Dr. Marc Lamont Hill and ‘Overrated White People’

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Front Page Magazine:

 

White privilege consists of being white. Black privilege consists of denouncing white people in ways that would be considered racist if the shoe were on the other foot.

Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, a man whose website modestly describes him as a “Professor, Author, Speaker, Public Intellectual,” has assembled a list of what he believes are the 15 most overrated white people to prove the point. Any college faculty member who tried assembling a list of the 15 most overrated black people would soon be the target of the most overzealous witch-hunt since Salem.

 

But if we were assembling a list of overrated black people, Dr. Marc Lamont Hill might just deserve his own place on the notepad. Hill’s bio is the usual intriguing world of African-American academia, complete with essays on social commentary in Hip Hop. Hill writes, so he’s an author. He speaks, so he’s a speaker. And he was once a weekly contributor to the Star Jones talk show, so he’s clearly a public intellectual. Best of all, he’s an affiliated faculty member in African American Studies at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. IRAAS has a logo that features two iguanas mating and offers all the usual navel-gazing courses that exist only to waste tuition money, except they’re African-American navel-gazing courses.

Dr. Marc Lamont Hill’s list of the 15 most overrated white people displays exactly the intellectual rigor you would expect from a man affiliated with such a fine academic institution. It isn’t a list that’s oriented around anything but race. To be on the list, you can be a playwright, a musician, an economist, a football player or a politician. You can be American or European. You can be alive in the present day or dead for 400 years. It doesn’t really matter so long as you’re white.