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The Selective, Subjective Studies of a Sociology Professor

by Patrick Seaworth - Ohio State University on April 23, 2013

That you’ve never heard about how President Barack Obama represented a slumlord who evicted poor people in the dead of winter from low-income housing in Chicago during his stint as a “civil rights” lawyer in Chicago in the 1990s is understandable; that morsel from Obama’s past only surfaced in news reports last summer.

But how does that story escape the attention of a sociology professor from Northwestern University whose primary focus for a decade was the study of race, class and gentrification in America – and in particular – within the city of Chicago?

Professor Mary Pattillo’s recent hour-long presentation at Ohio State University was titled “Race, Class and Gentrification in America,” during which she talked a lot about the Chicago-based North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood, “a predominantly black area that was one of the poorest in the city in the 1980s, but now is a place with million dollar homes, a new park, and an upscale coffee shop,” the university’s website stated in advertising the guest lecture.

“Why do some neighborhoods go from being ignored and starved of resources to being ‘prime real estate’ and the targets of redevelopment,” organizers asked in touting her visit.

As Pattillo gave her speech at Ohio State’s African-American Community Extension Center, presenting her decade-long study of gentrification – the purported process of relocating poor (read minority) tenants out of low-income housing, to the benefit of (you guessed it) wealthy, white developers – she never mentioned our president’s name, that great civil rights lawyer, nor the various slumlord developers he represented as a lawyer in Chicago against the interest of these very people she claimed are being taking advantage of by wealthy whites, who by the way are also racially motivated.

Her speech was based on her 2008 book titled Black on the Block, described on Amazon as the exploration of “the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old-timers as they clash over the social implications of gentrification.”

“Along the way, Pattillo highlights the conflicted but crucial role that middle-class blacks play in transforming such districts as they negotiate between established centers of white economic and political power and the needs of their less fortunate black neighbors.”

That’s one way of looking at it. But after her lecture, Pattillo was asked point blank by The College Fix about Obama’s tenure in Chicago as a slumlord defender. Nope, sorry. She said she hadn’t heard that one.

In particular, Pattillo also said she hadn’t heard of one Chicago case, that of Bishop Arthur Brazier, a Chicago political force and preacher, a Man of God, a black man, who in the mid-1990s evicted his tenants during winter temperatures that dropped below zero, and who was defended by our President, Barack Obama.

In his 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father, Obama recalls this time a bit differently. He was a “civil rights lawyer … to lend meaning to a community suffering and (to) take part in its healing.” According to the Washington Examiner, however, most of Obama’s clients from this time “were in real estate, construction and finance.”

Which brings us back to gentrification.

In 1994, Obama chaired the defense of Bishop Brazier, described by some as a South Chicago Slumlord.

“Brazier’s… had failed for nearly a month to supply heat and running water for the complex’s 15 crumbling apartments,” reported the Washington Examiner last September. “On Jan. 18, 1994, the day the heat went off, Chicago’s official high temperature was 11 below zero, the day after it was 19 below. Even worse, the residents were then ordered to leave the WPIC complex in the winter chill without the due process they would have been afforded by an eviction procedure.”

Even Chicago’s city government was upset by this (which is saying something), explicating: “The levying of a fine is not an adequate remedy.”

But our president was so adept at his defense, that Bishop Brazier paid only a $50 fine. This property then became a profitable real estate venture for profit-driven men.

The story represents the typical horror portrait painted by individuals who claim these crimes are committed only by white men. Yet it wasn’t white people that evicted these poor families, it was a black man, defended by a black lawyer.

Now, this perception of racist gentrification is so well covered within Chicago, it even makes an appearance in the lyrics of Patrick Stump’s “This City” – a popular pop song describing the artist’s love for Chicago:

“Sorry my brother can’t let you in, ‘cause the property value might go down to a level that’s economically unacceptable, and socially taboo for us to live around you… Actually mine’s just a fair education and gentrification, despite all the above, I love my city.”

This is to say, the youth of Chicago grow up with the ingrained belief that wealthy white developers wish to move them out of low-income housing, so that whites can live there cheaply, by stealing their property, with complete disregard for individuals of different skin tones.

Yet, the very lead of this discussion within Chicago itself, a distinguished Northwestern professor – the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies – said she could not recall any of our president’s time as a lawyer representing these wealthy developers.  Nor even recall this case, although she said she does know of Bishop Brazier.

A curious condition, given this is the region in which Pattillo lectures, and has spent most of her adult life combing through decades of these horrendous acts of racially motivated victimization.

The point here being, that if one is so concerned with the belief that individuals of certain skin tones are being evicted in order to make room for wealthy individuals of a different skin tone, we, as students, can rightly demand that the speaker holds all parties accountable for these racist acts, or that she begin to view her work from a new mindset, and not the one that furthered her agenda, here at the cost of the OSU student.

Perhaps that is asking too much of the academic left, and expecting too much as to where and upon whom our tuition and fees are spent.

Fix contributor Patrick Seaworth is a student at Ohio State University.

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Northwestern Will Require All Students to Complete New Diversity Program

by Charles Rollet - Northwestern University on April 18, 2013

Northwestern University is busy implementing an ambitious program for diversity on campus. University officials have created a “Social Inequalities and Diversities” requirement, which all students will have to complete before they graduate.

The goal of the requirement is multifaceted. The draft proposal states that once completed, students will be able to “expand their ability to think critically”, “recognize their own positionality in systems of inequality,” and “engage in self-reflection on power and privilege.”

The exact details of the requirement are not finalized, but there are two main components. One will involve students taking an already-existing class, which addresses diversity and inequality in some way.

The other component of the Social Inequalities and Diversities requirement will be a “co-curricular requirement.”

According to the draft proposal, the co-curricular requirement will put students in small groups to “build relationships” and “develop strategies to improve student relations.”

But what the diversity co-curricular requirement actually is remains unclear.

In addition to the mandatory new diversity curriculum, three new full-time diversity jobs have been created at Northwestern, bringing the total number of campus diversity administrators to seven.

Together, the seven administrators will head up a new committee called the Diversity Leaders’ Group. According to an article in The Daily Northwestern, the group was formed due to a “need for collaboration” among Northwestern’s seven diversity officials.

University president Morton Schapiro announced the Diversity Leaders’ Group in an April 1 email to the Northwestern community. The group will “begin strengthening a coordinated approach” to enhance diversity on campus, Schapiro wrote.

Amid all these changes, the majority of confusion surrounding Northwestern’s new diversity program centers on the still undefined co-curricular requirement. All that is clear is that every student will be required to fulfill it—whatever it turns out to be.

In an interview with The College Fix, Director for Campus Inclusion and Community Dr. Lesley-Ann Brown said that “no decision has been made” on its exact nature yet, although the “Sustained Dialogue” program may be used.

“Sustained Dialogue” is an extracurricular program used at a number of institutions around the country. It is designed to educate students about race, gender, and class issues.

During an NU Faculty Senate meeting on April 3rd, some faculty expressed concern about how students would fulfill the co-curricular requirement.

Clarifying that the “logistics are still in the works,” Mary Patillo, a sociology professor, said that the requirement would be “a peer-facilitated activity and it will be run out of student affairs.”

“Our endorsement here would be endorsing the idea that peer-to-peer dialogue is as important as the kind of pedagogical substantive critical thinking [in the curricular requirement],” she said.

Fix contributor Charles Rollet is a junior at Northwestern University.

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(Image by Dave Cobb/Flickr)

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The Reality of Racial Preferences in College Admissions

by College Fix Staff on April 2, 2013

Roger Clegg writes at NRO about a revealing email exchange he had with a reader whose college-bound son apparently had the wrong skin color:

My son and his very good female friend have attended the same small Christian elementary school & high school. Their academic qualifications are nearly identical — top 2 students in their classes, same level of leadership & extracurricular activities, both with SAT scores 2100 or above, straight A honors students, he is president of the NHS Chapter, she of the Student Council.

They live in the same town, have gone to the same schools with the same teachers, same friends, same books, same classes, etc. etc. They were in theater together at school, in band together, on the same track & soccer teams. They are both middle class. They applied to many of the same colleges & were interviewed by the same alumni for Harvard & Princeton. My son’s friend’s father is African American. She was accepted at every elite school that she applied to — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Georgetown & other Tier 1 schools. My son was not accepted at any of the elite schools that he applied to, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Pomona, Middlebury, Williams, Amherst and Bowdoin…

There’s much more to this story. Read the full article here.

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‘White Student Union’ to Begin Night Patrols at Towson University

by Nathan Harden - Fix Editor on March 27, 2013

A student-organized group calling itself the “White Student Union” says it will begin night time patrols on campus at Towson University near Baltimore, MD, in order to combat black-on-white crime.

The controversial group, founded by a few students last year, has been labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The WSU published an article recently bemoaning the university’s “black crime wave.”

The group, however, claims that its planned night patrols are not racially motivated.

“We just want to make campus a better place. If we see a white person commit a crime against a person who is not white, we’re going to assist the person who was attacked every time,” WSU President Matthew Heimbach said in an interview with The Towerlight–a Towson University student newspaper.

The WSU became the focus of controversy earlier in March during a panel on race at CPAC–the national conservative political action conference.

The host of the panel, K. Carl Smith, a black conservative who founded an activist group known as Frederick Douglass Republicans, spoke of a letter Douglass wrote later in his life offering forgiveness to his one-time slave owner.

At that point during the panel, Scott Terry, a member of the Towson WSU who was in the audience, spoke up, interrupting Smith, questioning what cause Douglass would have to offer forgiveness in the first place:  “For giving him shelter and food?,” Terry asked.

The remark prompted audible gasps from the audience. Onlookers appeared to be appealed that someone would openly challenge the idea that slavery was a great evil.

Terry said he believed Republican outreach to minorities was being done “at the expense of young, white, Southern males.”

Despite the isolated nature of Terry’s comments, liberal media outlets such as Think Progress and The Huffington Post were quick to publicize Terry’s remark as an example of racism among conservatives and Republicans.

Scott Terry seemed to be proud of his racist attitudes. He later told Think Progress that if he lived in a society where blacks were permanently subservient to whites, he’d “be fine with that.” He proudly claimed to be a direct descendant of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. And he openly advocated racial segregation.

In light of the controversy surrounding Terry’s remarks at CPAC, the announcement that the White Student Union at Towson–of which Terry is a member–will begin night patrols has naturally provoked concern at the university and among some outside observers.

The White Student Union is adept at provoking controversy and stirring up publicity for itself. Last year the group made national headlines when it wrote the phrase “White Pride” in chalk around campus. WSU founder Matthew Heimbach sometimes refers to himself as “commander Heimbach” in communications to other WSU members.

Is a ‘White Student Union’ really a good idea in the first place?

The entire White Student Union project may be designed to duplicate activities of “Black Student Unions” or “Latino Student Unions”–which are so common on American campuses. But attempting to appropriate the hyper-victimized racial identity politics of the left for the cause of white nationalism will do nothing to improve race relations in America.

The Towson group has consistently pointed to the issue of combating black-on-white crime as a primary purpose for its existence. In an interview with The College Fix, WSU founder Matthew Heimbach, who  “If there is a legitimate thug or criminal who is victimizing people, we can’t talk about it because of the color of his skin.”

On the contrary, Heimbach, Terry and the Towson White Student Union seem capable of talking about nothing but skin color. And their latest plan to conduct night patrols on campus appears to be designed, not to protect students, but to draw attention to their fledgling group and its half-witted ideas about white pride.

Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix.

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IMAGE: El Nagual/Flickr

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Opinion: Colleges Coddle Hate Crime Hoaxers

by College Fix Staff on March 11, 2013

Last week The College Fix reported on an alleged sighting of a “KKK Figure” at Oberlin College, which caused the college to cancel all classes. Police later reported that the “KKK figure” may have in fact simply been a person wrapped in a blanket.

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin writes about how colleges need to show more restraint when responding to alleged campus “hate crimes.”

American college campuses are the most fertile grounds for fake hate. They’re marinated in identity politics and packed with self-indulgent, tenured radicals suspended in the 1960s. In the name of enlightenment and tolerance, these institutions of higher learning breed a corrosive culture of left-wing self-victimization. Take my alma mater, Oberlin College. Please.

This week, the famously “progressive” college in Ohio made international headlines when it shut down classes after a series of purported hate crimes.

Read more at Fox Nation.

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Northwestern Creates Mandatory Diversity Program

by Alex Jakubowski - Northwestern on March 7, 2013

Northwestern University students will be expected to complete a quarter-long course in the “Social Inequalities and Diversities Curriculum” as a graduation-requirement. According to a report released on February 26, they will also be subject to a vaguely defined “Co-Curricular Requirement,” or a weekly discussion outside of class on the topic of social inequality.  Students will be expected to complete both within their first two years at the school.

Though situated in the highly diverse and notoriously liberal suburb of Evanston, over the years Northwestern’s campus has been no stranger to controversies of race.  In 1999 former Men’s Basketball Coach Rick Byrdson was murdered just off campus by a member of the white supremacist “Creativity Movement,” inspiring much dialogue on campus about societal race-relations.

More recently, Northwestern students have been in the news for appearing in black-face at a Halloween party, organizing a drinking competition that has since been dubbed the “racist Olympics,” and spewing racist slurs against a fellow Latin-American student.

In response to these events the University has attempted several times to initiate a dialogue on campus on the importance of racial tolerance and sensitivity.  Just last year, the University created a new administration-level position of “Assistant Provost for Diversity and Inclusion.”  In addition, since 2000 Northwestern has had a Faculty Diversity Committee, charged with creating concrete new proposals for increasing diversity at Northwestern.

Each June, the Vice President of Student Affairs, Dr. Patricia Tellus-Irvin, must release a report that details specific actions she and Assistant Provost will take in the coming year to improve diversity on campus.  Finally, after tensions came to a boiling point last spring a new “University Diversity Council” was formed, which just a week ago announced several new proposals to take effect in the coming years.

Yet some students believe Northwestern has not done all it could to combat racism and promote diversity on campus.  In response to an incident last month in which a black teddy-bear was hung by a noose inside the office of a black professor, NU4DiversityNow, For Members Only (a black student-group) and ALIANZA (a Latin-American student-group) organized a “March Against Northwestern’s Racism.” On the event’s Facebook page are many pictures of 1960’s era Civil Rights’ rallies, and the official event description references Northwestern’s “hegemonic culture,” which “perpetuates racist and sexist ideals that inhibit our [students] ability to thrive socially and academically.”

Several commenters expressed discomfort with the group’s tone during the event, with one student lamenting “Hate breeds Hate. Anger creates Anger, no matter the color/race of the person perpetuating it.”

The proposals set forth last week by the Diversity Council, however, would appear to contradict these students’ claims that Northwestern is a racist institution.  In fact, given the broad and progressive scope of the plans, many students are suggesting that the University might be going a bit far in their attempts to calm tensions between the university and its minority student community.

Though the Council included plans for many different efforts, what has drawn strong positive and negative reactions from students are the new curriculum requirements proposed by the Council.

Senior Steven Monacelli, President of Northwestern’s Student Political Union, commented, “Exposure to the stories and histories of a diverse range of people can only benefit one’s development.”  He added, “Many majors don’t delve deep into topics that this requirement will cover, so many students are never exposed to the content. The requirement will help to change that.”

Yet other students are not too keen on the new requirements.  According to Dane Stier, President of Northwestern’s College Republicans, “It is unfortunate not only that a university as prestigious as Northwestern would choose to perpetuate such a flawed and narrow-minded perception of diversity, but also that a top down, indoctrinating approach is being considered the appropriate solution.  The neglect of reality and logic in favor of emotional satisfaction is disgraceful and unacceptable.”

Regardless of student feelings on the issue, university officials have made clear that the implementation of the draft released is truly the “official proposal,” with implementation a question of “when” and not “if.”  As such, incoming students across disciplines can expect to be participating in the mandatory diversity curriculum by the fall of 2015.

Fix contributor Alex Jakubowski is a student at Northwestern.

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(Image by Kijkwijzer/Wikimedia Commons)

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