That said, I feel I should respond to a few things here, as well as a number of threads in the discussion at Joe Schloss’s Facebook page.

I’m not on Facebook, so I didn’t see Joe’s piece. He forwarded it to me a couple days ago, and I’ve been catching up (actually, I’ve been taking a weekend, but y’know). As expected Joe makes some very reasonable, dissenting points — as do some of the commenters, including esteemed colleagues. That said, I still stand by the piece I wrote with Jeff. And I want to point out that I have encountered — via email, Twitter, Google Reader — as much affirmation as confrontation over this (despite what this comment thread may look like).

Let me make this clear: I don’t think that anyone should lie about their credentials. It does appear that Shante has, at the least, lied about the Ph.D., though I have also seen some evidence — both the “DR” I point out above, and in the Blender piece that Oliver mentions — which suggests that she isn’t, or hasn’t always been, so comfortable straight-up claiming a Ph.D. (Here’s the key bit of careful dissembling in the Blender piece: “I remembered a clause in my record contract that said Warner would pay for my education for life. I got a master’s from Cornell, went back to ­Marym­ount and became Dr. Roxanne Shanté.”)

Shante is an inspiring figure regardless of which pieces of paper she holds or not. (I am totally with commenter “a” above re: credentialism run amok.) And I agree that Shante will have to deal with what does seem like, as Joe puts it, a lie that probably “got out of hand.” Indeed, I think Shante now finds herself with an opportunity to craft an even more compelling personal narrative by facing this head on.

… which brings me to Joe’s most trenchant point:

A lie got out of hand. Probably unintentionally. If Roxanne Shante could really talk to me about how and why that happened and what she wishes she had done differently and what I as a human being can learn from that so it doesn’t happen to me, then I would accept her into my Ph.D. program any day.

but then I have to come back to Jeff (via the FB thread):

…we don’t think he’s shown anything other than the fact that Warner Brothers didn’t pay Shante’s tuition, and that she says she didn’t get her Ph.D.

This last point is serious, I agree. Does it justify crucifying her? I don’t think so. ….

I’ve been resisting the urge to get all ideological, but I really do think it matters **where** this piece came from. I’m not really joking when I’m talking about the diff btw rappers claiming murder records vs. rappers claiming educational records.

Shante is accountable to the community for her Ph.D claim. I hope Shante chooses to do the right thing and speak her deepest truths. But in the meantime, I have absolutely no qualms about raising questions about Ben Sheffner’s intentions and the editorial decisions of the Slate crew. That’s a key part of the truth we’re all searching for too.

This brings me to Oliver’s point above, which I do feel the need to address. He wonders whether Sheffner’s background is enough to invalidate his reporting if his journalistic techniques can be shown to be rigorous, ethical, and fair. Oliver doesn’t want taint-by-association or ideological position, per se, to indict one’s work. And I agree. As Joe put it, we should be wary of a scenario in which “who you are should be weighted more heavily than what you do”; but that’s not what’s happening here.

What we’re criticizing about Sheffner is NOT about WHO he is; we could debate until the cows come home, including with him, about whether he “is” a racist or an asshole or a conservative or a shill. (We all learned that from Jay Smooth, yes?) It’s PRECISELY about WHAT he’s done — not just in this particular piece but in all his writings and other work. What he’s done, for many years now, is to support major record labels and media companies and conservative campaigns at every (well paid) turn. To see his piece on Shante as apart from that work would be to overlook a great deal.

I just want to touch on another point from Joe’s FB thread — the following note from Mark Anthony Neal: “I think we all (in the broadest sense) want to believe Shante and this story about Warner, because it alleviates our collective guilt about the practices of the recording labels–and particularly women in the industry. ”

That helps to explain part of our sympathetic angle here. I mean, just look at the first paragraph of that Blender article for a pretty classic story of record industry done good exploitation –

I started rapping when I was 14, when Marley Marl asked me to record ‘Roxanne’s Revenge,’ a dis on U.T.F.O.’s hit ‘Roxanne, Roxanne.’ We lived in the Queensbridge projects, and he promised me Sergio Valente jeans to record with him. I never got the jeans, but the song was an overnight hit. After that, I went on tour for three years as a naive child. I had a baby [now in his 20s] with a man 18 years my senior. I didn’t even have milk money for my baby, but I raised him. Today, I wonder where the adults were.

But we could go on and on and on. I’m not terribly interested in continuing the debate at this point. I’m a lot more interested in what Shante has to say now. (I look forward to her appearance at Pop Montreal at the end of the month, where, incidentally, I’ll also be speaking! I only learned this a couple days ago, btw.) Instead, I’m going to leave it at this, yet another fine bit of reasonableness c/o our man Joe Twist –

I think we all pretty much agree on the basic premises: people shouldn’t lie about their education, reporters should be responsible, we should apply critical thought to the things we read and hear, writers shouldn’t be assigned to stories that they have vested interests in.

i understand the ironies of black representation and misreprentation you’re getting at by comparing her con to the “con” of rappers who pretend to be killers and gangsters

but the fact is that the whole gangsta identity trope has been around since the medieval era, with the wandering troubadours and minstrels who mythologized themselves as outlaws

the gangsta ethic/aesthetic/mythology of rap music owes as much to that tradition as it does to the realities of street life and is like a pretty fundamental trope in popular music and the marketing of its personalities

the fact that “Dr” – in quotation marks or not – Shante has been paid to dispense advice while purportedly NOT actually having a degree is a fraud far worse than simply entertaining listeners with stories of badassedness. and yes, maybe there was a wink all along, but in her bio it clearly states her credentials to dispense such advice.

so she claims to have earned her degree under an assumed name out of fear because of a domestic violence situation – she seems to have been given every opportunity to substantiate her claims and defend herself and chose not to.

and your reasoning or assumptions about the Slate writer’s intentions are borderline conspiratorial and highly flawed. simply because he is associated with the “pro-copyright” complex has nothing to do with this story, in spite of your conjecture that it does.

the other story inherent to this here is, i think, the culture of credentialism that has run amok… the certifications and credentials manufactured by academic institutions is its own kind of con, especially when it limits a worldly and intelligent woman like shante from speaking to kids about really important life issues from the authority of her own experience. my great-uncle was a lawyer-turned-social worker, who helped countless runaways in the 1960s without any kind of a special certification. today, you need the rubber stamp of an academic institution before engaging in that kind of activity and i’d be wiling to believe that this whole “Dr” personae is as much an act of fraud as it is a really brilliant comment on the injustices inherent to the classist academic credentialing system.

It seems to me that, for reasons I don’t understand, you simply feel the need to be Roxanne’s apologist. You’re right in pointing out that the lies involved in Watergate are on a much higher, socially relevant scale. That said, by your own reasoning, YOU would fault the Wash Post for “shifting the narrative” to Nixon’s alleged cover-up. YOU would pen a piece about Woodward’s ties to the Democratic party and call his motivations into question, arguing that Woodward’s allegiances are more important than the lies he’s uncovering. Getting back to the matter at hand, you betray your own biases when you call Roxanne’s alleged lies a “fib”. Her lies are much more than a fib because Shante has held herself out to the public as an inspirational figure: someone who beat the music industry system (which kicks low-selling artists to the curb) and – through hard work and dedication – pursued a professional degree. If these stories turn out to be lies, they dishearten and make cynics out of very people that could be very inspired by such hard work and sacrifice.

I’ve seen the YouTube clips where Shante speaks of her accomplishments: if those accomplishments are phony ANY reporter/blogger would be totally justified to expose them as such. And as to your last comment, even if her Dr title is in quotation marks on her site, in her interviews she gave no indications about her being “wink-wink” about her PhD.

Bottom line is that Shante’s alleged lies are an insult to all the true strong independent women that go back to school and get a degree. I know many of them; it’s tough task to go back to the books when you also have to work and raise kids. It looks like Roxanne fronted . . . don’t kill the messenger.

I’m not saying Shante is obligated to fix all these factual inaccuracies of her background but the frequency is unsettling. And I know Jeff feels differently but to me at least, that’s a big part of the story that can’t be invalidated by whatever Sheffner’s allegedly poor ethics might suggest.

One thing I would add though: the very tenets of intellectual freedom are premised upon the idea that our work should be free of any attacks upon it premised purely on ideological reasons. Either the methodology is rigorous or it is not. Either the facts are correctly stated – to the best of our ability – or they are not. And if those things have been done sloppily, or deceptively, then higher scrutiny is not merely warranted, it is mandated.

If you’re saying Sheffner’s background is open game, where does that leave the rest of us whenever we want to try to do something investigative? Do I need to start worrying about how my past employment or friendships might cast a shadow on the veracity of my work? I had someone once dismiss my academic standing on the basis of me having gotten my degree from an Ethnic Studies department where a certain professor taught. In essence, I was accused of being “in his pocket.” I thought that accusation was patently absurd. I don’t see how you and Jeff going after Sheffner’s background is much different at all.

Is that the intellectual world we should be encouraging?

Respectfully yours, Oliver

Hate to break this to you, but it’s not up to you to decide whether I did something political or moved the conversation. You’re but one dude, and, as you acknowledged, a “biased” dude at that.

I suspect that our ideological differences will prevent us from even continuing beyond these few comments. The whole point about the piece I penned with Jeff is that we don’t really CARE about investigating these allegations further. We find Sheffner’s motivations and ethics far more suspect than Shante’s.

Your worry for Shante’s patients strikes me as totally disingenuous. The sentiment for and testimony about Shante’s positive influence, in my opinion, outweighs too literal a pursuit of her current honorific.

Speaking of “DR Rox,” as her management company calls her, I need to thank you for pointing out that page. Did you notice that “DR” is in quotation marks (and, according to the Way Back Machine, has always looked that way) –

Makes one wonder: has she been wink-wink about this all along? If so, the Daily News Story was indeed misguided, but Ben’s piece was too.

I’m not in ANYONE’s pocket. I’m someone’s friend. Big difference.

You didn’t move the conversation forward – you commented on it. Big difference.

And you didn’t do anything political – you defended a liar. Big difference.

Journalists report on Shante. Academics just pay her to lie.