Maybe some black folks can set me straight. Among historically black colleges, is Howard University the top of the heap? Is it Harvard? Or is that Spellman? Is Spellman more like Yale or Princeton? Is Morehouse more like Princeton or Stanford? I don’t really know how the pecking order works in terms of prestige. I just know that Howard University is a very good university, and Aqua Buddha was basically out of his mind to assume that Howard students didn’t know that the NAACP was founded by Republicans. Howard students are basically the smartest black kids in the country. They go to school in Washington DC. To think any of them are not intimately familiar with the history of the politics of race is beyond condescending. It’s downright foolish.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
I really think this is the most interesting and possibly the most significant story of the last week or so.
What Paul did is so conservative. It’s a perfect illustration of exactly what the essential problem is with American Conservatism and why it’s struggling the way it is in the current decade.
As has been argued exhaustively elsewhere (including all the “reality-based community” business during the Bush years), Conservatism isn’t very empirical. It’s not just that the rank-and-file constituents are ill-informed, or that the “Power Elite” tend to buy into self-serving concepts like the benefits of tax break for the wealthy; it’s an orthodoxy that (largely for propagandistic reasons) genuinely opposes intellectualism; data; knowledge; experience; “elitism.” It’s a dogma that has figured out a way to hold it against the President that he was a law professor at the University of Chicago.
And this is the direct result. When you theorize in a vacuum about America, you get things wrong. If you invent theories of intrinsic racial imbalance based on your own ignorance, you’re going to be in for a surprise when you navigate outside your immediate sphere. I think the Rand Paul fiasco is a perfect illustration of what’s wrong (as was, in certain ways, every single Mitt Romney “gaffe”) and I’m hopeful that it’s the beginning of a growing trend.
This is a perfect diagnosis of “conservative” idiocy. Although I don’t think that any growing trend of seeing the actual braindead state of today’s “conservatism” is likely to occur.
Paul thinks his nice “conservative” distinctions are just so reasonable and logical. Everyone he talks to agrees with ’em! Of course he and other NAACP-foundin’ conservatarians aren’t opposed to the Civil Rights Act, Heaven Forbid! They’re just opposed to forcin’ those provisions for non-discrimination in equal employment and public accommodation onto (white) private property bizness owners because…um… Freedumz!
Yes indeed, Rand, you only oppose the most critical operational provisions of the law, but you’re REALLY “in favor” of civil rights! As long as each white person gets to personally decide whether to grant those “rights”, they’re inviolable. Pretty persuasive, especially to people whose grandparents couldn’t eat breakfast at some crappy Southern diner or get a room anywhere. Let’s just say today’s conserva-Rands wouldn’t be helping to found any NAACP, ha-ha. That’s the true comedy of the situation.
Also, too, re-branding fail, I’d say.
Do you think Rand Paul knows what the N,A,A,C and P in “the Enn Double Ay Cee Pee” stand for?
I’m not so sure he does.
Rand’s audience wasn’t Rand’s actual audience.
Davis, if you’re right and Rand’s strategy here is for news of this meeting to win over whites, that’s even stupider a strategy than if this were an honest attempt at minority outreach. Besides, Rand’s told this group of young blacks that the Drug War is a wasteful, hypocritical sham. That would undercut a base-hardening strategy, no?
So I don’t think you’re right, although I have sympathy for wanting to believe that no one could be this hamhanded if they were making an honest outreach. I particularly loved Rand’s response to the student’s reaction to his totally patronizing NAACP question- “Sorry, just trying to determine what you know…”. Wow, just fuck that guy.
He has to win a Republican primary before he can run for the Presidency. Those two goals aren’t any closer together now than they were for Romney — and the elections still fall in the same order.
Howard University is “Mecca” in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir. (FWIW)
Howard, Morehouse, Spellman are the top tier.
You cannot write the history of Black people, post Civil War, without it going through Howard University.
Thurgood Marshall went to Howard U Law School.
Charles Hamilton Houston – the architect on how to defeat Jim Crow – was the Dean of the Howard Law School during Marshall’s time there, and built an entire stable of Civil Rights Lawyers.
Literally, post Civil War America cannot be written without Howard University.
The list of important/famous Black people that have some connection to Howard is tremendous….
from Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. (first Black to achieve the status of General in the Army)..to Vernon Jordan to the Late Senator Edward Brooke (whom Paul couldn’t even say his correct name)…to Toni Morrison..,..the list of Alumni from Howard who have made an impact on the Black community is huge.
You don’t go onto Howard’s campus, where the plan to dismantle American Apartheid was shaped, talking about
STATES RIGHTS.
Everything about Paul’s visit was offensive to the mission of Howard since its inception.
I just want to point out that Edward Brooke is still alive at 93.
sorry. I thought he had passed away
Nicely put, rikyrah. My great-great-grandfather was one of the founders of the medical school there.
Y’all are afraid of Rand Paul because he speaks Truth, regardless of Y’alls wedge issues based on irrelevant issues regarding Race, Gender, Sexual Orientation, etc.
I knew back in the Great Eighties that, ultimately, it’s basically Libertarians versus Statists…
Let’s Get It On!
Also, I’m going to start a Booman cowardice watch…I have no issue with The Mob erasing my comments…that’s what Mobs do…
When the Powers That Be ban me from commenting, that is sheer cowardice…What are you afraid of? Only Cowards ban free speech.
I’ll forgive the previous 20 or 30 acts of cowardice…let’s start the count at one…
May Steve Tao rest in peace…long live TonyD!
Acts of Cowardice now stands at one.
Go Braves!
Shoo, troll.
“Only Cowards ban free speech.”
Oh, try to get it right. No one is banning your “free speech.” You can say whatever you like (within the law) without government interference. However, no one is required to give you a platform to speak from and no one is required to pay any attention to you. If someone on a personal blog deletes your comments, that does not make the blog owner a coward, nor have your free speech rights been violated in the slightest.
Censor? Censor what? You don’t say anything. You never do. There’s nothing there. Mainly because you don’t actually know anything.
Your comments are just an online celebration and personal affirmation that “TonyD” is a conservative white male. “Let’s Get It On!” As if. Pretty boring and banal.
Troll, what’s your game plan?
Just curious, TonyD — how old are you? I think most psychologists would infer a mental age of about 12. That about right?
That must be an especially US curiosity, which I’d forgot about: a university associated with race, skin color or whatever you call it. ‘White’ people also attend these ‘black’ universities, I suppose. Or not? Their historical background is self-evident.
I’m of an age to remember that “predominantly” black institutions of higher learning were all that was available to blacks. Given that everything else about our society at the time was segregated, it’s no surprise that colleges were as well. And those mentioned in these comments are either in the South (Spellman, Morehouse) or in adjacent areas as Howard is in D.C.
Even today we have predominantly Black public institutions of higher learning, to my knowledge, all located in the former states of the Confederacy. Oh, they’ve the occasional “white” student, but their focus remains on their predominantly AA student population.
There are a number of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) located outside the old confederacy. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_historically_black_colleges_and_universities
They’re public institutions? Didn’t know that.
There have also been gender-based colleges, like the “Seven Sisters” of the Ivy League, where only females were admitted. They’ve mostly succumbed over the recent decades to the pressure to go co-ed, but in their time they offered a welcome refuge for women who wanted to pursue a rigorous education without being sidetracked and held back by pre-women’s lib societal pressures.
As a 1971 graduate of a Seven Sisters school, coming to it from a large public high school where being a brainy girl was a social death sentence, I found the freedom and encouragement to make the most of myself exhilarating and liberating. Being white, I cannot fully grasp what it must have been, what it must still be, to realize the liberation and exhilaration of the black university system, but I’ve got enough of an idea to celebrate its magnificent history and its continued existence and to be gobsmacked that even a Rand Paul could be so staggeringly obtuse.
Yes white people do attend Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). In at least one instance (and I’m sure there are others) at West Virginia State College in Institute, WV, the school went from being predominantly Black to predominantly white in only a few years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.
Having taught at two HBCUs, I can assure you that there are many white and foreign students of various backgrounds who attend those schools. Of course, just as at, say, Harvard where the culture is heavily influenced by the European ancestry of most of its students, so, too, the culture at most HBCUs is heavily influenced by the culture of Black America.
What I can’t get over is that he thinks it matters that the NAACP was founded by Republicans. That’s sort of like saying the Chicago Cubs are the champs because they won the World Series in 1908.
Clearly Paul was amazed to hear the news about the NAACP himself. And he knows he’s really smart and well-educated. So to find out that these Howard U kids know about it already is like finding out that they all had higher SAT scores than he did (I assume that’s likely anyway). That is, his own stupidity and ignorance has to be part of the story alongside the superiority of the students. It’s like Bill O’Reilly learning that Sylvia’s in Harlem has napkins and accepts credit cards and so on.