| By Justin Elliott - Nov 20th, 2007 at 7:21 pm EST |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Tags: Brown Daily Herald, college newspapers, diversity, Harvard, harvard crimson
It’s pretty well-established that being an editor at the Harvard Crimson is a meaningless, strictly resume-padding distinction. (The relevant headline: Harvard Crimson Has 800 Editors. Literally.) But being the president of the Crimson is, at least as far as these things go, significant. The Crimson reports (via Romenesko):
Malcom A. Glenn ’09 will lead the newly elected 135th Guard of The Harvard Crimson, the paper’s outgoing president announced Friday.
Glenn, a history concentrator from Denver, Colo. and Leverett House, has served as an associate on the Sports board since February … [and] will be the first black president of The Crimson in more than a half-century.
First off—and set aside the Crimson’s relentless pretensions (must a student newspaper have a frickin “Guard”?)—congratulations to Glenn on his ascension. Second, I’d like to underscore just how remarkable that last line is: “the first black president of The Crimson in more than a half-century.” This is a milestone, but, in some sense, a sad one. I wrote about this on CP over the summer:
Consider the case of the Brown Daily Herald—certainly not unique—where I was an executive editor last year. The Herald holds the distinction of having had the first black editor-in-chief in the Ivy League, Wallace Terry, back in 1958. Even more remarkable is that Terry was just one of three black students in his class of 1,500. He went on to a celebrated career as a Vietnam correspondent for Time. Today, Brown’s student body is typically 7 percent black and 7 percent Latino. Yet a full half-century after Terry broke the Ivy League color barrier, the Herald has scarcely a handful of Black and Latino staffers out of a staff of over 100. That’s an appalling rate of progress, by any measure. Why has so little changed?
Well, along with the Crimson news, I’m happy to report that the Brown Daily Herald just announced its 118th editorial board (you know, because it’s a newspaper, not a castle) and it’s quite diverse racially. These developments can only mean good things for the future of race-related coverage at Brown and Harvard.
!
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An elite is an elite, regardless of skin color, and the sons and daughters of the elite tend to do just fine. The kids of rich African Americans tend to do just fine, without any significant prejudice to deal with.
I knew a bunch of guys who've gotten an incredible scholarship for minority students to spend a summer on Wall Street and get special introductions to the top hedge fund managers in town, etc. Any minority - anything but caucasian - will do. And so you have upper class kids of Indian, Chinese, African American background - all of whom who've come from upper-crust backgrounds and who haven't faced significant discrimination in their lives, who are at the top of their game professionally - competing for it. It's silly, it doesn't reach anyone actually affected by racial prejudice.
Stories like this indicate the blatant classism of so many progressives, as if the random success of an upper-class African American is supposed to be some sort of joyous beacon of hope to the people at the bottom, of all races, who are stuck mired in poverty.
For all the bitching about the NYT Style section and its unswervingly upper crust tastes on these blogs, I see these stories the exact same way.
No 'glass ceiling' of any note has been broken here. Not a damn thing of higher significance has occurred, just the same as I don't give a damn if there's a new Black ivy league president, just the same as I don't care if there's a new Black Fortune 500 CEO. You want a real, meaningful change? Let me know when we've gotten the African American and poor American rates of fatherless homes down to the national average. Let me know when we've ended the drug war's discrimination against the poor.
Until then, you're patting yourself on the back for ivory tower, elite-class bullshit that doesn't actually do anything for the people suffering out there in the real world.