“Every Knight Chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since the 1980s has entered that position as a full professor with tenure. And yet, the vote on my tenure had to be forced by weeks of protests, scathing letters of reprimand, the threat of legal action and my refusal to start July 1 without it. Even then, the Board of Trustees had to be led to this vote by its youngest member, Lamar Richards, the student body president who publicly demanded the special meeting. The board then chose to wait to vote until the last possible day at the last possible moment.
Yeah, a qualified black alum who was offered a chair faced opposition - baed on… maybe her race? Maybe her job at NYT?
Racism is a belief or a dogma. Systems are not capable these. Only people are. Systems do not have thoughts about people. The people who run the systems do. Systemic racism is used by people who are afraid to name names.
Is this the depth of your OP? I’ve got news for you…UNC is a “woke” university…period. Reading your article, it appears this is the crux of the issue; she was the author of the 1619 Project that the NYT published.
You have two opposing forces; the conservative side and the woke side with in the university at odds with each other and it appears to be over this 1619 project.
Yes. You obviously didn’t do your homework before you posted this thread. This isn’t systemic racism. It’s a total disagreement over one’s view of our country’s beginnings.
The letter sent to the Times says, “We applaud all efforts to address the foundational centrality of slavery and racism to our history,” but then veers into harsh criticism of the 1619 Project. The letter refers to “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing’” and says the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Wilentz and his fellow signatories didn’t just dispute the Times Magazine ’s interpretation of past events, but demanded corrections.
She is full of it and historians called her out on it.
If there’s so much systemic racism at work here how could this be true? From the linked piece.
“ Two decades ago, in 2001, I learned that not only had I been accepted into the master’s program at the journalism school at UNC, but that I had received a full-tuition Park Fellowship. I cried from joy. I could not believe how lucky I was to get the chance to learn journalism at a place I had so long revered.”
Later in the same piece… “UNC took a woman with ambition but no practical journalism training and provided the foundation for all that I would become. And through the years, Carolina has been so good to me; inviting me to give the journalism school’s commencement address in 2017; honoring me with the Young Alumni Award that same year and the Distinguished Alumna Award in 2019; and last year, inducting me into the N.C. Media Hall of Fame.”
None of that sounds all that systemically racist to me.
Maybe the reality that this woman is responsible for that crock of crap known as the 1619 Project has something to do with UNC being hesitant…I wouldn’t want someone who had produced that kind of dishonest disgusting easily disproven racist garbage teaching anyone in my family.
And systems are built by people who have these unconscious/subconscious biases, and those biases can be built into the systems they build (and many of the building blocks of these systems are people with those subconscious/unconscious biases).
This is the whole reasoning behind why even supposedly “colorblind systems” can still produced biased outcomes.