race to the top [2]

race in the academy

Just some interesting excerpts from two articles I stumbled across last week…. I don’t really have any particular responses to them right now, other than I do agree that they pose interesting questions that can’t be answered easily:

Is race just a scapegoat for the problems of society when we should actually be looking at class? Is race an excuse for us to not talk about economic inequality? Would it ever be possible to extricate class from race, as history has inexorably intertwined the two? And how does the ‘framing of the question’, the vocabulary of interpretation, the lens of analysis, or whatever you want to call it, alter our conclusions? [And perhaps also, if you could really eradicate identity politics, or racial understandings of society and history, what would that solve? By erasing race from our discourse, and insisting on avoiding it altogether, do we deny something valuable about ourselves?]

This first article in the Chronicle addresses Princeton’s new African-American studies department and discusses race in higher education:

My point, then, is that the commitment to African-American studies, like the commitment to Asian-American studies, is a commitment to describing our social problems in a way that will make all of us — teachers as well as students, alumni as well as parents — feel comfortable. It does this by racializing injustice at a moment when race is less relevant to injustice — at least to the injustice done by elite universities — in America than it has ever been. Rooks quotes Orlando Patterson as saying, "The doors are wide open for ... black middle-class kids to enter elite colleges." The relevant term here is "middle-class." African-American- and Asian-American-studies programs tell us that, from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our identity, at the very moment when, again from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our wealth and what the upper middle class sees on that television show is not the image of its own virtue (that's what make us comfortable), but the reverse face of its own success.

Another reason is that these programs are the places where questions about the meaning of race (and its handmaiden, culture) get raised. No assertion is more common in American intellectual life today than the insistence that race and class (and gender) are inextricably intertwined, and, in a certain sense, this is obviously true. Everybody has a household income; everybody's descended from somebody; everybody's male or female or some combination of the two. But one of the things that thinking seriously about race makes possible is not just the imbrication of race with class, but the disarticulation of class from race. We live in a society where the struggle to achieve racial equality is not the most profound of the challenges that face us. A program in African-American studies that helps us to understand not just the importance of race but its limits (not just its relevance but its irrelevance) will be well worth the money Princeton plans to spend.

This article in The Nation reviews the books The Trouble with Diversity:

The Trouble With Diversity is a bracing jeremiad, an all-out assault on the way identity in general, and race in particular, is used to organize society. It is also a thought experiment in which Michaels invites us to remove our race-tinted glasses and view the world in the class-based terms that, he argues, actually define it. For Michaels, there is no middle ground, no room for compromise: Race shoved class out of American consciousness, and he wants to reverse the situation. "We love race--we love identity--because we don't love class," he writes. The alternative is not to "love" class, since Michaels knows that class, unlike race, is distinctly unlovable. Class inspires no "National Museum of Lower-Income Americans on the Mall" in Washington, and no special holidays celebrating the culture of the poor (indeed, the "culture of poverty" is a sociological epithet); while some poor people inherit their poverty, we would all agree with Michaels that it would be perverse to think of it as their "heritage." The only area in which we are sentimental about poverty is in studies of working-class culture and literature, in which class is considered a form of identity.

Furthermore, Michaels accused contemporary champions of postidentity theory--those who envisage identity as contingent, performative and fluid--of employing the very racial essentialism they oppose. The more we emphasize culture and diversity, he scolded, the more we become mired in race. We inevitably answer the question "What should we do?" in terms of "who we are"--an appeal to racial/ethnic identity. The quest for identity is a vicious circle in which one can never escape the nineteenth-century notion of race. "For racial identity to become a project, it must turn to culture; for cultural identity to become a project, it must turn to race," he wrote.