You are wrong, Professor Hough

Political Science Professor Jerry Hough made the following problematic statements in a May 2015 blog comment on a New York Times editorial: “Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration. The amount of Asian-white dating is enormous and so surely will be the intermarriage. Black-white dating is almost non-existent by blacks of anyone who dates a white.”

In the same comment, Professor Hough made other dubious assertions, objecting to messages that “tell blacks to feel sorry for themselves” and claiming that “the Asians were discriminated against at least as badly as blacks” historically in the United States. He has extended that line of thinking, as quoted in a Guardian article that same month, to argue that Asian-Americans “didn’t feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard.” In the Guardian piece he is quoted as saying, further, “I absolutely do not think it racist to ask why black performance on the average is not as good as Asian on balance, when the Asians started with the prejudices against the ‘yellow races’ shown in the concentration camps for the Japanese.” I leave it to others to pick apart this line of reasoning, including whether or not the views Professor Hough has expressed on these subjects are racist.

Here I want to focus on his original comments about naming and intermarriage simply because, as an anthropologist with some expertise on the subjects of self and identity, I think I can say something useful on these topics. Professor Hough has complained on HuffPost that “no one has said I was wrong, just racist.” My argument is that he is wrong. His assertions display his ignorance about ethnic identity.

In a Nov. 12 Duke Chronicle Q and A article, he has doubled down on these remarks and expanded upon them in directions that reveal more about his thinking. In the same article, he dismissed the original statements as just “unfortunate sloppy writing on my part”; in particular, in an email to the Associated Press in May, he expressed regret over “the sloppiness in saying every Asian and almost every black.” I do not accept this excuse; since the comment was a written one, Professor Hough had ample opportunity to reconsider and edit it. Moreover, other published niblets of his thinking suggest that these remarks are not just sloppy writing but consistent with the professor’s larger worldview.

I wish to make—or if someone else has published a similar thought, reinforce—two points. The first and most basic point is that identity is multi-faceted and complicated. African-American identity cannot be reduced to isolated patterns of naming and intermarriage. Moreover, in addition to lumping together many different cultural groups who come from the vast continent of Asia, Professor Hough’s contrast of African-American with “Asian” identity overlooks some practices quite inconvenient for his argument. For example, Chinese-American parents often send their children to special Chinese schools so that they can learn Chinese and know Chinese values. Should that count as a “lack of desire for integration"? I have known Indian-American students at Duke whose parents arrange marriages for them, and who themselves willingly participate in this practice, as long as they have veto power over the final choice of mate. They are happy to have their parents’ and other older relatives’ seasoned advice and assistance in this important life decision. These unions are arranged with other marriageable Indians, either from India or already living in the United States. Should this count against these students’ and their families’ “desire for integration”?

Secondly, it is nowhere written that ethnic enclaves are required to integrate into the host society. In many parts of the world they do not. In the Andean highlands of Ecuador, for example, where I cut my ethnographic teeth, residents of each tiny community refuse a broader identity by wearing ponchos in a style, color and embroidery that signifies their belonging to that small community as distinguished from others. Of course this very local expression of identity in dress has much to do with the history of these Quechua-speaking communities, back to the Spanish Conquest, the Inca Empire and beyond. If many African-Americans are insistent about having a distinct, separate and in many ways oppositional identity, this also has to do with their history, and in large part, specifically, with the history of discrimination against them. Professor Hough’s views, which overlook the many significant contributions African slaves and African-Americans have made to mainstream America, would seem to be animated instead by “a melting pot America” metaphor in which every group is to strive for total assimilation.

To the point about African-American history, Professor Hough writes in a letter to a parent, published on HuffPost, that he is “very disappointed in the lack of progress that I have seen” in the recent past, adding that “60 years since Montgomery is a long time to say that the current black experience is the result of them not being voluntary immigrants when almost all but Caribbeans have roots that go back before the Revolution. A very, very long time.”

A very long time, indeed, for the persistence of discrimination against African-Americans—which has changed over this time but not abated—and for the consequences of that discrimination for African-American identity. The implication that African-Americans should be over it by now, because they arrived (as slaves) so very long ago, under-estimates the enduring effects of slavery and Jim Crow after it. And the use of the Montgomery bus boycott to mark the time when this discrimination presumably ended erases the last 60 years of its continuation—red-lining, incarceration, police shootings and other profound assaults on African-American life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.