James Wagner’s “highest aspiration”
If James Wagner didn’t know it already, now he knows for sure: academics are smart people and don’t take fatuous bullshit and tin-ear privilege well – provided their ire’s up. And man people are pissed at him. A ton of writing is coming out on Wagner’s potentially career-ending debacle, and pieces like this and tressiemc’s work (see below) is laying out exactly why he has to go. Here’s Aaron Brady at New Inquiry taking a wrecking ball to Wagner echo chamber.
Sociology PhD student Tressie McMillan Cottom has an awesome piece on the Wagner trainwreck – “Higher Education Ideology Wars: Who Is The “Slave”?” Read. This.
“This is how you get to a place where you can offer up as an example of political expediency and virtue a debate among slaveholding political elites about the value of a black human life. You remove people and humanity from the equation, you identify with the victors who scored the most spoils, and you narrow the debate to those who would only debate with you how the pie should be divided and never where the pie came from.”
