We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (5 page)

At the same time, while affirmative action programs were increasingly constrained by the courts and at the ballot box, public higher-ed technocrats tried to devise new programs to address continued underrepresentation of students of color. In Texas, Florida, and California, admissions processes were altered to include versions of what has been called the “Top Ten” method—accepting the talented top tenth (or fourth or some similar proportion) of the students of each high school.

As Justice Blackmun had predicted, such processes were not a perfect substitute for programs that directly addressed racial underrepresentation. Numbers of Black, Latino, and American Indian students dropped dramatically. Rapid demographic change alone would not guarantee that students of color would reach equitable numbers. On the contrary, in most cases, it only increased the urgency to find replacement plans for affirmative action. The innovation of the Top Ten plans was that they treated the best students from underfunded inner-city high schools equally with those from the well-funded exurban ones. Yet even after the states implemented these plans, most universities never returned to the level of diversity or equity they had attained before affirmative action programs were gutted.

Even worse, the plans were built on an irony that Thurgood Marshall himself might have found tragic. The Top Ten plans began with the assumption that high school students were already unequally distributed by race and class. Their success depended completely on school resegregation. The more segregated by race and income the state’s high schools were, the better state universities would be able to create freshman diversity. In 1978, one rightly might have been dismayed by the desperation of such plans. But in three of the most racially diverse states in the country, there were no longer many other legal options to reverse resegregation in higher education.

Diverse Like You

What would Justice Marshall have thought of the halftime show of Super Bowl 50, which featured Beyoncé rocking a militant tribute to the Black Panther Party, accompanied by the quick-stepping Bruno Mars, a Filipino/Puerto Rican/Jewish son of Hawai’i, all but eclipsing the white rock headliner band, Coldplay. Would he have felt it was just another performance of diversity for whites? Would he have noted that only one of the thirty-two NFL team owners and only one of the top twenty power brokers in the music industry was of color?
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People of color are allowed, even
required
to perform, and, especially these days on issues of race, to edify as well. “
Here you are now, entertain us.”
But are we allowed to lead?

Business leaders from Silicon Valley to Hollywood to Wall Street trumpet the virtues of diversity, but still face protests over the lack of Black and brown faces in their offices and boardrooms. Other whites, including many who would describe themselves as far to the left of Trump, show signs of diversity fatigue.
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As Anna Holmes has written of her white editors, who approach her to help them locate writers and editors of color, “I get the sense that for them, diversity is an end—a box to check off—rather than a starting point from which a more integrated, textured world is brought into being.”
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The group that has benefited the most from the revolution of opportunity has been white women. In 1960, male college graduates outnumbered female grads by 60 percent. Those numbers have now reversed.
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The gender pay gap persists, but during this ongoing “man-cession,” many white women have been graduating directly into the most in-demand jobs in the economy. Affirmative action has helped white women close the income gap with white men.

Yet white women share their male counterparts’ disdain for affirmative action, in similar numbers. The plaintiffs in all the major college affirmative action cases since
Bakke
have been white women. Younger whites are no more supportive of the program than older whites. Just one in three whites between the ages of seventeen and thirty-four support affirmative action, a negligible three percentage points higher than their elders.
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If the court made diversity for white people, it would seem it is naive about how the law produces equity and reproduces inequity—or worse, perhaps, it no longer believes in equity at all.

Not long ago, I was asked to give a keynote speech for a Diversity Week at a large public university in a large state, that is to say, a campus about to become “majority minority” in a state about to become majority minority as well. I got into a discussion with the director of the multicultural center about how the week had been going. She said she was concerned that very few white students came to any of the week’s events. They saw the word “diversity,” she said, and decided to skip it. “Diversity” had become another word for “them,” a new category of Otherness. Even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in its recent effort to address the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, changed its rules to increase “the number of women and
diverse members
.”
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And so diversity remains a premonition of racial apocalypse; a photo op and dash; a commodity conveying value; a marker of moral credibility, even fitness in the Darwinian sense; a term of corporate management; an offering of racial innocence and absolution; a refusal of protection to historically negated communities of color; a performance for entertainment or edification or exploitation; another boring lesson in tolerance and civility; a mark of Otherness.

But the fact that it appears as all of these things at once is yet another way to map the strangeness of this moment, or, to be more specific, the strangeness of whiteness. Demographic and cultural change has unsettled whites in their privilege. And so diversity presents itself as a lot of confused, contradictory things at once, each indexed to the confused, contradictory states of whites themselves.

Yet these are not the only meanings that diversity necessarily need hold. Is it possible to reimagine diversity separated from histories of exclusion? What would diversity that liberated everyone look like?

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE

ON STUDENT PROTEST

When Jonathan Butler began his hunger strike at the University of Missouri in November of 2015 to force President Tim Wolfe to resign, an action Butler said was precipitated by the president’s inattention to what student protesters called “racial violence and exclusivity,” he had been at the school longer than the administrator had.

President Wolfe had been at Mizzou for three years. Twenty-five-year-old Jonathan Butler had been a student at the university for seven. He had secured his bachelor’s degree there and was nearing completion of a master’s degree in education. He had been on campus long enough to believe that things were not going to get better unless something dramatic happened.

Butler told CNN, “I felt unsafe since the moment I stepped on this campus.” But rather than run, he chose to protest. “We love Mizzou enough to critique and to fight against the injustices we face at this school.”
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After Butler’s weeklong hunger strike, which climaxed when the Mizzou football team threatened not to play, Wolfe stepped down. But though the protests at Mizzou ended, the fire quickly burned outward from the prairie, fueled by the winds of social media, following the spread of the Movement for Black Lives from Ferguson the year before. In all, during the 2015–16 school year, nearly one hundred universities and colleges would receive lists of demands from students demonstrating for racial equity.

Predictably, both conservative and liberal pundits decried the new wave of antiracist campus activism. On the right, the
National Review
’s David French called them “revolutionaries” who sought “nothing less than the overthrow of our constitutional republic, beginning with our universities.”
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The liberal critique was even more bizarre, a barely coherent mix of free-speech absolutism (
hate speech is valuable because you had to respond to it
), pop-psych generational stereotype (
oh, you narcissistic, entitled millennials
), and “moderate” triumphalism (
look how crazy you extremists on the left
and
the right are!
).

At the
Atlantic
, Conor Friedersdorf called student organizers “intolerant bullies.” Todd Gitlin wondered in the
New York Times
why they felt so vulnerable and fearful. Thomas Friedman wrote, “There is surely a connection between the explosion of political correctness on college campuses—including Yale students demanding the resignation of an administrator whose wife defended free speech norms that might make some students uncomfortable—and the ovations Donald Trump is getting for being crudely politically incorrect.”
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To be fair, in a season of righteous student unrest, there were lots of examples of hyperbole. Pundits had a field day with Oberlin, where students protested botched dining hall sushi and bánh mì. But while those incidents were funny, they hardly threatened free speech. When administrators made suggestions not to wear certain culturally appropriating gear on Halloween, it hardly signaled the end of Western civilization. They might have made the day more tolerable, maybe even preemptively stopped some buzz-killing confrontations. Culture matters, context matters, and cultural context matters.

So were student protesters a mob of anti–free speech thugs or a confused mass of coddled dependents? Of course they were neither.

When students protested, it was not anti–free speech, it was the practice of free speech. Critics drew a direct line between protest and censorship, but speaking up about injustice is exactly what democracy is supposed to look like. What Jelani Cobb called “the free speech diversion” was meant to shut down the intended discussion.
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Over the last quarter century of student protest against racism, the act of calling out so-called political correctness has become a standard strategy of silencing. The legal scholar Mari Matsuda reminds us that racial attacks and hate speech, as well as the “anti-PC” defense of them, are proof that free speech is not a neutral good equally available to all. “The places where the law does not go to redress harm have tended to be the places where women, children, people of color, and poor people live,” she has written. “Tolerance of hate speech is not tolerance borne by the community at large. Rather, it is a psychic tax imposed on those least able to pay.”
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But even liberals who pride themselves on their antiracism have their own ways of trying to get the protesters to turn down, as it were. They draw false equivalencies—equating student protests against institutional racism with the ending of free speech, as if calling out racism were the same as issuing a racist call to extremism. At least conservative critics don’t pretend to be ignorant of how power works. Student activists rightly believe that they can build power only insofar as they band together—and then they can still be ignored, as they mostly always have been. Institutional neglect of racism and injustice is the exercise of power, the kind of power that refuses to notice and refuses to speak.

Protest of moral and historic force begins with people facing extreme vulnerability. For those who have been silenced, rising to the act of speaking is a perilously high climb indeed. For them, protest is not an expression of fear and doubt, but an overcoming of fear and doubt. And when it comes from those at the bottom, it can often be a profound proposition about how to make the world better for all. That’s the difference between the mob whipped into a frenzy by a demagogue and the protesters demanding that institutions address harmful conditions that negate their very existence. One excludes, the other raises up.

I have written elsewhere that while we are engaged in the culture wars, the most difficult thing to do is keep the “race conversation” going, because its polarizing modalities are better at teaching us what not to say to each other than what to say, better at closing off conversation than starting it. In this way those who believe that protesters are dangerous and those who believe they are merely misguided join together to end the necessary discussion the rest of us might want to have, in fact need to have. If the choice is framed as one of silence versus noise, in the long run most people prefer silence.

Here we might take a lesson from two people who helped to bring about the peaceful end of apartheid in South Africa. The first was a white Afrikaner named Roelf Meyer, who served as the National Party’s vice minister of police during the national state of emergency from 1985 to 1988. His job was to stop the demonstrations in the Black townships by any means necessary. But as he came to understand the suffering of Blacks and Coloureds under the apartheid regime, he underwent a profound change of heart, and emerged by the end of the decade as one of the key voices for change within the party. He became the chief negotiator for the de Klerk government to bring apartheid to an end, eventually becoming so respected and trusted that Nelson Mandela would later offer him a position in the new government.

As he engaged in this process, he was met with derision from fellow Afrikaners. They called him a traitor and worse. They asked how he could be so concerned with the freedom of Black people. They told him he had ruined his life and those of his fellow whites. And he responded that they had it exactly wrong. “I have liberated myself,” he told them, “and we have liberated ourselves.” He deliberately echoed Martin Luther King Jr., who famously wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
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