.
• Criticizing Pomona College for giving tuition breaks to illegal immigrants, but not to legal immigrants.
  
• Fighting to keep Pomona's alma mater because its text is not inherently offensive
  
• Opposing racial retreats during Freshman Orientation.
• Arguing against a blacks only space in Pitzer College.
  

It is that last advocacy for which Courtney Moffett-Bateau believes that I have transgressed.
In an article titled "'Black' Space, My Space," she advocates for the creation of a space in which black students might feel comfortable and says that it isn't segregation at all.

Of course Moffett-Bateau has ignored what Ms. Janet Alexander of The Claremont Independent has already unearthed.

Alexander writes,

Student Body President and Student Senate Chairperson, Ben Kramer, who is Caucasian, perhaps confirmed a sneaking suspicion of many Senate members at one point when he asked, "If a meeting was called to take place in the Agnes Jackson room would you turn me away?"

[BSU President] Daniels replied, "To be honest with you, you wouldn't be turned away, but I personally wouldn't want you there."

How inviting of BSU and the creators of a "black space!" Given that all of our tuition dollars almost always end up going to these racially segregated groups, I see these efforts to create a black space as little more than a politically correct effort toward segregation with our money.

Ms. Moffett-Bateau chooses to ignore that segregation aspect of her proposal and goes after me personally.

Charles Johnson's assertion that with the creation of a Black space within a White landscape epitomizes the argument of this article: the students, faculty, administration, and institutions of the Claremont Colleges do not find worth in Black space... Why is it that with the creation of a Black Space or non-White space (within a White landscape), must it be perceived as segregation?

Because that is really the intent underlying the creation of a "black space."

I reject the idea of there even being "white landscapes" because I see no evidence for their existence on this campus and because even if I were to see such "white landscape," than the proper response is eliminating that "white landscape" instead of creating a black landscape that becomes little more than a ghetto.

I wonder what would those who died desegregating this country's lunch counters think of those trying to impose it at our nation's best colleges.