Until 2016, not many Americans had heard of Hillsdale College. Over the last half-decade the school became famous when it became the leading institution pushing the agenda of Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission. Now it is at the forefront of the national campaign against what it claims is the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the public schools. While CRT is not actually taught in middle schools and high schools, it has made the once-obscure college of only 1,500 students a national leader in the push to change how American history is understood.
David Azerrad, an associate professor at Hillsdale, spoke earlier this year at St. Vincent College, a Catholic institution in Pennsylvania, on “Black Privilege.” I have included a video of his entire talk below. According to Azerrad:
“For all the talk of ‘White Privilege’ today…I would argue that the real color of visible privilege in America today is Black.”
Azerrad warns that in modern America, it is no longer safe to disparage Blacks, saying “Those who mock Black people…do do at their own peril.”
Oddly, he also disparages capitalizing the letter “B” when the word “Black” is used to refer to Black people. For some reason, he does not seem to have a problem capitalizing the “L” in “Latino” or any other capitalizations.
While Azerrad says that Blacks are the most privileged group in America today, he does not deny that this was not always so. He says; “I am looking at contemporary America, not at America under Jim Crow, not at colonial America when we had slavery.” Of course, we still had slavery nearly a century after 1776, but I won’t dwell on that forgotten period of history. Azerrad does say that in that distant past “We were de facto a White Supremacy.”
Although Azerrad says that he is not talking about American history, he turns to American history and the teaching of just about anything about Black people. He said that part of contemporary Black Privilege is a “Black demand to be honored in all realms regardless of accomplishments. So you have mediocre Black composers, scientists, and writers from the past who are showered with praise, while genuinely great men who, in hindsight, just had the misfortune of being white, are being cancelled.”
I know that more Black history is taught now than when I was in school, a time when Blacks were all but invisible in American history textbooks. But, I doubt that those 44 out 45 American presidents who were white are now invisible and that only Barack Obama gets a mention in American history classes nowadays.
When I was in school, only one Black scientist even got a mention in class, and Azerrad has a real problem with that. He says that “if he were not Black, no one in America today would know who George Washington Carver is…” Carver is apparently one of the “mediocre Black…scientists” Azerrad was warning us about!
What Azerrad does not mention is that George Washington Carver was born into slavery. That after the Civil War, when he wanted to get an elementary education, the school in his region refused to admit Black children. He had to walk ten miles to got to an all-Black school. He made an assiduous effort to find schools that would admit Blacks, moving to other areas to attend. When he finally finished high school, he won admittance to Highland College in Kansas, but was turned away when he arrived on campus because he was Black.
Carver was 26 when he finally gained admittance to college. He became the first Black student at Iowa State University. So he was not only a scientist, he was a desegregator of a university as well. But I am sure that those White scientists to whom Azerrad refers had very similar experiences of being admission to schools because of their race.
Azerrad, of course, also criticizes the movie “Hidden Figures” for telling the story of Black women whose math skills played a role in “putting a man on the moon.” Again, this is depicted as “Black Privilege.” It is a strange privilege because I have seen at least a dozen movies on the Space Race, and none of them mentioned these women. If Blacks were in such a privileged place in modern America you would have thought they would have figured prominently in Apollo 13 and other The Right Stuff. They did not.
By the way, Azerrad is also upset that most Americans capitalize the “B” when writing about “Black people.” He says that this is an expression of “Black Privilege.”
As Azerrad wraps up his argument that African Americans (a term he does not use) are hyper-privileged, he tries to refute the claim that American society was influenced by racism, saying “I have yet to meet a White Supremacist regime that allows…Jews…to out-earn and out-perform Whites.”
Note: Feature photo shows David Azerrad speaking at St. Vincent College. It is from the college’s video of Azerrad’s talk.
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Hillsdale sent almost all its young men to fight for the Union during the Civil War. About 400 in total. Perhaps you could take the time to understand the extraordinary history of the school and its educational approach over the decades as rooted in history instead of blatantly slandering it because one professor said something you disagree with.
You could start with article: https://www.hillsdale.edu/hillsdale-blog/writers/evalyn-homoelle/hillsdale-students-and-the-civil-war/
Slander is the making of false and damaging statements against an entity. What is false in my article?
How does the school’s sending its students to war in the Civil War, and indeed its laudable abolitionist past, excuse the racism exhibited not only by this professor but also the school’s president, Larry Arnn, who supports suppression of Black votes, or the school’s support of Christopher Rufo and his racist disinformation attack on Critical Race Theory?
It is astounding that his tropes and asinine assertions are allowed a public forum. Nonetheless, he’s entitled to his free speech. He is only revisiting a long and tired “fear of Negro Rule” that has permeated conservative-Christofascism since antebellum America. He contradicts himself and provides false equivalence across the board. It would take a Collegiate dissertation to unravel this inherently racist and particularly simplistic posits he brought forth.