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Tag Archives: Objectivity

The Scourge of Scholarship & Scallops

01 Saturday Jan 2022

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Academic Culture, Bias, CMU, Elites, Elitism, Fishiness, Fishy, Genius, Joe William Trotter Jr., Objectivity, Oppression, Privilege, Racism, Scallops, Status Quo


Pan-seared scallops with bacon cream sauce, February 10, 2015 (cropped, December 31, 2021). (https://www.cakenknife.com/pan-seared-scallops-bacon-cream-sauce/).

I am not much of a scholar. No, really, I’m not. At least not in the extremely narrow way those who taught me to do historical research defined scholarship. For me, uncovering deliberately hidden truths or coming to new ideas, realizations, and leap-in-logic epiphanies was always about more than just “evidence.” It was about the nexus between human history and human behavior, the ability to use the past to understand the present and possibly the future. And through all that, to predict, to prevent, to propose remedies or possibilities for being, and being better, as a person, as people, as entire societies.

But all through graduate school in the 1990s, especially during my Carnegie Mellon years, all I was supposed to learn was about the greatness of “scholarship.” The way my dissertation advisor Joe Trotter would say “scholarship,” it reminded me of how my now recovering-alcoholic father would say “pep-up” when he wanted a drink. Trotter said “scholarship” with the zeal and relish of a person ready to eat at their favorite down-home restaurant or fish shack. 

For years even after finishing my doctorate, I could still hear Trotter’s “scholarship” and think of scallops, the ugliest and fishiest tasting of mollusks, in my opinion. I imagined them raw, then either sautéed or seared in butter, as this is the only way to eat the nasty things. Just like with academic scholarship. None of this removed their fishiness or the loads of carcinogens lurking in their lumps of meat.

For years, I have watched former and current colleagues, former and current students, and big-fish academicians I have only seen from my cold and cheap seats in the Kuiper Belt promote scholarship as a great and mystical process. “This is groundbreaking scholarship” is a common phrase in my academic world. “The genius of” so-and-so’s “scholarship” can also be read and heard, in book reviews, in scholarly journals, at academic conferences. I could be jealous, but I’d eat a can of unseasoned and undressed tuna again before eating up these scallop-y descriptions of scholarship.

For those who really don’t know, “scholarship” is really a combination of three things. 

1. Research, which in my field usually involves archival materials, like a letter Martha Washington might have written about making “her” Rum Punch, or a diary left behind by a granddaughter of an enslaved African woman, providing details not normally found in historical literature. For me, it’s interdisciplinary. Interviewing people about their experiences, asking common questions along the way for comparative purposes. It could also mean looking at census records, running microfiche machines for 100-year-old op-eds about “Saturday Night and the Negro.” But it is ALL research, and you don’t even need a high school diploma to be this nosy. I knew this already, but was reminded of this by a former student, an archivist who recently completed his bachelor’s.

2. Training and Methodology helps folks shape the research they do into what we call scholarship. It is very hard to do historical research on any given topic without “going to the archives.” That’s where researchers can commune with the primary sources, where they can most readily find the first-hand and “objective evidence” they need. But, if dead folks didn’t write anything down, then proximate evidence, like census records, can tell us about a people who didn’t leave written records, or because of oppressors, might have seen their records destroyed. Ethnographies, all the rage in my profession in the 1990s, are a sociologist’s and an anthropologist’s tool. So is mere observation or years spent reading others’ research. This is how I and so many others know lazy-ass Martha Washington ain’t never mixed no drinks in her Mount Vernon mansion. Not when she had trusted enslaved Africans as cooks and mixologists doing all the work.

3. Experience works on multiple levels, and is often the way others who like what they’re reading reach the conclusion that so-and-so’s “scholarship” is “genius.” There’s the experience of interpretation and being able to take new information and meld it with everything one already knows about a specific person, a group of people, a given topic, event, question, and/or social problem. There’s the experience of being a human being, and how those experiences have shaped you and how you process information, including the small and big epiphanies gleaned from one’s research. There’s also the experience of being oppressed or benefiting from oppression, which utterly colors whatever “objectivity” one may believe they have. In the case of oppressors and their beneficiaries, those experiences often dilute one’s ability to take quantum and cosmic leaps in logic to cover up the ginormous holes in their research, training, and methodology.

So when like-minded people get together to discuss what is and is not “scholarship,” 3. outweighs 1. and 2., just like Jupiter outweighs the other seven planets in our solar system — combined. It is a toxic, cannibalizing system, made more potent by the riches and miseries of capitalism, where research grants, book deals, and media appearances, and lecture circuit checks are on the line. 

When people ask for “evidence,” whether at this year’s American Historical Association conference or on Twitter, they are saying, “My experiences in life and in my field are privileged and limited, so I have decided your experiences in life and in my field do not matter.” When people refuse to accept your findings, it is often their myopia and their sense of narcissism and entitlement at work, and not flaws within the research you did. Especially when one’s research is about oppression, oppressors, how to fight oppression, and what happens when a people succeed in that fight.

This is why I chafed at Trotter’s salivations over scholarship some 26 years ago. This is why I find much about the idea of scholarship offensive today. Oh, I think doing one’s own research in a field of expertise or even to acquire expertise is fundamentally important. I just don’t think genius and scholarship are in any way related. Not without the experiences of life, the understanding of one’s positionality in privilege, not only to do research, but one’s unique life experience through which to process it. This is why I can never be a scholar. I refuse to be part of a club that has to sear and sauté its poisonous, fishy-ass scallops and declare themselves all “geniuses” for doing so. 

One might say that there’s something fishy going on here in the academic world. Scholarship is like scallops in that way. Do not leave it at room temperature for too long. Just like the academic “geniuses” who refuse to shower while writing their latest unreadable tome.

Technocrats, Journalists, and Statistical Orgies

25 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Black-White Wealth Gap, Closing the Achievement Gap, Culture of Poverty, Journalists, Michael A. Fletcher, Misery Statistics, Objectivity, Orgy, Poverty, Prince George's County, Racial Disparities, Racism, Rich-Poor Wealth Gap, Statistical Orgy, Statistics, Technocrats, The Washington Post


Front page of The Washington Post, January 25, 2015. (http://newseum.org).

Front page of The Washington Post, January 25, 2015. (http://newseum.org).

There are times when I wonder if exposing racial and socioeconomic disparities is really an eye-opening and life-changing exercise. Or, does the exposure merely serve to confirm the racial and socioeconomic stereotypes that Americans hold against each other? In today’s Washington Post, on the front page and above the fold, there’s an article titled “A Shattered Foundation,” with the smaller type “African Americans who bought homes in Prince George’s [County] have watched their wealth vanish.”

Above the title and subtitle are a series of charts and statistics noting the national chasm of a gap in total wealth accumulation between Black families ($95,300) and White families ($678,800). The theme here is that since the housing bust and subsequent Great Recession, the burgeoning Black middle class of PG County has fallen on desperate times, as home equity — their main means for accumulating wealth — for tens of thousands of these families caved in on them.

Michael A. Fletcher’s article is pretty even-handed. But this is kind of tangential to my larger point. In any given three-month period of my life, for nearly as long as the forty years and two months I’ve known how to read in full sentences, I could’ve scanned at least one article or book about the cruelties of structural racism and capitalism. Even if I’d never grown up in poverty or experienced racial discrimination, there have been enough articles, op-eds, books, book chapters, poems, short stories, plays, letters to the editor and scripts written about disparities to cover the US a mile deep in paper. The fact is, no statistics on growing wealth gaps and persistent racial gaps in wealth and education have led to lasting changes in policies, politics or institutional structures substantial enough to end poverty or ameliorate the most vicious forms of racism in this country.

Hand reaches out from big heap of crumpled papers, January 25, 2015. (http://galleryhip.com).

Hand reaches out from big heap of crumpled papers, January 25, 2015. (http://galleryhip.com).

Then again, there are some folks whose business depends on mantras like the “growing wealth gap” or “closing the achievement gap…as the civil rights issue of our time.” Technocrats in corporate education reform, social scientists in the world of conservative and “libertarian” think-tanks, neoliberals and so-called American liberals in search of compromises to strengthen the American middle class. They all turn to these statistics to tell their stories, to sell their experiments and their research, to promote their politics. It’s as if the statistics on racial and socioeconomic gaps in wealth and education provided a high, like crystal meth or a speedball. In some ways, for these groups, a five-story brothel in which they practiced S&M would be more appropriate for their use of misery statistics.

I am hardly suggesting The Washington Post‘s Fletcher or I or any other journalist, academician or writer should cease making their points with statistics about racial and socioeconomic disparities. But America’s poor and poor people of color or falling-through-the-cracks middle class are far more than “statistics on a government chart” (to quote The Police’s “Invisible Sun“). These are real people with families and lives, people who represent generations of lives in which this construct of racial capitalism has limited their choices and their opportunities, whether they believe in fate or not. So-called objectivity has never been sufficient, and neither have been statistics. What we need is a revolution in thought and in action, quiet or otherwise.

The Make-Believe Media

17 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Tags

"Both Sides Do It", "Dirty Laundry" (1982), Anchors, Columnists, Commentators, Jay Rosen, Journalism, Journalists, Liberal Bias, Mainstream Media, Make-Believe Journalism, Media, News Media, Objectivity, Print Journalism, Pundits, What Are Journalists For? (1999)


What media can get wrong (Election 1948, SCOTUS Obamacare Decision), November 3, 1948 and June 28, 2012 [October 17, 2012].

I get so tired of so many “journalists,” commentators and columnists saying the same thing over and over again. About the 2012 Presidential Election, about education, about race relations, about crime, about virtually anything anyone with a working brain cares to think about.

For more than four decades, our media has become like the color commentators for an old World Wrestling Federation (now WWE) event between “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan. Where the mere appearance of journalism and fairness has become more important than any actual substance. Where pitching fake debates about actual facts about real events and trends is normal business. Overall, the news industry — TV, print, radio and Internet — is about as professional an operation as a hole-in-the-wall bar attempting to become a strip club.

“If it bleeds, it leads,” whether it’s Ruth Chris Steakhouse or the mainstream media, October 17, 2012. (http://sanfrancisco.com).

Jay Rosen’s ’99 book What Are Journalists For? and Don Henley’s ’82 hit “Dirty Laundry” have plenty in common. They both unmask the news business as just that, a business. All of these ideas about objectivity, access and coverage for mainstream journalism in all its forms are just that, ideas. In actuality, news has grown into another form of entertainment, sometimes in the most literal sense (read The Onion and watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as but three examples).

Perhaps the most glaring falsehood of all is that the media is a mere reflection of society, and that journalism’s role is to be the mirror that stands apart, reflecting both the light and the darkness of our world. Both Rosen (in a scholarly tone) and Henley (with sarcasm-dripping lyrics) call bull crap on this idea.

There are too many lies that the media tells itself for me to go through all of them in one blog post, but there are particularly pernicious ones that I need to address here:

1. The built-in “liberal media bias:” This one is about as true as “dolphins fly” and “parrots live at sea” (thank you, Stevie Wonder). Fact is, the news media, with the exceptions of FOX News, represents a centrist view of the US and the world. Period. When’s the last time anyone has heard CNN discuss creating a single-track Pre-K to twelfth grade college and work preparation school system? Since when does the New York Times recommend the legalization of marijuana or the decriminalization of heroin and cocaine? Has the Washington Post ever suggested that America’s imperialist foreign and economic policies were the ultimate reasons for 9/11? These are all liberal positions, and yet, they get next to no play except maybe on non-mainstream TV and rags, liberal talk radio and progressive blogs.

2. The media’s goal is “objectivity:” Are we really that daft? Scholarly objectively went out the window in the humanities and social sciences in the ’80s, because it was obvious that scholars are actually, well, people. Last I checked, journalists, commentators, editors, columnists, anchors and talk show hosts are, too. Their collective main goal – to sell a story to the public (or, in many cases, to others in the media world), and overall, to make money for their newspaper, radio station, news channel or website. For if the business makes money, folks in the media get to keep their jobs and their prestige.

Gold bars and the earth on a set of brass scales (inspired by An Inconvenient Truth [2006]), August 2, 2011. (http://drpinna.com).

3. The “both sides do it” argument: The fact that the media has turned into about five different monopolies has led to this idea that there are two equal and opposite sides to everystory. It’s been true of the mainstream coverage of this election, but it’s applicable to everything they show the public. Climate change, some say “yes” (as in 99.8 percent of all scientists) and some (scientists paid off by Scaife, Olin, and the Heritage Foundation) say “no.” Trayvon Martin, was he a victim or a thug? Look, we all know that life has much more gray than the media is capable of capturing, but most rags and news outlets have long given up trying to provide a full story. All in the name of selling more newspapers, driving up ad sells and pushing up Nielsen ratings.

Megyn Kelly, FOX News, September 27, 2011. (http://huffingtonpost.com).

4. People in the media world are intelligent and sophisticated: This one is a keeper. To be sure, there are plenty of brilliant folk associated with CNN, MSNBC, The Huffington Post, and the New York Times. But most journalists aren’t as smart as we tend to assume. Fact is, journalists are good at two or three things: asking lots of questions, looking professional in front of a camera and writing in middle school sentences. I could’ve done two of these three by the time I finished sixth grade. Since most folks in news spend most of their time talking with each other, their brilliance is self-evident. They certainly don’t need to check in with us for our approval.

I’m sure that the likes of Megyn Kelly, Soledad O’Brien and Tom Friedman won’t be reading my blog to see what I’ve said about their business. After all, they have the pen and the mic, and I’m just an aspiring writer and professor with a blog. But I know something they don’t. You can’t live in the world of make-believe forever.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

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Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

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