While I was working on a postdoctoral fellowship some nine years ago, a senior faculty member at the host institution gave me some advice that I didn’t fully understand.
We were meeting over lunch, and I was explaining to him that I had been making real headway in my attempt to transform a dissertation into a publishable book manuscript. As I relayed my informal progress report, the scholar listened and nodded approvingly. Then he leaned over and told me — in no uncertain terms — that I had better not let anyone tenure me “with just one book.”
There was a third person at the table, and that individual’s subsequent comment quickly swung the conversation to a different theme entirely. But I never forgot the stern recommendation, even if I didn’t completely know quite how to make sense of it.
Many anthropology professors that I knew had received tenure with one book and several articles. So, I didn’t understand why I should be motivated to up the ante for myself. Why would I want (or need) to do that?
Replaying that suggestion over and over in my head for several days after our lunch, I decided that I would heed it, even if I wasn’t confident about everything that was being implied/invoked. My gloss on this caution ended up resting on the specter of affirmative action.
Although many scholars (in “book” — as opposed to “article” — disciplines) have received tenure before their second book was completed (sometimes, even before the first one was actually available in stores), this senior scholar was advising me against allowing for any obvious dismissal of my academic/professional accomplishments as a function of the racial “double-standards” argument. The point was simple: Try to make the tenure issue as unambiguous as possible. There will always be detractors (and they’ll find other things to use against you — the quality of a publisher, etc.), but don’t give them easy arguments to make by not producing.
I internalized the advice, which meant that I made sure to finish the bulk of my second book manuscript before I even allowed myself to begin entertaining questions about when I might go up for tenure.
But why mention any of this now?
Well, all the recent talk about Obama’s current success in the campaign being predicated on his race highlights (in very different terms and on an obviously larger stage) similar “double-standards” claims.
What does it mean to say (as some pundits have) that if Obama were a white politician without such an “ethnic” name that he wouldn’t even have made it out of the primaries?
Is the point to say that it is somehow easier for African-Americans (especially those with “Muslim-sounding names”) to ascend to the presidency? Easier, say, than a white guy named Joe or Jefferson?
I know many graduate students who have had to negotiate the same kind of opportunistic (and self-serving) dismissals from their peers: “If you weren’t an under-represented minority [URM], you wouldn’t have gotten that amazing job. You don’t even have to be anxious about the job market, not like the rest of us. Your race will do all the work for you.”
But there are tons of URM’s in the academy who don’t get rewarded with the choicest faculty posts. Do the research. Moreover, how hypocritical is it to flag the academic job market’s supply-and-demand rewarding of some Ph.D.-holding URM’s while not thematizing the plethora of nonmeritocratic reasons why they are underrepresented in the first place? (Unless one thinks that the difference is all about genetics — or a “culture of poverty” that fully accounts for the numbers.)
To say that Obama is doing as well as he’s doing simply because of race is, by definition, racist. I don’t mean that in a name-calling kind of way. I’m not trying to make a claim about people’s hidden intentions or harbored hatreds. Racism is a form of social reductionism, taking complicated social phenomena and pretending that they are easily understandable with recourse (simply and exclusively) to race. People can make that move on the political Left and the political Right. It is a way of simplifying a complex social world that doesn’t nearly do justice to the real causal calculus that explains our contemporary realities.
