CommonQuest:
The Magazine of Black and Jewish Relations
"Mixing it up on Campus"
Editor's Place
All Mixed Up by Jonathan Rieder
There’s much to make one yawn
in all the yammering about diversity
in higher education. And much to vex.
The subject careens between boring pieties
and overheated posturing. As for the
heat, we all know about the mindless
assaults on Western ideals of rights
and reason, the huddles of like-minded
students who betray the values of pluralism,
antiSemitic speakers who have garnered
an audience on black campuses.
We need to say right off that terrible
things have been carried out in the
name of "diversity." Too often
our campuses have been close-minded
places. Years ago, a class of mine at
Swarthmore College nearly devolved into
a brawl after we read Bill Wilson’s
The Declining Significance of Race.
"How dare this white reactionary
say there’s no more racism,"
students asked? Forget that Wilson never
said that, that he’s a black man
of impeccably decent inclinations, that
Swarthmore is a Quaker institution where
people are not supposed to duke it out
in class. Apparently certain things
were too impolitic even to be broached.
That is why Nat Hentoff’s reminder
about "multicultural contempt for
free speech" [p. 40] is so urgent.
In the past decade, people have burned
books, and bully boys—and girls—of
all persuasions have cloaked their repressive
tactics in the mantle of "difference."
A strain of reactionary separatism hovers
around the fringes of "diversity"
and thereby mocks and corrupts it.
Alan Bloom thought he had a fix on
closed minds and wrote a classic book
about it, The Closing of the American
Mind. The moment I read the section
on rock ‘n’ roll, I knew something
was amiss. According to Bloom, rock
had displaced books as the key cultural
medium of virtually all students. Worse,
it was a "barbarous expression
of the soul," epitomized by "the
pubescent child whose body throbs with
orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are
made articulate in hymns to the joys
of onanism or the killing of parents."
Talk about know-nothing. A man who couldn’t
tell Led Zeppelin from Van Morrison
was leaping wildly from scraps of lyrics
to the inner mind of an entire generation,
pronouncing on its devilishness without
even the qualification "some"
before young people.
The ironies were almost too perfect:
Bloom was guilty of the same things
he tarred the students with: lax thinking,
narcissism (the projection of his feelings
onto his subject), obsession with raw
sex. All in all, the failure of rationality
from a man who trumpeted the lofty ideals
of Greek philosophy.
A similar sloppiness ran through Illiberal
Education, Dinesh D’souza’s
voyage through this territory. At least
D’souza provided some evidence
of illiberality: the University of Connecticut
warning that sexual or racial harassment
includes "misdirected laughter,"
the Vassar student government’s
effort to ban the student newspaper
when it described a black activist as
"hypocrite of the month" for
his reported reference to "dirty
Jews." These things were undeniably
bad, but so was D’souza’s
method, which was pure slap and dash.
To sustain his claim that affirmative
action had produced racial animosity
at Berkeley, he spoke to a handful of
students and quoted a poem by a black
student, "Your time is running
out, white boy." I would have flunked
him on a basic methods exam.
Too many of the jeremiads against diversity
fail to answer a basic question: When
you pluck vivid cases from the vast
system of higher education, with millions
of students and remarkably varied school
cultures, does the part stand for the
whole? Social scientists call this guessing
the "availability heuristic."
That’s a fancy way of saying that
perfectly lucid people, when they don’t
have time to gather up the facts, rely
on "available" clues. Unfortunately,
available usually means flamboyantly
so—Khalid Muhammad at Kean College,
the infamous Water Buffalo case. The
problem isn’t just of non-representativeness;
these spectacles transfix the observer,
obscuring more subtle forces swirling
beneath the surface.
Many conservatives rightly point out
that some left academics certify certain
groups as worthy of respect and not
others. The Left may parrot the decreasingly
modish jargon of "transgressing
boundaries" and of not "exoticizing"
others. But these strictures are not
applied across the board: There are
good others-–blacks and Latinos—and
not-so-good others—evangelical
Christians, white ethnics and Orthodox
Jews.
In many campus circles, using the word
"pathology" in reference to
poor blacks and Latinos will land you
in trouble; you can invoke that forbidden
imagery to depict people who believe
abortion is immoral as maladjusted kooks.
The metaphors we use to describe people
who believe things we don’t can
be weapons, then, a way for the "open-minded"
to close their minds against those they
think are close-minded: A reasonable
person couldn’t believe that.
Liberal cosmopolitans have often resorted
to the rhetoric of unreason. Most notoriously,
Richard Hofstadter branded populists
and fundamentalist Christians "paranoids."
In rejecting provincialism, the secular
intelligentsia seemed to be applauding
its superior capacity for ambiguity.
Meanwhile, they were operating with
the same either-or thinking they ascribed
to fundamentalists. They just replaced
sin and salvation with the psychiatric
lingo of sickness and health.
That’s only one of the sleights
of hand we need to guard against in
discussing "diversity." Actually,
two warring sensibilities vie to claim
the word multiculturalism: One is separatist,
fabricates mythic history and is hostile
to empathy; the other carries forth
the ideals of tolerance, robust debate
and empathetic universalism.
Despite all the mumbo jumbo of race,
class and gender, the impulse to expand
the canon and recover the experience
of women, blacks, gays, Latinos and
other excluded groups has mainly reflected
the spirit of universalism, the same
democratic spirit that has inspired
the incorporation of new groups into
American life. And, against all political
correctness, in recent years that empathetic
impulse can be glimpsed in sympathetic
studies even of those supposedly decertified
others—fundamentalist Christians,
evangelicals, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews—many
carried out by feminist, liberal and
even leftist types allegedly eager to
certify only their own kind!
One of the worst aspects of identity
politics is the refusal to engage, the
timidity that masquerades as belligerent
assertion of one’s own kind—like
the emergence of the word twinky among
Asians: yellow on the outside, white
on the inside.
Twinky has the same restrictive twist
as when blacks challenge the authenticity
of other blacks by saying they are not
black enough. This narrowness can take
exquisitely Talmudic form, as when a
convert to Orthodox Judaism is rejected
by the arbiters of Orthodoxy as a "jean
skirt girl," meaning she’s
not observant enough.
But is it always better to mix and
mingle? When I walk past the "kosher
kitchen" at my college, should
I be alarmed: What are they talking
about? Are the students at Jewish tables
defilers of Western Civilization? It
may be our expectations are askew. The
emphasis on individualism in America
has long missed, as Garry Wills once
put it, the Baptist fervor and Methodist
morals that energized it. We could add
the richly communal visions of Jewish
humanism, the African-American prophetic
tradition and the ideal of Catholic
community that have qualified the official
culture of individualism.
It’s also easy to forget we’re
dealing with kids, who are prone to
acting out. So we may not want to rush
to judge complex moments whose meaning
only becomes apparent over time. In
Andrew Glassman’s account of black-white
relations at a Manhattan private school
[p. 56], a black student, when asked
why she was going to a black college,
had retorted, "To get away from
[white] people like you." Now,
from her vantage at Spelman College
she asks, "Did I really say that?"
Abrasion and awkwardness are natural
at the transition-points of mixing.
Many black and Latino students, often
crossing class boundaries as well, feel
skittish or wounded as they immerse
themselves in a mainly white world for
the first time.
A black student from the Crown Heights
section of Brooklyn once left my lecture
scowling. This followed a discussion
of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill in
which the woman reported, "In my
neighborhood we consider Anita Hill
a traitor for taking down a black man.
We believe we have to support our black
men." A number of white women,
mainly feminists, insisted this was
a narrow way to cast the issue.
I happened to walk out with the woman
and asked what was wrong. Refusing eye
contact, she said, "Those white
girls were disrespecting me." I
told her I thought they were respecting
her, by taking her seriously and sharing
their opinion. She gave me a look of
withering sarcasm. "I see, I’m
sensitive, right?"
A charged moment, to be sure, one we
could nicely code as "racial chip
on shoulder." Only it was followed
by a period of engagement in which the
student forcefully injected her views.
In countless ways she enriched the course,
opening the minds of her fellow students
by challenging them with a view from
Crown Heights.
Like American society as a whole, our
campuses have absorbed a great deal
of change in a short period. In the
eye of the storm, it’s easy to
lose one’s sense of direction.
A bit of history provides a compass.
Jewish fear of the goyim didn’t
abate over night. Catholics were long
lambasted as practitioners of popish
identity politics; today nobody thinks
the Irish threaten American civic culture.
And who got in a tizzy about identity
politics when enacted by white jocks,
preppies and fraternities? Surely our
campuses are more open-minded than when
they were relentlessly unitary in complexion,
religion and gender.
I’m struck by the mostly nuanced
ways the students in this issue of CQ
are figuring out how to balance attachment
to clan with participation in the larger
order: the black student who distinguishes
between the legitimate cultural borrowing
of the Beastie Boys and inauthentic
white posers; the Filipina who embraces
the fusion of flip hop (Filipina hip
hop); the Jewish women in search of
the right blend of Jewishness—whether
religious or cultural—and feminism;
the Latina who wants the freedom both
to affirm her identity and not be consumed
by it.
This mixing is about as American as
it gets: In the process of scrambling
boundaries, these students are refiguring
not just their own identity but that
of the nation as well.
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