I was reading a post on a popular history blog (by "popular" I suppose I mean it updates regularly and seems to have commenters, although who the hell knows that the words "popular," "history" and "blog" mean in that order in the present day).
I was reading a post on this blog about the decline of history as a profession. As someone who flung himself bodily from the path of history grad school and sometimes wishes he hadn't (despite knowing it was the right decision), the topic is of some interest to me. I then made the mistake of reading the comments. You see, the OP had made a passing reference to the controversy over a small essay by the president of the American Historical Association, an Africanist at UW-Madison named James Sweet. As one might expect from someone who is the president of a professional organization, he's older; it is relevant to the linked piece and the entire contretemps that he's white. The blogger linked the same piece I did above, but rather than talking about the now months-old controversy, talked about the president of the AHA bemoaning, in the _Atlantic_, the allegedly impending death of the scholar to scholar monograph rather than the truly dire straits that the historical profession finds itself in.
The piece does, indeed, include a link both to the essay that started the whole affair, as well as links to a range of responses -- some clearly dashed off, some more considered, some broad, some focused. You're free to read them and agree or disagree in whole or in part. I encourage you to; I certainly did.
I feel like I have to give you this background, gentle-but-entirely-notional reader, to really give you the full context for why seeing someone in the comments describe what happened as "the mau-mauing of James Sweet" blew my hair back. Imagine reading a piece on an intramural but, frankly, relatively low-stakes fight (if you followed the link above, you may have already done this). Then put yourself in the shoes of someone who looks at that and thinks "yes, the best way to describe what happened is to conjure the colonial bogeyman of unhinged Africans attacking the white man" and then expects to be treated as a good faith interlocutor. Perhaps, more in sorrow than in anger, he thinks at his keyboard that the other side has already abandoned reasoned discourse. Maybe he's just an asshole.
