Er, I'm back. A marathon of grading, then packing, then moving, then unpacking, then other kinds of my-two-cents distractions (
Facebook,
Twitter), etc., etc. Long story. Anyway...
One of the more common--and more despicable--assumptions on the Right concerning persons of color in high places is that any achievement or station in life is the result, not of merit, but of misplaced liberal guilt. One could cite as a recent example
Fred Barnes' on-air musings about the legitimacy of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's
summa cum laude honors at Princeton; or one could simply read
this wretched commentary by
City Journal's Harry Stein on
l'Affaire Gates. 'We're ... learning that race hustlers come in all kinds of packages', he fumes, and while his basic claim is that 'the racial-grievance industry won't learn anything' from the whole dust-up, his main ambition seems to be to drag Gates, a Cambridge-educated Harvard don, through the mud of calumny and innuendo. 'As a scholar in the trendy[!] field of black studies [
sic]', Stein declares (without supporting evidence of any kind), 'Gates has built a career on being deferred to by cowed liberal colleagues, and he's obviously unaccustomed to anyone's calling him out on anything'. (Actually,
according to one former colleague, he's quite accustomed to being called out all the time, simply on account of the color of his skin.) Stein then cites an instance where Gates apparently misattributed a line by the poet Robbie Burns to William Shakespeare, and approvingly quotes an anonymous online commenter in explaining the failure of the press to highlight this error: 'Why shouldn't Gates expect preferential treatment? He's been getting it his whole life'.
It's an interesting 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' moment when great achievement is taken as proof of a lack of merit: Stein might have looked to Gates' scholarship, or his command of the language, or his intelligence, for such proof. But these seem to me to be, even given my limited familiarity with his work, fairly unimpeachable, pace what seems to have been a rather egregious slip in erudition. No matter: Gates has been handsomely rewarded, he is black; ergo we have some quota to thank. '"Teachable moments" never teach these people anything', Stein concludes. Indeed.
