Allow me to apologize in advance for my very un-Instapundit-like length for going into depth on a topic unrelated to my wife or the ever-important nanotechnology.
No, the old media briar getting stuck in my country crawl comes from the usual source - The Nashville Scene - which, and don’t let Marketing ever tell you different, hoists it’s burning cross on Dr. Carol Swain’s lawn this week cloaked under the banner of Dwight Yoakam’s mysterious stetson.
It’s “Honky Tonk Man” not “Honky Tonk Klan” you leftard Bistro dwelling, brie-eating Bigots.
You could attempt to prove otherwise but it would require suspension of belief on my part that the cover story in their alt-weekly is supposed to start on pg. 61 while they donate six full pages of prime, inky real estate as a testament to what a race-traitor Dr. Swain is without having the gonads to come out and say so. (fyi, if you need gonads you can call “Gaymates” on pg. 72 of their deadtree thinly veiled prostitution rag).
For the uninitiated, Dr. Swain comes from what the effete, self-righteously liberal set would qualify as “humble beginnings”:
The place was never much to begin with, more of a shanty than anything else. It lacked running water, and only the kitchen and living room had electricity. No one has lived there for years, though for more than a decade of her childhood, Carol Swain and her 11 brothers and sisters called it home. The structure still stands, though there’s nothing much left but a battered tin roof and the stark silhouette of rotting beams in Virginia dirt.
Well, it’s not a cozy loft in Germantown but some people call it home. Regardless of Dr. Swain’s low rent origins, she’s sharecropped a paying job out of Vanderbilt University’s oppressive leftwing plantation, CNN, and several other noteworthy outlets.
And that’s the rub isn’t it?
From the very beginning of their profile on this underappreciated and insightful scholar, the imagery is being furrowed into the readers’ minds. Further to revelations that her mother was beat by an abusive husband:
When the beatings started, she quietly withdrew into her own mind, like a rabbit seeking its burrow when the hard rain comes.
Got a little rabbit in her does she? Or is this more like the Cartoon Network when it comes to divining the Scene’s author P.J. Tobias’ intent as he flings himself against Swain who he casts early on with such tar baby vignettes? These sissyslaps from John Spragens‘ heir-head apparent won’t leave nearly as indelible a mark.
To illustrate Swain’s untimely meditations, Tobias quotes her reaction to the predictable Muslim outrage at last year’s controversy where a an English teacher in the Sudan was threatened with death after her class named a teddy bear Mohammed:
“Would a conservative Christian like me be offended if a Muslim schoolteacher in the U.S. allowed or encouraged her first-grade students to name a stuffed animal Jesus Christ?”
“Yes, I think I would be offended…. I might view the naming situation as further evidence of the disrespect that secular humanists often display toward Christian believers.”
This quote is then used as evidence of putting her at odds with her Ivy-league peers without ever asking “is it true”? Is there a difference between being offended and calling for people to be thrown in jail or killed? Better yet are western secularists quick to crack wise about Christianity and protect Islam from criticism at all costs in the name of multiculturalism?
Such follow-up questions would require siding with Western Civilization over the politically correct embrace of Khartoum’s religious intolerance. A big no-no in Scene country. But it gets worse when Swain attacks the Marxist intellectual endocarditis seizing the heart of a liberal arts education:
“I think that a lot of the problems that we have in society are caused by people in the academy,” Swain says, sitting in her second-floor office at Vanderbilt Law School. “They come up with these ideas, and they filter them to the public and they’re very destructive.” Ideas, she says laughing, “like multiculturalism.”
Not surprisingly, the feeling among some in “the academy” is mutual.
Professor Ron Walters, a political scientist at the University of Maryland-College Park and a distinguished black scholar in his own right, calls her “a spear-carrier for the conservative movement.”
How long did The Scene have to shop to find a fellow “black educator” to call Swain a spearchucker? Probably as along as it took to walk to Bruce Barry’s office who, though a Vanderbilt professor, one of the head contributing writers to The Scene, and editor of their blog, was not quoted once throughout the piece. Almost as if Tobias is his waterboy, draped in Hillsboro Village advertising clothier klan robes carrying a burning torch and a noose onto Vandy’s campus on his behalf. Thank Allah it’s summer break.
When discussing her book “Black Faces, Black Interests”, a literary exercise in determining if black legislative representation delivered better results to black constituents than white legislators to the same voters, the Scene scoffs:
“She makes the argument that whites are able to represent blacks better than blacks,” says Maryland’s Professor Walters, who calls her thesis “weird.” “The logical extension of her argument is, you wouldn’t need any blacks in the Congress,” he says. “What is she arguing here?”
Logical extension is evidently out of their grasp in their quest for quotidian as shown by a recent Memphian controversy in The Scene’s own state where Harold Ford, Jr.’s brother Jake “The Joke” Ford was running against a pastily white ultra-liberal Steve Cohen for the majority black district’s vote just two months ago. The racist solicitations from the black candidate in question, who looked to his own skin to ingratiate himself to the voters, couldn’t have provided Swain with a better example:
“He’s just not for the money for blacks,” Jake Ford said. “He is for Jews, but not for blacks.”
(On that point, among others, Jake Ford seems to have gotten his facts wrong. Cohen is a co-sponsor of a bill to study reparations for slaves’ descendants.)
As if Jake Ford’s own words weren’t delivered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, Isaac Ford neatly summarized his brother’s talking points before leaving the Shelby County Election Commission headquarters.
“Jake Ford is a black candidate, it’s a black district and we need black representation,” Isaac Ford told our reporter. “Say that Isaac Ford said that.”
Swain’s contention is less about the color of a representative’s skin than it is about the effectiveness of their representation. Obviously, the liberal, white Jew in Joke Ford’s estimation is not a better ambassador of his district than he is due to his pigmentational deficiency.
The Nashville Scene feels likewise. You should vote based on skin color in their enlightened eyes or else you are calling for the abolition of all black members of Congress.
Swain writes that affirmative action gave her a creeping self-doubt about her qualifications and right to be at Princeton, despite prestigious awards and publications. She also notes the patronizing tone that white, liberal colleagues took when talking about the progressive social policy.
And here’s when Cummins Stations’ finest wretches call animal control on a black academic. When they bite the hand that fed.
The coup de grace to underscore Swain’s unhinged and heretical thoughts comes when they describe her 2003 appearance on NPR arguing against the merits of creating a “national slavery museum” in Virginia:
The radio segment started as a feel-good paean to the joys of American history and how by understanding a difficult past we can all move forward as one people.
Then Professor Swain showed up. She immediately began berating both the host and Wilder about the historical accuracy of the museum, saying they probably would leave out facts such as the existence of “black slave holders in every state.”
Further, she suggested that re-examining slavery in such a way might harm race relations or possibly cause a race riot. “Looking backwards would not be positive,” she practically shouted, “and it could be detrimental to race relations. [...]
The host, a very shocked-sounding Dick Gordon, began to stammer, “But you’re an educator, you’re not saying we shouldn’t know what happened in the past because it might cause a problem in the present?”
“I’m saying it depends on how the story is told,” Swain spit back. “As an educator, I don’t trust other scholars to accurately tell the story. There’s too much political correctness…. There were black slave holders in it for profit, and there were blacks who fought for the Confederacy, and African nations were involved in it….”
Swain also insisted that the slave museum was actually a giant red herring whose true purpose was to raise white guilt, making it easier to shove reparations down the throats of American businesses.
At that point the discussion endured a total meltdown, as Swain, Wilder and the host were all shouting to be heard. After Gordon got things under control, they took a few calls, most of which were from angry listeners who disagreed with Swain.
We are talking about National People’s Radio after all. Dr. Swain has shoved the ugly, self-serving racism of the American Left back into their smug faces and the phonelines light up like candles on their Kwanzaa candelabras.
As always, the best quotes come last as Swain genuflects on the opinions that have defined her time in academia:
While the media exposure has garnered Swain a certain national notoriety, she says the attention has won her few friends among colleagues. “I think my career has taken a whipping as a result. In the [media] world, I’m bigger, but in the academy, no.”
Hill, Swain’s early mentor at Roanoke, doesn’t deny that Swain may be unpopular with other academics, but says, “Professional envy takes many forms, doesn’t it?”
Indeed. No one ever seems to have cross words about pseudo-academic leftists like Michael Eric Dyson, Cornell West, or the equally absurd Frances Cress Welsing.
“I thought for a while I might go into the ministry,” she says. “And then I realized that what I do, in a way, it is ministry…. I feel that I am called to speak truth to a world that doesn’t want to hear it.”
A message that P.J. and the rest of Scene staff were forced to sit in the pews and listen to for a week before complaining about it.
Dr. Carol Swain is one of the few jewels at Vanderbilt’s $25,000 a year babysitting factory. Let everyone appreciate her luster if only for this one post.
Posted by Brian @ 11:53 pm
and 1 Trackback
| Permalink
| Trackback URI
