Tuesday, April 5, 2011

We will miss you, Manning...

Manning Marable died Friday 1 April 2011.
In 1983, he was kind enough to recognize my
work in his column, From the Grassroots.

Dr. Manning Marable, “Academic Racism,” (July 2, 1983):

Part of the renaissance of racism today is found on college campuses. As most of us know, racism has taken the form of attacks against affirmative action in the hiring and promotion of black faculty and staff.

Consider also the decline in the recruitment of black graduate and undergraduate students at white schools: the attack against black studies departments; and the loss of federal and private funding for historically black universities. There is one other component of “academic racism” which must be evaluated – the growth of new eugenics research which describes blacks as “generically inferior” to whites.

As documented in a recent issue of “Science for the People”, Barry Mehler notes that there is a direct connection between racist white academic researchers, the New Right and politics of the Reagan Administration.

Over recent years the Pioneer Fund, an academic foundation has funded a number of racist college professors. The officers and directors of the Pioneer Fund in 1981 included Thomas Ellis, a major financial contributor to Reagan, and John B. Trevor, a founder of the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies.

The Pioneer Fund has given thousands of dollars to British fascist Roger Pearson, author of “Eugenics and Race”, and an organizer of a large “neo-fascist and antisemitic” conference in Washington, D.C. in 1978; the fund has also supported notorious racist William Shockley, who has written major studies trying to “prove” whie supremacy; Arthur Jensen, “America’s leading proponent of black inferiority”, University of Georgia professor Frank McGurk and Audrey Shuey, authors of “The Testing of Negro Intelligence”, termed by Mehler, “a book that has formed the basis for numerous racist studies.”

What kind of academic research in the fields of biology, psychology and sociology is being distributed to thousands of college students and public policy makers? A brief passage from the 1978 book, “Human Variations”, edited by R. Travis Osborne, Clyde E. Noble and Nathaniel Weyl, is clear enough: “(During slavery) the environment was more favorable that anything (blacks) had experienced in Africa. As slaves they improved in health and increased in numbers. When the Negroids were liberated from agricultural slavery, they were thrown free to shift for themselves in largely Caucasoid societies… These simple, unskilled rural people were suddenly offered irregular urban employment combined with opportunities of drink and drugs, gambling and prostitution, and no reliable means of productive, creative or congenial labor.” The authors conclude that there is no “scientific and historical evidence” that blacks are equals of “the intellectually well-endowed races.”

Mehler notes that the goal of this new eugenics research “is a world of racially pure stocks living in separate geographic areas, with strict apartheid practiced in areas where racial groups share one geographic land mass. The extreme wing of this movement openly advocates the elimination of all non-white races, Jews and homosexuals.”

Some of us might think that this racist garbage could not possibly be taken seriously in respected universities. Think again: Jensen’s writings have appeared in the “Harvard Educational Review”, and his “theories on the inferiority of black children”, have been published in the “New York Times”, “Newsweek”, the “Educational Digest”, “National Review” and “Science News”.

Former University of Chicago professor Dwight Ingle has widely published his view that “Negroids” problems are “not caused by racism” but the “Negroid-Caucasoid IQ gap.”

The task of uprooting white supremacy was only begun when we removed the Jim Crow signs and when Civil Rights legislation was passed in the 1960s. Now we must develop a serious campaign to destroy racist ideology in every form in the campuses across this country.

Dr. Manning Marable is director of Third World Studies, Colgate University, Hamilton, N.Y. “From the Grassroots” appears in 150 newspapers internationally.

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