Rush is Right - Part 2

In my last post I said that I agreed with Rush Limbaugh that proponents of diversity position heterosexual white males as Pharaoh. That’s not the way Rush would put it, of course. He’d say it more directly: the “feminazis” and multiculturalists demonize heterosexual white males and blame them for everything.

That’s a more extreme characterization than I offer, and it takes no account of the fact that the Exodus trope *forces* diversity advocates into insisting that at least one category of human being must not and shall not be part of human diversity. But that insistence is needless, intellectually bankrupt, and in moral terms a failure of nerve.

As used within academe, “diversity” tracks back to the 1978 US Supreme Court decision of Regents of the University of California versus Allan Bakke. Bakke was a 35-year old white male who sought admission into the UC-Davis medical school, and when turned down challenged the rejection of his application as being discriminatory. He argued—successfully, as it turned out—that the affirmative action policy of the University of California—which in the case of the UC-Davis medical school reserved 16 seats for minority students—was unconstitutional. That seemingly knocked the props out from under affirmative action policies in general, and certainly in terms of academic admissions.

Justice Lewis Powell, however, was able in large measure to rescue affirmative action by arguing that the state has a compelling interest in securing the best possible higher education for students, that this requires exposure to a wide variety of life experiences and points of view, and that this in turn requires that universities should encompass a diversity of students. The lower court decision in favor of Bakke was thus affirmed in part but also reversed in part, and the reversal was mainly the result of Powell’s intervention.

Powell was by and large a conservative, and he would have thought it absurd that heterosexual white male students could not, by definition, contribute to the wide variety of life experiences and points of view he regarded as of such importance. But proponents of affirmative action essentially embraced Powell’s formula for the preservation of affirmative action while ignoring logical consistency in applying the underlying principle.

Over time, that has had expensive consequences, and needlessly so. When the Rushes of the world get exercised over diversity it is not about affirmative action, it is about the moral hypocrisy of affirming the validity of everyone’s point of view except that of heterosexual white males. I am not saying that Rush would not object to affirmative action. I would be highly surprised if he didn’t. But affirmative action is a tool to achieve a goal—that of diversity and inclusion—and few would argue any longer that minorities ought to be excluded from higher education. If affirmative action is a problematic tool there can be a rational conversation about what might be a better tool. But the villainization of white males, as Rush would put it; or consigning them to the role of Pharaoh, as I would put it, is not rationally defensible. It is an article of faith, and it simply excites the invocation of a countervailing article of faith, namely that the advocacy of diversity is a mere power play.

The conventional formulation of diversity is not only unwise, at a personal level it is offensive. I myself am a heterosexual male, and in that respect I’m barred from the world of diversity. But I also have bipolar disorder, which falls under the category of a disability, and persons with disabilities *do* contribute to diversity. My mental illness thus gives me an entry into the world of diversity. My contribution, however, is limited to my experience of mental illness: the project of diversity tacitly insists that this must be a core component of my identity. To the extent that I have life experiences and opinions that derive from anything other than mental illness, then within the realm of diversity they do not matter.

This takes us to my second area of agreement with Rush. I also agree with him that there is such a thing as “political correctness” and people who approximate a “diversity police.”

The charge of political correctness is thrown around far too freely. It is generally used as a way to instantly invalidate the viewpoint of any group that makes conservatives uncomfortable. I bridle when anyone uses the term.

But on some subjects a conversation that touches upon diversity simply cannot be had.

Within the realm of diversity the concept of “implicit bias” is now much in vogue. And justifiably so: it brings into bold relief the many ways in which our views and behaviors manifest prejudices that lie outside our conscious awareness—unless we make an effort to bring them to awareness.

The logic of the concept is that *everyone* is vulnerable to implicit bias. If this is true, it may help to explain why the groves of academe—of the humanities, at least—are overwhelmingly populated by liberals. It is possible, of course, that most conservatives do not self-select into the humanities. It is theoretically possible (although vanishingly unlikely) that most conservatives somehow do not reach the intellectual threshold required for admission to graduate studies or faculty appointments.

But implicit bias suggests that those already within academe systematically reject and exclude conservative voices—and therefore that this is a hypothesis that merits consideration. On several occasions, however, I have wondered aloud about this, and have been instantly shut down, always reflexively and often quite rudely. Certain aspects of diversity are very plainly policed, and in that respect, a self-appointed diversity police must, in the nature of the case, exist.

Rush is Right - Part 1

Once upon a time, a significant portion of Rush’s listeners were liberals, but those days are long gone. I’m probably one of few liberals who still hang in there, not because I enjoy it, but because Rush mirrors the views of a good many Americans, including some of my best friends. El Rushbo is worth an estimated $330 million; he didn’t acquire that fortune by challenging his listeners. He does not shape their opinions so much as articulate them.

Arguably there is an exception to this: Rush excels at playing upon the emotions of his listeners. His basic frame is that liberals are willfully, knowingly wrong. Liberals don’t have policy differences with Republicans. Rather, they are intent on taking your freedom and establishing a totalitarian regime in which everyone must embrace their ideology or else. This is a modern expression of a trope that has existed since the American Revolution. Historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed it “the paranoid style in American politics.” It is a continuation of the revolutionaries’ conviction that the British government was a threat to liberty. Thus, throughout our history, one’s political opponents have been depicted as a threat to liberty as well.

A basic tool in Rush’s arsenal is mockery. He not only excoriates liberals, he caricatures them, typically by impersonation. Apparently liberals habitually speak in an indignant, flustered tone. This mockery is especially pronounced when he touches upon diversity. He has a pet term for feminists—“feminazis”—but other groups attract his scorn without even the honor of a pejorative tagline. Essentially diversity has no purpose other than bashing white males and indeed, the “diversity police” have no tolerance for any viewpoint that does not wholly conform to theirs. Rush takes particular umbrage in multiculturalism and particular glee in mocking it.

There are nonetheless two respects in which I agree with Rush. In my previous posts I have outlined them. To begin with, according to Rush, in the cosmos of diversity’s proponents, “The only people that are racist are white men — and, even further, white Christian men.” This is an extreme formulation of an argument I have advanced that diversity’s dominant trope is the Exodus: the liberation of people long oppressed. This narrative requires a Pharaoh, and the role is thrust upon heterosexual white men. That is what once annoyed me about the work of Jamaica Kinkaid in "A Small Place" and Malek Alloula’s "The Colonial Harem."

One available response is to just suck it up and listen to what they have to say. A better response—although difficult to pull off—is to reject whiteness as a core feature of one’s identity. If you don’t think you’re white, you’re not going to feel targeted by the world’s Kinkaids and Alloulas. But it is really no wonder that a good many white males just get angry and resentful and switch off. Rush faithfully reflects their sense of alienation.

I’ll explore my second area of agreement with Rush in my next post.

I Know You Are But What Am I? Rush on Race

One of the obligations of maintaining a blog is that you have to post at a consistent rate. For a while I was publishing a discursive post every day. The trouble is, since my last post I’ve been too swamped with my regular work to fulfill my promise to get back to posting about Rush Limbaugh and racism. But consider this a down payment.

Rush’s characteristic take on racism is to declare that the proponents of multiculturalism are the real racists. A sample:

“You can give the proper definition to a lot of things. The proper definition of socialism? They [Millennials] don’t know what that is. They don’t know what the real definition of communism is. Millennials today hear ‘socialist’ and think that it means being social, being nice to people. Living in groups of people that treat each other fairly. That’s what think socialism is. They have no idea what it is. Same thing with racism. Racism now is any disagreement with somebody… By the way, the only people that can be racist in America today are white men.

“(paraphrased) ‘African-Americans or women, Asian men or women, Injun men or women? It’s impossible for them to be racist ’cause they’re minorities. They don’t have any power to hurt anybody with their racism. The only people that are racist are white men — and, even further, white Christian men. White Christian gay men are excluded because they’re gay, and gays are a minority and therefore they can’t be racist.’ It’s hideous, and it’s ridiculous. It ought to be… It should have become a joke by now, as frequently and as often as the Democrats are out there charging it. It’s lost whatever meaning it ever really had.

“There are some genuinely rotten people out there who are racist, and there’s many proper definitions of the word. Now, Al [a caller] was right that a lot of what is just rude and impolite behavior is being chalked up to racism. But racism, in its real form, is hideous. It believes in the inferiority of other human beings because of the way they look. It believes in the inferiority of people over things they have no control over. Real racism is despicable, it’s hideous, and it’s ugly — and this is what’s so outrageous.

“They’re just charging that any white person’s existence today is racist, and it traces to the founding of the country. That’s what they’re saying. I mean, there are college courses now on what type of where white people are being forced to take it so that they’re being forced to understand their born-with, inbred racism. They’re being taught there’s nothing they can do about it, that they are inherently flawed in this way. The only thing they can do is constantly apologize and make amends at every turn. Well, what we’re talking about here is not racism.

“And the racism that’s properly defined, there isn’t that much of it. That’s the real thing that irritates me. When you start talking about actual, real racism, the Democrats want you to believe it’s everywhere, and that it exists solely in one political camp: The Republican camp. Barack Obama was one of the biggest racists you can believe. Racism is also the active attempt to divide people on their human differences. I’ll tell you: Trayvon Martin was the first episode where Obama sought to divide.”

Left Cheapens Real Hate , Calls Ivanka's White Dog Racist

Jail Break - Part 2

Some years ago I chanced to attend a Pentecostal church whose membership was about evenly divided between whites and Blacks, with numerous interracial families. After the service I stood chatting in the parking lot with a number of men, all of whom happened to be white, married to African-American women, and thus the fathers of children of mixed heritage. We all knew that in our society these children would all be seen as African-American and treated as such—which would of course inevitably make them subject to racial discrimination. Thus these white men had a problem that most white men do not: the anxieties that go with raising non-white children in a society still suffused with white racism.

They knew that, although themselves recipients of “white privilege,” they could not impart this privilege to their own flesh and blood. Thus they urgently wanted a society in which the privilege was dissolved. They had no idea of how to accomplish this—not because they were unintelligent but because they knew the grip that white racism still holds upon our society. They understood its power—so powerful that even as individuals, they could not cease to receive its benefits. There was, as I suggested in my previous post, no place to leave their whiteness upon the altar.

What does it mean to be white? It means to be the member of a race, so what does race mean? In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars were confident that they knew. They went about classifying humanity into races and assigning characteristics to each. By the twentieth century, however, the problems with this “scientific racism” became apparent. Writing in 1942, a white Southerner noted that scholars of race could not even agree upon the number and composition of the races. “Thus one scholar makes an elaborate classification of twenty-nine races; another tells us there are six; Huxley gives us four; Kroebner, three; Goldweiser, five; and Boas inclines to two, while his colleague, Linton, says there are twelve or fifteen. Even my dullest students sometimes note this apparent contradiction.”

The races have no objective existence. They are invented, inhabited, modified, and destroyed. In the antebellum United States it was common to hear scientists speak of Slavs, Teutons, Celts, Hebrews, Alpines, and Mediterraneans as separate races, though nowadays all such individuals would be considered Caucasian or white. The historical melding of these groups gives the game away, for the success of “whiteness” resides in its political and social utility, and each of these groups was able to place itself on the same political and social footing as the Anglo Saxons who long dominated the United States. Whiteness is ultimately about power, pure and simple.

I own a white skin, and I have no idea how to divest myself of the privilege that whiteness confers. But I *do* have it within my ability to recognize that this privilege is unfair. I may be stuck with it, but I can choose not to make it part of who I am. I don’t have to think of myself as white—or I can at least try not to think of myself as white. By this reasoning whiteness is no longer about privilege. It is about inhabiting a kind of prison.

When I think of this, I think of a passage from “John Brown’s Body,” Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem about the American Civil War. It is in a context far removed from the prison of white identity but it conveys a sense of what is involved with any form of psychological imprisonment.

The passage occurs in a soliloquy in which Lincoln’s thoughts range across the course of his life and psyche as he awaits the outcome of the battle of Antietam—which, if a victory, he has decided will bring the moment to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Toward the end of the soliloquy he imagines himself in a psychological prison, and speaks of languishing in “the blind darkness, … the lonely cave // That never hears a footstep but my own // Nor ever will, while I’m a man alive // To keep my prison locked from visitors.”

Lincoln then asks:

What if I heard another footstep there,
What if, some day—there is no one but God,
No one but God who could descend that stair
And ring his heavy footfalls on the stone.
And if He came, what would we say to Him?

Here is where the poem, for me, captures the tragedy of making whiteness the core of one’s identity:

That prison is ourselves that we built,
And, being so, its loneliness is just.
And, being so, its loneliness endures.

Still, there may be hope of a way out, a jailbreak:

But, if another came,
What would we say?
What can the blind say, given back their eyes?

No, it must be as it has always been.
We are all prisoners in that degree
And will remain so, but I think I know
This—God is not a jailor….

Jail Break - Part 1

It’s time to bring this series of posts in for a landing so we can return to El Rushbo and his gleeful embrace of “Barack the Magic Negro.” This requires a post longer than usual, so please bear with me. I have divided it into two parts. Even so, this first part is 1,100 words in length.

The project of multiculturalism, or to put it another way, diversity, implicitly reflects the Exodus narrative—the release from bondage of a people long oppressed. The “long oppressed” includes a long list of people: African Americans, Latino/Latinas, Native Americans, women (aside from conservative women unsympathetic to multiculturalism), persons who identify as LGBTQ, and persons with disabilities, to name a few. That narrative requires a Pharaoh, and white males are assigned that role whether they like it or not. I myself do not like it, although I am prepared to tolerate it.

But plenty of white males--and for that matter plenty of white females--have had it up to here with playing Pharaoh. Which is a big reason they listen avidly to Rush Limbaugh and his hordes of imitators. It’s also a big reason so many of them voted for Donald Trump. For years they have howled about “political correctness,” although, whether or not they know it, they deploy the phrase as a way to invalidate any opinion they find uncomfortable. Instant invalidation is, indeed the go-to tactic of aggrieved whites. Black Lives Matter? No, ALL Lives Matter. (No shit. But the force of meaning of “Black Lives Matter” is “Black Lives Matter Too.”)

To be sure, political correctness does exist. Some people, no matter their ideology, are temperamentally fundamentalists, and political correctness is a reflection of that. But it’s not nearly as widespread as it’s cracked up to be. What *is* widespread are the millions of people who honest to God really have been oppressed. And historically their oppressors have been white. White heterosexuals, to be precise.

I have just turned 60, and I am old enough to recall a time when this oppression was unabashed, when heterosexual whites still openly regarded this country as a country of, by, and for heterosexual white people; and non-white and/or non-heterosexual people had better know their place. That African Americans should “know their place” was a byword, and, with some allowance for socio-economic class, it applied to Hispanics just as forcefully. As for individuals who nowadays self-identify as LGBTQ: they had no place. They were regarded as perverts, pure and simple.

The incomplete triumph of the modern Civil Rights Movement changed that, sort of. But white racism didn’t disappear, it just took another form. It went underground—often so far underground that many whites didn’t realize that it continued to exist, alive and well and residing in themselves, manifested in a myriad of ideas and actions that were racist but operated outside their conscious awareness.

Aside from being self-aware about it, I am not so different from those whites. I was born in North Carolina during the final years of legal segregation, and although my parents were not virulent racists they reflected the racism of their time and place. They breathed it in and out as naturally as they breathed oxygen. Inevitably, they raised me to breathe it in and out as well. Infants and toddlers figure out the world with astonishing speed, and one of the first things I learned is that my skin was white and so I *belonged* in a way that other kids did not.

This did not mean that I hated Blacks, nor did my parents, and we did not consider ourselves to be racist. Yet that was a mistake. Because racism is frequently vicious and ugly, it is too easily conflated with racial hatred. In fact, however, the essence of white racism is the preservation of “white privilege;” that is, the dominant position of white power and values. That privilege can take a variety of forms, many of them so obvious that, paradoxically, whites overlook them completely.

The term “white privilege” is unfortunate. Although innocuous in academic circles, once released into general discourse it drove many whites straight up a wall. “Privilege” had strong associations with inherited wealth, and when used in that way most whites, accurately, could say that it did not apply to them. “White advantage” is a better term. Yet even this requires explanation.

“White privilege” echoes “male privilege,” a common term in the feminist lexicon. But In 1988 feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh published an essay reporting on the result of a thought experiment in which she replaced “male” with “white,” and considered the ways in which her white skin gave her the sort of unearned advantages that feminists had long ascribed to males.

Mulling this over, McIntosh compiled a list of forty-six ways in which her whiteness operated, on an everyday basis, to make her life less burdensome. A sample: “I can if I wish to arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time. . . . I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed. . . . I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented. . . . I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to ‘the person in charge,’ I will be facing a person of my race. . . . My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races. . . . I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.”

To repeat a point, whites take such advantages so much taken for granted that they operate outside conscious awareness. McIntosh herself reported that in order to remember her list she literally had to carry it around with her.

By this reasoning the essence of white racism is not hostility toward other races but rather the preservation of the advantages that go along with owning a white skin. This imperative is so deeply engrained in our society that the advantages are nearly impossible to relinquish even when one wishes to do so. There is seemingly no altar upon which to place one’s whiteness.

Ha! I Found You!

Many years ago I attended a colloquium on multiculturalism in the classroom. It was run by an expert from Midwestern State University, an African American professor of education who was probably in his mid-fifties. At one point the professor asked a question about how best to deploy multicultural perspectives and offered a menu of four possible responses. Then he went over each response, one by one, and asked us to raise our hand when he mentioned the one that sounded best to us. I didn't listen carefully enough, didn't realize the menu was loaded, and raised my hand at one of the "wrong" responses. In fact, it happened to be the worst of the wrong responses.

The professor pounced. He asked me what I taught. History, I said, and when he asked what sort of history, I said military history. He began to explain to me, in pretty heavy-handed fashion, about the deficiencies of the response I'd chosen. It was clear to me that it never entered his head that I might have chosen the response from anything less than a deliberate, committed, reactionary position. His tone of voice became mocking. He addressed me as "General" several times. All in all, he did the best he could to make me feel like a fool. And he really seemed to enjoy doing it.

Other than the way he treated me, I thought his presentation was useful, and when I ran into him afterward I made a point of thanking him. I don't know that I was being gracious so much as I wanted to indicate that he had been wrong about me and I was really on his side. He could barely bring himself to grunt at me in response. I had the distinct impression he didn't want me on his side. I had the impression that although he had spent his life struggling against the bigots of the world, he rarely had the chance to unload on one. He had enjoyed unloading on me, and that was the value I had to him: someone to unload upon.

I could easily multiply examples of this. And since we tend to generalize most freely from our negative experiences, I could easily forget the numerous times I have spoken to proponents of multiculturalism who were as gracious as this professor of education proved malignant.

Still, a great deal of writing that deals with colonialism, sexism, racism, and the like--particularly some of the earliest and most seminal work in the field--is politically very charged. It has an adversary, the white male, and usually it assumes that all white males are alike. If it leaves me as a white male feeling insulted and invisible, both at the same time, I might consider that it is often written by people who have felt insulted and invisible their whole lives. I can suck it up for the time it takes to read a book or an article.

Gut Reactions

Whence did my gut reaction to Alloula's “Colonial Harem” arise?

Alloula plainly saw me--a white male--as being in effect the colonial photographer. That was obvious to everyone in the seminar. The book was a polemic against people like me. Although I happened to be reading his text, I was not his intended reader--except in the limited sense that he considered people like me the "sender" of "this immense postcard" he was returning.

Alloula also saw what he was doing as political, an act of resistance--as Alloula put it himself, an "exorcism." The people he was resisting, presumably, were also people like me.

So there I was, willing to read Alloula and hear what he had to say, only to discover that Alloula's response to me was a book-length diatribe against me. And not even a diatribe addressed directly to me, but rather a diatribe about me with me present. Reading Aloulla was like being insulted and treated as invisible, both at the same time.

As irrational as this gut reaction might be, I think it's worth taking seriously, because I don't think I'm alone in having it. I think white males have this gut reaction constantly when they dip into works concerning colonialism, racism, sexism, etc. I think it's tiresome to be constantly positioned in the role of Pharaoh, and I think a white male has only three responses to being positioned in that fashion.

The first is to turn away, to reject, to roll one's eyes, to scoff.

The second is to deny that one is the target, by agreeing with and trying to identify with the Alloulas of the world.

The third is to take it--either because one thinks one deserves it, or because one accepts it as the price of hearing what the Alloulas of the world have to say.

The first reaction is probably the most common, and it fuels the widespread exasperation, on the part of conservative white males (and for that matter conservative white females), with the whole project of multiculturalism.

The second reaction is common among most white male academics. And after all, why not? They didn't create the colonial project--or sexism, or racism--so they can as readily choose to identify with the oppressed as with the oppressor. Which would be fine except that ordinarily they benefit from a power structure that favors white males as much as if they actively identified with and supported it. Which makes the second reaction a cheap and easy game.

The third reaction is the hardest, because it obviously requires accepting a position that is unpleasant. This is tough enough when one is merely reading a book or article. It's much more difficult when one actually engages face to face with the Alloulas of the world, as we’ll see in my next post.