There’s never a shortage of ironic news out of the Claremont Colleges in SoCal. Last week, Pomona students were outraged against conservative intellectual Heather Mac Donald and this week they are outraged against leftist intellectual Alice Goffman. From my new column in Taki’s Magazine on “More Hysterics on Campus:”
…Meanwhile, Pomona College’s hiring of the crown princess of sociology, Alice Goffman, author of On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, the celebrated 2014 denunciation of the mass incarceration of muscular, sexy black males, was slammed by 128 People of Color claiming affiliation with Pomona. Why? Because Goffman is not black:This hire does not enhance a culture of inquiry and understanding on campus as we navigate a tumultuous time in our nation’s history; on the contrary, it boasts the framework [sic] that white women can theorize about and profit from Black lives while giving no room for Black academics to claim scholarship regarding their own lived experiences.
… Unlike Dr. Wolters, Dr. Goffman expounds all the right (i.e., left) opinions.
In the current year, though, that’s just not good enough. She may wholeheartedly believe the right platitudes, but she inherited the wrong genes. If Miss Goffman, the daughter of 1950s sociology superstar Erving Goffman, wants to be paid to expound on race, she should have taken care to be born nonwhite.. …
Although heredity is not at all a popular idea among sociologists, the younger Goffman, who was born only a few months before her father’s death from cancer, inherited not only his prejudice against locking criminals up but also much of his dramatic skill.
Read the whole thing there.
