You Must be a Basketball Player

Rethinking Integration in the University

By Anthony Stewart  

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“Courageous and peerless, accessible and engaging, Stewart’s critique of the unseemly whiteness of the academy is a tour de force. His account of white academic privilege, homogeneity, cowardice, and hypocrisy with respect to matters of race and integration proceeds with keen insight and telling intellectual rigor. His analysis of white academia’s ‘theoretical’ evisceration of race and its practical and discursive actualities is nothing short of brilliant. The indictment of the monolithic and self-satisfied white demographic of academic departments of history, English, and philosophy (“the big three”) is wonderfully timely. Any scholar - especially any un-self-conscious white or black scholar - who fails to read Stewart’s work loses. This critique is a triumph of public sphere activism … straight out of Canada!” – Dr. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Distinguished University Professor, Department of English, Vanderbilt University. Author of Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era

Listen to Anthony Stewart talk about his book with Shelagh Rogers on CBC’s The Next Chapter http://www.cbc.ca/thenextchapter/

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Contents

  • Preface
  • Introduction: Reflections of a Tenured Black Sheep, or, How the University Looks to Me
  • Part I: The Myth of Merit
  • The Mythical Meritocracy, or, Is the Best Candidate Ever Simply the Best?
  • Ignoring the Pool
  • Lessons the University Should Not Be Teaching
  • Part II: Beyond the Myth of Merit
  • The Problem of Being and Only
  • The Problem of Toronto
  • Majoritarianism, Critical Mass and Institutional Literacy
  • Conclusion: If the Profession Looks Like this to Me …

Authors

  • Anthony Stewart

    Dalhousie University

    Anthony Stewart is a professor in the English Department at Bucknell University. His main research interest is twentieth-century African American literature and culture. He has articles accepted or in print on the work of August Wilson, Ralph Ellison, and Percival Everett, as well as “The Professional Sports Shell Game: A Black Canadian’s Reflections on Twentieth-Century American Sports History.” Dr. Stewart also teaches twentieth-century British literature and is the author of two articles on the work of George Orwell and of George Orwell, Doubleness and the Value of Decency. Dr. Stewart is at work on a book-length project on the work of Percival Everett as well as an article speculating on how the African American narrative might be changed-with the election of Barack Obama-from one that has long relied upon sports as a source of role models to one that would include images of public service.

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Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, the Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism under the Manitoba Publishers Marketing Assistance Program and the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, for our publishing program.