It’s Okay to Call Racists Racist.

September 8, 2012 in Campus Life, Race | by | 7 comments

I’m a big fan of Jay Smooth’s take on why telling people they’re racist is often counter-productive, but there are moments when not calling people racist is indefensible.

I just got a heads-up that the student who’s trying to start a White Student Union at Towson University is planning on bringing a guy named Jared Taylor to campus next month. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Taylor:

Taylor believes that white people have their own racial interests, and that it is intellectually valid for them to protect these interests; he sees it as anomalous that whites have allowed people of other ethnicities to organize themselves politically while not doing so themselves. His journal American Renaissance was founded to provide such a voice for white interests, as well as to convince whites that this enterprise is a legitimate one. … Taylor’s views have been described as racist by some academics, political commentators, journalists, and various other organizations. Taylor himself rejects any accusation of racism; he claims that his views are reasonable and moderate, and that they were considered normal by most key figures in American history.

And for context, let’s look at something Taylor wrote a few years ago:

“Our rulers and media executives will try to turn the story of Hurricane Katrina into yet another morality tale of downtrodden blacks and heartless whites, but pandering of this kind fools fewer and fewer people. Many whites will realize — some for the first time — that we have Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses, cruelty, and anarchy that they thought could never wash up on these shores.

“To be sure, the story of Hurricane Katrina does have a moral for anyone not deliberately blind. The races are different. Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears. And in a crisis, it disappears overnight.”

To call this claim racist isn’t pejorative, or even argumentative. It’s straightforwardly descriptive. And to say that Taylor’s views “have been described as racist” instead of saying that they’re racist is silly. It’s pointless. It’s absurd. If this passage isn’t racist, if its author isn’t racist, then literally nothing and nobody is.

March 2013 update | Hi, all! I just tweeted a link to this post because Matthew Heimbach, the Towson White Student Union founder who was looking to bring Jared Taylor to campus last year, was right in the middle of today’s horrible racist brouhaha at CPAC.

Two Ways of Looking At Youth Voting in 2008.

September 7, 2012 in Politics, Youth | by | Leave a comment

“In 2008 less than half of all eligible voters between 18 and 24 voted.”

—Scarlett Johansson, last night.

“The youngest voters were the only age group to show a statistically significant increase in turnout.”

—The Census Bureau, 2009.

Pell Grant Outlays Are Down, But There’s A Silver Lining

September 7, 2012 in Access, Financial Aid, For-Profit Education, Politics, Students, The Corporate University | by | 1 comment

Pell Grant expenditures by the federal government fell by more than six percent last year, according to new figures from the federal government, despite the fact that they were expected to rise by some $4.4 billion.

The $2.2 billion (or $6.6 billion, depending on how you look at it) savings won’t be fully explained until more detailed numbers are released, but there are likely three overlapping explanations.

The first, and likely largest, factor was the government’s elimination of year-round Pell eligibility last year. Congress zapped summer Pell Grants as a cost-saving measure, and that policy change was expected to reduce outlays by some $4 billion.

Another $1.4 billion of the gap came from declining grant awards to for-profit colleges, which saw Pell enrollment fall by more than a hundred thousand students, or about five percent.

As for the rest? Experts interviewed by Inside Higher Ed suggested that it might have come from a shift from full-time to part-time enrollment, possibly spurred by higher costs of attendance.

The elimination of year-round Pell was obviously a setback for higher ed access, and if students are dropping down to part-time for financial reasons that’s troubling too. But the shrinkage of for-profit enrollment is good news for a few reasons.

For-profit colleges charge students more than publics, and they pass those costs on to the government. Because average Pell outlays to students at for-profits are higher than those to students at the public colleges they’d most likely be attending otherwise, for-profit colleges have for years consumed a disproportionate share of Pell Grant spending. A decline in for-profit colleges — which often engage in predatory enrollment tactics, deliver shoddy instruction, and dump students into loan default after graduation — is good for students, good for the economy, and good for the government’s bottom line.

Towson Student Looking to Create White Student Union

September 6, 2012 in Campus Life, Race, Student Government, Student vs. Student | by | 2 comments

After a stint heading up a group called Youth for Western Civilization, a student at Maryland’s Towson University is looking to start a White Student Union on campus.

I wrote about the White Student Union phenomenon a few years ago, saying that I’d never heard anyone make a sincere argument for the creation of such groups:

When someone asks me [why white students can’t have WSUs], my response is always pretty much the same: “Do you actually want to have a White Student Union on campus? Would you be active in a WSU there was one? Is there stuff you’d like to be doing that the absence of a WSU is keeping you from doing?”

So far, nobody has ever answered any of these questions with a yes.

The guy I’ve been talking to on Twitter says he wanted “to make a point about the wrongness of segregation, regardless of purpose.” But you don’t demonstrate that something is bad “regardless of purpose” by showing that it’s bad if it has no purpose, you demonstrate it by showing that it’s bad even if it has a great purpose.

That’s the first fundamental problem with the WSU thought experiment — it doesn’t engage with the reasons that BSUs exist.

While I stand by everything I wrote back then, this case is a little different than the ones I’d seen before.

Matthew Heimbach, the flag-bearer for Towson’s WSU, is an active neo-Confederate who attended a white supremacist conference earlier this year, and paraphrased a notorious neo-Nazi slogan in a recent letter to the Towson student newspaper. He believes that the 69% white Towson campus is “hostile toward white students,” and that white students, who “share a bond that is far deeper than skin color,” must “take a stand for our people before it is too late.”

So yeah, let me rephrase. I’ve never encountered anyone who actually wanted to have a WSU on their campus who wasn’t an aggressively paranoid racist.

A New Phase for the Quebec Student Uprising

September 6, 2012 in Access, Organizing, Politics, Student Power, The Corporate University, Tuition and Fees | by | Leave a comment

Tuesday’s provincial election was a pretty good day for the Quebec student movement.

The Parti Québécois, which had opposed the Liberal government’s tuition hikes and its anti-demonstration Loi 78, won a clear, though not overwhelming, victory at the polls. Though they fell far short of winning majority control of the provincial legislature, their party leader — in a post-election call to the head of one of Quebec’s student unions — promised to reverse the tuition increase by decree, a move that would make a legislative vote unnecessary. Action on Loi 78 is expected to follow.

PQ’s margin of victory was smaller than anticipated, with the party winning just 54 seats in the 125-seat legislature. The Liberals won 50, though their better-than-expected showing was dimmed by the defeat of party leader Jean Charest, architect of the tuition hike in his own race. In another election-night surprise, 20-year-old student activist Léo Bureau-Blouin defeated a three-term incumbent on his way to winning a PQ seat in the city of Laval. Bureau-Blouin, whose decision to run was controversial among some activists, will be the youngest ever member of Quebec’s legislature.

But while this was a big battle, the war is still ongoing. The reversal of the hike sets up a new struggle over higher education funding, and PQ has pledged to index tuition to inflation going forward. Though students at several holdout campuses where students had continued to strike returned to classes on Wednesday, neither the issues nor the tactics of the spring have evaporated. For now, Loi 78 remains on the books, and the fate of students already under investigation for violating the act remains unresolved.

And the Maple Spring was never just about short-term tuition policy or a single authoritarian law. The movement has always been bigger than that, and a (promised, approximate) return to the January 2012 status quo hardly fulfills the movement’s larger goals.

So don’t put away your red squares just yet.

 

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

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