Professor Exonerated After Criticism for Using N-Word While Discussing James Baldwin Literature
“It is crucial that the right to do this be protected.”
This is a happy ending to a crazy story. She should never have been criticized in the first place.
The FIRE blog reports:
VICTORY: Professor exonerated for quoting iconic black writer at The New School
The New School has cleared a professor of charges of racial discrimination for quoting literary icon James Baldwin during a classroom discussion. The university reversed course late Wednesday after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education intervened on behalf of professor Laurie Sheck’s academic freedom rights.
“If I have a hope for what can come out of this, it is for a university community that seeks to open itself in the deepest and most informed of ways to the exchange and contemplation of ideas about which there is genuine urgency and concern but not consensus,” said Sheck. “It is crucial that the right to do this be protected.”
Sheck, a poet and novelist who is white, teaches a graduate course on “radical questioning” in writing. The course includes works by prominent African-American writers that examine racial discrimination. Sheck prefaces her course with a warning that active engagement with literature involves a sense of unease and unsettlement.
Early in the spring semester, Sheck assigned “The Creative Process,” a 1962 essay in which Baldwin argues that Americans have “modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history” and must commit to “a long look backward whence we came and an unflinching assessment of the record.” In her graduate seminar, classroom discussion involved the Baldwin statement, “I am not your nigger,” which was made during an appearance as a guest on The Dick Cavett Show. Sheck noted how the title of an Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary based on Baldwin’s writings, “I Am Not Your Negro,” intentionally altered Baldwin’s words. She asked her students what this change may reveal about Americans’ ability to reckon with what Baldwin identified as “the darker forces of history.”
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