Producer, Over To You

Programme producer/creator 

and

BBC Washington DC correspondent

Dear Leeanne, and Rajini Vaidyanathan,

As a follow up to your excellent series, America in Black and White, this current human interest story is something the BBC Worldservice might wish to take up, in Outlook or World Have Your Say or Out Source  or any of your other human interest and socially educational programme slots. However I have not cross checked with the protagonist in this eye opening and urgent narrative, whose experience is indicative of backlashes rarely revealed in purportedly liberal-rational academia, especially after an era of intellectual supremacy dominating our White House in the person of an African American executive.

Professor George Yancy, a widely influential and highly respected senior philosopher at Emory University, recently completed a deeply challenging and thought provoking editorial in the New York Times through its vehicle that reaches American intelligentsia across the board, in an online column called The Stone.  I am not personally acquainted with Prof. Yancy; I am only aware of his far reaching seminal contributions to various areas of academic philosophical narratives.  The link is below.

In consequence of his thought provoking open letter addressing the persistence of racist attitudes which are largely denied, overlooked or conveniently forgotten especially by the liberal white community in charge of critical thinking and cosmopolitanism in our culture.  

The frightening lash back has frightened the entire philosophical community in the United States, and abroad.

You might wish to illuminate this situation by contacting Prof. Yancy because it illuminates the degree of racism in which American culture is steeped.  It is not just a matter of historical residues, or a reflection of America's right wing political fringe, nor is blatant racist hatred a figment of provincial and unsophisticated law enforcement enclaves; these actual conditions prevail throughout American society.  

The academic philosophical community is endeavouring to formally object to these conditions of service that we all share with Prof. Yancy; but it would probably surprise BBC listeners to understand what the 'ivory tower' incorporates, tolerates and sustains by keeping silent. Up until now.

Nor is this phenomenon a reflection of anything particularly provocative about Prof. Yancy. If anything he is mild mannered and innocuous.  You in the World Service may have been aware of racial attacks on a professor of literature at Columbia University a couple of years ago.

The powerfully honest and frank letter to the editor as an opinion piece of Prof. Yancy can be accessed here:

A  sample of the hate mail which is only a fraction of the threatening insults and attacks on Prof. Yancy, supplied here with apologies so you can see I am not exaggerating, is here: