Public university stands behind ‘white supremacist’ professor for defending colonialism
A public university that evaluates job applicants with 44 questions about “cultural competencies” is standing behind a professor facing a professional blacklist for making “the case for colonialism.”
Scholars and students around the world are calling for peer-reviewed Third World Quarterly, which is published by the multinational academic publisher Routledge, to retract the September article by Bruce Gilley, associate professor of political science at Portland State University, and replace the journal’s editors.
. . . Gilley analyzes the history of Western colonialism and compares cases of countries before, during and after colonialism in his article. He argues that the practice has merit and in many cases has benefited colonized societies in spite of its known downsides on native populations.
A week after the article was published, it began to make the rounds among activist circles, prompting outrage on social media and planned protests in response.
Vijay Prashad, an Indian historian and former Edward Said chair at the American University of Beirut, threatened to resign from the editorial board of Third World Quarterly if it did not retract the article.
Nathan Robinson, who founded Current Affairs as a Harvard PhD student two years ago, penned an editorial lambasting Gilley, accusing him of falsifying history akin to “holocaust denialism.”
In Gilley’s article, he argues that the anti-colonial stream of thought prevalent in academe is historically revisionist, contradictory and shortsighted.
Gilley criticizes it in particular for ignoring the destruction committed in the name of anti-colonial nationalism. “In our ‘age of apology’ for atrocities, one of the many conspicuous silences has been an apology for the many atrocities visited upon Third World peoples by anti-colonial advocates,” he wrote.
The article also makes a case for “recolonization” in limited and specific contexts, such as public finance and criminal justice, for weak states with consenting populations. “Remaking a local police force may be possible without a share of sovereignty, but cleaning out a thoroughly corrupt national criminal justice system requires external control,” Gilley wrote.
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At least two petitions have been launched – both by activists outside the United States – calling for “The case for colonialism” to be retracted and the journal’s editors replaced.
Jenny Heijun Wills, director of the Critical Race Network at the University of Winnipeg, started a petition on Change.org Tuesday accusing Gilley of holding “white supremacist” views. The petition has garnered more than 6,200 signatures as of Sunday night.
Here's the
abstract:
For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts. The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it. Anti-colonial ideology imposed grave harms on subject peoples and continues to thwart sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in many places. Colonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance; by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch.
Talk about attacking a sacred cow. Reminds me of how the left responded to James Damore. To some people, there are some thought paradigms that are just off limits to questioning, regardless of evidence. And this is being passed off for learning in our colleges.
