Much as we lament the triumph of political correctness in academia,
we must admit that it has done wonders to keep everyone’s
sense of amazement well exercised. The latest challenge to credibility
comes to us from that creaky bastion of academic orthodoxy, The
Chronicle of Higher Education. In its issue for October 12, the
Chronicle published a brief essay called “White Feminists Who Study
Black Writers” in its “Point of View” department. Written by
Katherine J. Mayberry, an associate professor of language and literature
at the Rochester Institute of Technology, this specimen of
feminist-cum-racial handwringing will, we think, test the capacity
for amazement of even the most experienced connoisseurs of academic
demagoguery. Had the essay been published on April 1st, we might have
suspected a joke. Appearing when it did, however, we reluctantly
conclude that both Professor Mayberry and the editors of The
Chronicle of Higher Education intended this blunt compendium of PC
sentimentality in earnest.

It is an extraordinary document. Professor Mayberry begins by noting
that “the practice of feminist scholarship,” which was “born
of a
radical political movement,” is “often more than a strictly academic
undertaking.” Readers of The New Criterion will not be surprised to
learn that, on this point at least, we wholeheartedly agree with
Professor Mayberry; indeed, we have often had occasion to make a
similar observation ourselves. What goes under the name of feminist
scholarship, we have argued, is typically more about feminism than
scholarship. That is to say, “women’s studies programs” and
almost everything else that proceeds under the aegis of feminism in the
academy are essentially political, not scholarly, enterprises, and as such
have no place in the college curriculum.

Needless to say, this is not the conclusion at which Professor Mayberry
arrives. As her article makes clear, she—like so many of her
colleagues—regards politics as the raison d’être of her
professional life. But this is only business as usual in the academy today.
What sets Professor Mayberry’s essay apart
is not so much the presence of politics as
the collision of two
competing politics:
specifically, the collision of feminist and racial politics.

Professor Mayberry’s ruminations were occasioned by
an event that took place recently at an academic conference she
attended. As part of a panel on African-American literature, she
was to present a paper on Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (a book
that, she later suggests, “implicates us all” in racism). It happened
that all the participants in that panel, except the moderator, were
white women. The moderator, a black woman, introduced the other
participants and then announced her intention of leaving the room
because she was uncomfortable with the “appropriation” by white women
of literature written by blacks. Professor Mayberry writes: “She had
come to the panel to hear black women talk about black writers, she
said, and nothing that white women had to say on the subject could be
of any use or interest to her.” The moderator and the majority of
black women in the audience then left; the session was canceled by
the conference coordinator (another white woman, Professor Mayberry
informs us), who suggested that the allotted time be used to discuss
“the difficult issues of cultural appropriation and racism within
feminism.”

Professor Mayberry admits that her first reaction to this event
was “shocked indignation”: “Before ever being heard, the voices of
the three presenters had been judged, silenced, and dismissed solely
on the ground of race.” Later, however, she experienced a wave of
“culpability” for her “failure to have considered the cruel
ironies of a middle-class white woman’s professing to explain and to
interpret a powerful slave narrative.” Citing the
“ruthlessly reductive” book about slaves that a fictional
slave-owner writes in Beloved, Professor Mayberry concludes that
“it now seems to me that any white scholar writing about a work by a
black writer may come perilously close” to such reductiveness.

Indeed Professor Mayberry goes further, lamenting that, as critics, “we are
still in the business of controlling, organizing, and interpreting
texts.” Applied to mainstream works, she suggests, the effort to
“control, organize, and interpret” literature leads at best to
“oversimplification”; applied to works by “marginal cultures,” such
criticism risks becoming a species of patronizing “appropriation.”
Professor Mayberry implicates her graduate-school training in this
indictment. Having been taught “the tricks of textual mastery,” she
sadly acknowledges that, for many academic critics,
“it doesn’t much matter what we write about, as
long as we do it deftly and idiomatically. It is a small step from
this position to one of assuming that, armed with the right code, we
can write about anything, including those works that emerge from a
history already deeply scarred by the arrogance of the privileged.”
Professor Mayberry concludes by calling for a revolution in academic
criticism—or at least in feminist academic criticism. She wants to do
away with criticism that seeks merely to “interpret” or “explain” a work of
literature, in order to encourage more “authentic” responses that
acknowledge, for example, racism and the divisive relationship of white,
middle-class feminism and black experience.

In other words, Professor Mayberry wishes to reduce criticism to a species
of ideological accommodation. By seeking to replace accuracy with
“authenticity” as the goal of criticism, she seeks to replace a
publicly accessible criterion of judgment with something inscrutibly
subjective. Like many academics today, she confuses
the issue by recasting the notion of independent criticism into a political
melodrama where the goal is not so much understanding as expiation.
This is one reason that words like “power,” “control,” and
“oppression” loom so large in her verbal demonology. For Professor
Mayberry, the ideal of objective truth is indistinguishable from political
subjugation: hence the traditional goals of
scholarship—responsible
interpretation and explanation— must give way to the mysticism of
an “authentic response” in which one’s sex or race or ethnic origin
determines the nature of one’s access to knowledge. Professor Mayberry
is quite right to take exception to the idea that “armed with the
right code, we can write about anything.” This “technique,” fostered
especially by deconstruction and post-structuralist criticism, is a
recipe for intellectual frivolity. But the legitimate alternative is
careful interpretation and a respect for factual truth, not a descent
into the new tribalism demanded by political correctness.