from NWSA Journal Volume 9, Number 1FORUM: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
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"Diversity" in Adversity: The Retreat from Affirmative Action
SUSAN FRAIMAN
University of VirginiaIn 1994-95, under various practical and ideological pressures, the University of Virginia engaged in an exercise of self-justification involving tiers of committees and reams of reports. The ostensible purpose of this nine-month "self-study" was earnest introspection and improvement; the actual purpose was to meet-or at least to rhetorically finesse-the state's demand that we slash our budget. I was on a committee whose very charge was basically at odds with the straitened economic and political circumstances that called it into being. The name of our tired cadre-at once anachronistic and euphemistic-was the "Diversity Committee." This paper is an anecdotal meditation on the word "diversity" and other terms marking what is, generally speaking, a retreat from the antiracist and antisexist goals represented by affirmative action.
Affirmative action was, to be sure, imposed on reluctant universities by a federal government itself under pressure from multiple insurgencies. Insofar as it addresses the college-bound or college-employed, affirmative action is limited, moreover, by its concern with groups relatively enabled in class terms, about which more later. It has nevertheless stood not only for programs but also for structures of feeling on behalf of the dispossessed, especially women and blacks. Incredibly, it has offered a more or less sanctioned language of resistance to the legacies of male privilege and racial segregation upon which schools such as Virginia were founded. For some time now, as we are all well aware, this language has been fighting for its life.
My story of political backsliding mapped discursively begins in the 1980s with the fall from "women's studies" into "gender studies." Though I certainly recognize the emergence of important work on masculinity and sexuality under this rubric, I would stress the rather obvious fact that gender studies has flourished as radical politics in the United States has stalled. It is therefore mostly bark with little of the political bite that feminist scholarship had early on when it was sponsored by a clamorous popular movement. "Gender" today is a reasonably respectable category of analysis, not any angry mob; it has no constituency, and it sucks as a rallying cry.
African American studies, meanwhile, has suffered a concomitant shift. Here the problem is less theoretical work on "race" than the blandly inclusive rephrasing of "race" as "ethnicity." Whether one is black or white, Chinese or Celtic, quadroon or Anglo mutt, the cachet of a colorful and miscegenated ethnic past is now generally available. I realize this attack may seem rather blunt, and I hope it's not taken either as a repudiation of theory or as a failure to savor our achievement in institutionalizing once scandalous areas of study. Nor do I mean to deny that work on men or white ethnics may be helpful in prying open and disrupting the machineries of sexism and racism. But I still believe that white men-once gendered and ethnicked along with everyone else-are more easily able to pass as politically correct, in spite of what remains their pervasive domination.
If programs redressing specific historical wrongs particularly against women and blacks have fallen off in recent years, their decline (as well as partial success) has been heralded in the '90s by such slippery terms as "multiculturalism" and "diversity." "Diversity," as I discovered in committee, may actually enable the neglect of these groups and these wrongs in favor of a cheerful cosmopolitanism. In this case, as black members gradually disappeared in dismay, the Diversity Committee's complexion became paler and paler until-my own half-Asianness notwithstanding-racial diversity as far as we were concerned came down to three Spanish-speaking but evidently white men. There was also a white man representing the field of Asian art history and still another specializing in affirmative action law. And then there was the genial guy from the business school, qualified only by his disarming innocence about matters of race and gender. No wonder that such a committee responded to a past and present of virulent racism and sexism by proposing to spice up the admittedly homogeneous university population with members of the "international" community. My problem here is not, of course, with venturing outside the United States but with the fact that foreign individuals and countries were viewed as usefully diversifying regardless of their historical privilege either locally or globally.
In all fairness, the committee's ultimate report had more political intelligence and edge than this account might suggest, yet its attraction to a well-meaning but depoliticized internationalism is arguably symptomatic of our times. To take another local example, the theme of the 1995 Virginia Festival of American Film was "U.S. and Them." Its admirable intention was quite self-consciously to address, among other things, the disturbing wave of hostility to immigration cresting in California's Proposition 187. But while anti-immigrationism today is obviously underwritten by racial animus, the festival (whose funding was in jeopardy) pondered an only vaguely racialized "them"-so that Canadians and various Europeans were positioned as the "Other" no less than Mexicans, Iranians, or Vietnamese. The two kickoff films, for example, were Howard Hawks' Scarface (1932) and Paul Wagner's Out of Ireland (1994), which made the salient point that most of us were immigrants once but also, in effect, equated white ethnics with more recent immigrants of darker hues. Another disclaimer: I would not wish to ignore the fact that some whites have been, historically, more equal than others. In Old World and New, the stigmatizing of Italians, Irish, and Jews has often, moreover, been phrased in explicitly racial terms. In the context of today's racial politics, however, the othering of white Europeans coexists with a dilution of sympathy for those emigrated from Haiti as well as those descended from slaves. I'll go further: I am troubled by my own administrative practice of allowing undergraduates to use some courses on Joyce and other Irish writers in a postcolonial context to satisfy our English department's so-called "nontraditional" requirement. Needless to say, a postcolonial perspective on Irish texts is valuable, but in this economy of scarcity and given that many departments still condescend to American not to mention African American and Native American cultures, recuperating Joyce is not high on my list.
Even when postcolonial work concerns not Ireland but India, and taking for granted its political and scholarly integrity, there are several ways in which, like gender and ethnic studies, this work may be seen not only to resist but also to reflect today's chilly clime. My first point concerns the identity politics of hiring. However clear I am that fine scholarship on a given group may be done by those outside it, it remains true that when oppositional work is being done by a person who also happens to be underrepresented in the academy, hiring this candidate intervenes at two levels, institutional as well as intellectual. With a few exceptions, however, those younger scholars purveying the new postcolonial scholarship are not themselves postcolonial subjects, and they can therefore be hired without challenging the existing demographics of the university community. My second point about postcolonial studies is that it tends to displace racial struggle away from our own backyard and onto spheres in which the players are reassuringly remote. Much as we in the United States are pointedly implicated by the views of someone like Edward Said and notwithstanding the brilliance of recent writing by scholars like Anne McClintock, postcolonial accounts still generally feature Britain as archvillain and model oppressor, and their focus is thus on anti-imperialist uprisings not in Los Angeles today but in other places and (most often) other times.
The pattern of embracing revolution elsewhere in lieu of paying attention to race and gender matters at home was discouragingly echoed by still another committee I was on. Here a group of feminists planning events to commemorate "25 years of coeducation at UVA" was tempted to allow a program on Palestinian women largely to replace any attempt at addressing domestic race relations. The gesture of representing non-Western women was so satisfying, so conducive to self-congratulation as to obviate any need to think further about race. My intention, once again, is not to minimize the value of this gesture but simply to question its adequacy in response to intractable civil rights issues-and their effect on women specifically-here in the United States. What I am noticing time and again, in short, is an emotional transaction in which African Americans get traded for, or at least subordinated to, a blur of diverse but distant peoples from around the globe.
In a similar end run around race issues of the most immediate and pressing kind, this committee roundly rejected a suggestion by one of its members (hey, I'm not bitter) to crown the year's events with a conference on women and welfare. If there's one item in the current political lexicon even less redeemable, even more untouchable than "affirmative action," it is "welfare." In fact affirmative action as a conference topic got thumbs up from this committee. University women, it was argued, have a personal sense of urgency about the issue of affirmative action. Who, by contrast, would leap to attend a conference on welfare? Well, it could be answered, anyone who cares about the economic upshot of wife abuse; or anyone concerned about the underremuneration of women's waged labor and the invisibility of domestic labor; or, more altruistically in this case, anyone angry about the demonization of poor women and poor black women above all. In spite of arguments that might plausibly link all women to the issues raised by welfare, for this committee, "welfare" apparently symbolized something outside our political ken while "affirmative action" connoted women in higher education, women in the professions, women like us. Nationally, by contrast, the so-called Committee of One Hundred is an example of women in academia and the professions rallying behind those less elite women directly targeted by antiwelfare legislation. Yet even the name of this important lobby suggests, in its exclusiveness, a climate in which potentially radical groups tend to yield, at least strategically, to dominant paradigms.
My final example returns to current uses of "diversity" and suggests once again the doggy readiness of this term to go home with whoever feeds it. The occasion was a brainstorming session convened by UVA's Women's Center with the goal of updating its agenda for the twenty-first century. Expecting the usual conspiracy of women in jeans sprawled on secondhand sofas, I was surprised to find a power gathering of the pragmatically chosen, most of them well-heeled and eager to put the right spin on our product. "Diversity" was frequently invoked and offered, at least, an acceptable code for those urging the marginal interests of, say, lesbians and African Americans. But the word was no less available to those arguing the opposite-that the Women's Center needed a makeover precisely to dispel its aura of marginality and broaden its appeal to the standard-issue white heterosexual. "If the Center wants to be truly diverse," this argument ran, "it needs to reach out to the mainstream."
I know that at the present reactionary juncture, one may feel inclined to defend "diversity" and other residual signs of feminist and antiracist struggle in the academy-witness my own hours of committee work under this banner. In another mood, for another audience, I might well want to argue the continued, if impaired, vitality of movements originating in the '60s and '70s. We know now, too, that the sometimes essentializing politics of those movementshad their own attendant risks. Nor do I mean to discredit the wealth of left scholarship being done today, a body of work with which I strongly identify. What I have tried to emphasize here, however, are the ways much of this work is being framed-now as opposed to a decade ago-so as to temper the threat it might otherwise pose. My hope is to point out some of the dangers of "diversity" in times of political adversity, and to ask what price we pay for misnaming our goals.
Correspondence should be sent to Susan Fraiman, Dept. of English, Bryan Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903.
A version of these remarks was originally presented at the 1995 MLA Convention in Chicago as part of a Women's Caucus panel on the "academic economy."
Toward Diversity
ESTELLA LAUTER
University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh"'Diversity' in Adversity" is a meditation on the political retreat that is signaled by the current shift away from the rhetoric and practice of affirmative action and toward the rhetoric of diversity with its less certain practices. Susan Fraiman's claim is that "inclusion" under the "diversity" model is deliberately construed as broadly as possible in order to avoid facing the results of American history. The essay is beautifully written and arresting. It certainly brought me up short to look at the possible costs of adopting the new rhetoric, and to the extent that these costs are being paid across the country, I am completely sympathetic with Fraiman's critique. My own experience, however, has been that both rhetorics and their accompanying policies are useful-and the rhetoric of diversity may produce better results.
On the campus of the large state university where I taught until two years ago, for example, I heard constant mutterings about affirmative action, and when the policy was enforced by an administrator in a specific search, these noises became loud and bitter. I remain grateful for affirmative action policies, since I suspect on the basis of my job searches in the sixties that as a married woman with children, I would not have had a career without them, but the results for other protected groups on my campus have not been impressive. After twenty years of affirmative action hiring, in 1994 the full-time faculty of about 120 still included only one African American and a couple of other persons from protected groups who claimed no connection with their heritage. The numbers of tenured women hadn't changed much either. In my view, women's studies was the finest jewel in the affirmative action crown on my campus, since the many women hired in entry-level positions taught wonderful courses about women. A system-wide "diversity requirement" actually accomplished more for minorities by making it possible to create and sustain an American Indian Studies Program, hire two American Indian faculty members, and design a course sequence for education majors that virtually required instructors of color.
The University of Wisconsin's "Design for Diversity," crafted and implemented in part by Donna Shalala before she joined the Clinton administration, was an ambitious initiative to benefit students, recruit minority faculty, and change curricula, and I would be the first to complain that it was never fully realized. A few faculty members and administrators, however, were able to use its provisions effectively. At the Green Bay campus in the late 1980s as the rhetoric of diversity began to take hold, a group of six Euro-American faculty members won the final battle in a fifteen-year war to establish an American Indian Studies Program. At first, they could staff the program only by team-teaching in their separate areas of expertise; since there was no money to pay three professors to be in a classroom at once, each received credit for the course every third time it was offered. Faculty Retraining Grants from the UW System provided some money for research, films, slides, and honoraria for guests from Native communities. The campus moved fairly quickly to require one course in ethnic studies, andwithin three years enrollments in the introductory American Indian Studies courses (which began with 25 students the first semster) had grown to 80 each semester thereafter. It soon became obvious that the program needed a director, and a national search found a highly qualified Oneida-Stockbridge woman who was just finishing her PhD.
The College of Education responded to a similar directive from the Department of Public Instruction and sponsored a two-semester program in diversity for its majors. One course was formatted as a 180-person lecture on discrimination with weekly discussion groups led primarily by students of color; the other, on cultural diversity, consisted of six separate sections of 30 students each led primarily by instructors of color. The first seemed to me to be a giant headache for the instructor and discussion leaders for only a small gain, but the second made such a difference in student learning that any growing pains were bearable. Within a couple of years after it was offered, one could teach, say, an upper-level course about African American literature and some students in the class would actually be prepared to see the diversity within black culture, to say nothing of their improved understanding of American history.
The secret of the second course was its team-teaching arrangement. The university couldn't afford to assign six full-time faculty members, but it managed two or three plus three or four instructors of color-usually American Indian, African American, and Latina-and it found money once more for guest speakers from nearby communities. These instructors and speakers increased both the level and the speed of everyone's learning about cultural diversity. The instructors usually came from staff positions elsewhere in the university (e.g., Student Services, the American Intercultural Center) or from similar staff positions at neighboring institutions. Weekly meetings ensured ample time for exchanging knowledge of texts, cross-cultural interpretations, classroom problems, and university politics; the faculty took responsibility for all administrative tasks, including xeroxing. After the first time I participated in the course, I said that I had never learned so much in one semester, and later that I had never seen a single course make such a difference in the education of students.
At roughly the same time the American Indian Studies Program and the cultural diversity course were taking shape (1986-94), the university needed a creative writer on short notice and hired an Ojibwe poet with an MA degree as a temporary lecturer. When the chancellor offered an extra faculty position to the first department to hire a person from an American ethnic minority, we were able to convert the temporary position quickly and put the poet on a tenure track. It was harder to convince some members of the literature department that she should also teach American Indian Literature as part of the AIS program, but the numbers won out.
Also during the same period, when my department began to offer Great Books in one-credit modules to attract students who needed an odd number of credits for graduation, I insisted that Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Paule Marshall be included. A colleague and I had offered African American Literature under the title of Humanistic Values through Literature, a course accepted for General Education credit, since the early 1980s, and we knew that our students would have no difficulty seeing the greatness in these selections!
None of what I have described would have happened, I contend, without the rhetoric of diversity. Our chancellor presented the principle of diversity as a logical alternative to the "coverage" model that had kept the "canon" in place; as good faculty members, of course, we had a responsibility to be "inclusive." One could say, "Well, we teach the Irish Renaissance; shouldn't we also teach the Harlem Renaissance?" It was for some a license to explore a different model of education; and for some who had been attuned to issues of color in American society, it was a crowbar to pry up the facade and alter the structure of academic relationships. What we did at Green Bay was little enough, but the effects continue. The colleague who founded the cultural diversity course went on to secure NEH funding for two years of conversations with the community on these issues. The colleague who directed the AIS program left the university to become a director of the Oneida Museum, but she has convinced other Oneidas to teach for the university, and she is working on an anthology of materials from our introductory course that will soon serve as a text for others.
Little as it was, it did not happen without cost. I certainly used up all of the political capital I had accumulated during my twenty-three years on that campus in the scuffles over these programs and courses to advance diversity, and those difficulties are not over for my colleagues. On balance, I would not trade the experience, but I can understand why faculty without tenure, or even many with tenure, would not elect to run this gauntlet. For various reasons I will not discuss here, I went south fifty miles to another campus of the same university system in 1994.
In my new position as chair of the English department at UW Oshkosh, a more conservative campus that did not seize the diversity initiative in the 1980s, I have found that affirmative action has more teeth left than I thought. One of my first tasks was to propose that we make three new hires to begin filling vacancies created by retirements. I suggested a position in American ethnic literatures (now filled by an Asian American male), one in postcolonial literatures (filled by an African male), and another in linguistics (filled by a woman). We have since got three more women on board and are hoping to hire an African American for next year. Because of the way affirmative action statistics are compiled, the department was not actually under pressure to hire ethnic minorities, but the existence of the affirmative action policy definitely helped to make the personnel committee more receptive to the issue of diversity in making its decisions. Active pressure to hire women, by contrast, gave us the courage to go for three.
The rubric of diversity remains useful as well. Some odd things had happened in this department when it had only one or two women and four Asian men on its faculty of twenty-five. Courses on Chinese, Japanese, and Indian literature had been approved, for example, but only at the lower level for the General Education requirement in "non-Western cultures." Also, an upper-level course on gender had been approved, along with Detective Fiction and Science Fiction, but it did not count for the major. The implication was that these were ephemeral topics-not for serious study. One of the first things I asked the curriculum committee to do was to change the ruling on all of the upper-level courses in the name of diversity-in the broadest sense of the term. We have now introduced a requirement for at least one course in women's, postcolonial, or American ethnic literatures in a new major. We have also secured approval for African American and American Indian courses as part of the system-wide ethnic studies requirement and have helped to revive the African American Studies minor.
As these examples indicate, I think there is no necessary contradiction between the construction of diversity as recognition of differences among protected American minorities and broader constructions. When teaching the cultural diversity course at Green Bay, I found that a student's exploration of ethnicity through an interview with a Euro-American grandparent often increased his or her understanding of the differences in our histories within the United States. As a case in point (and a negative example), I often told students about my father-in-law, whose bitterness stemming from the prejudice he faced as a young man made him scratch the identifying part of his German surname off tombstones and family Tournverein medals, and blinded him to the very different situation of African Americans who were denied their heritage by slavery and forced to remain segregated by Jim Crow laws.
If diversity is a sound principle, as I believe it to be, it is valid in many realms of thought and experience, and we may learn it in one to apply it in another. In biology, the term means the range in variation in a group of related species. The dictionary offers the instructive word "multiformity" as a synonym. To understand diversity, I think, one must be able not only to see things or beings that appear different as related species but also to appreciate that their multiformity represents a valid range of possibilities. It is a complex task of "seeing as" coupled with "seeing multiply" that requires practice. Small children often do it well, but by the time they get to college, they have learned to value other tasks more highly; chief among these is finding the "right" answer. Only a few students elect, say, creative writing classes, where seeing one thing as another is required, practiced, and even graded, and fewer still elect specialized studies in animation, where one can see form concretely being multiplied by motion. Our colleagues' resistance to diversity has been instilled by the very educational system that now uses the rhetoric of diversity. We will need to find a lot more ways to practice the tasks of "seeing as" and "seeing multiply" before the pervasive American misunderstanding of difference is resolved. Nonetheless, since the problem has been given a generic name, we may be able to work on its solution in many arenas at once.
The tactics employed to avoid any encounter with significant forms of diversity that Susan Fraiman describes are present on both of my campuses, but I do not think they are necessary corollaries of the rhetoric of diversity. While Fraiman's experience with that rhetoric has been negative, mine has been positive-so far. Still, I am glad to be forewarned about the dangers that may lie ahead; I will become more alert.
Fraiman's piece intends to leave the reader with a question, What price do we pay for "misnaming our goals"? In the case she describes, this description is fair; "diversity" is a code word for finding less expensive ways to achieve the appearance of equity without its substance. But if one continues to press for justice instead of smoke and mirrors, the label "diversity" is not a misnomer. It is by turns a logical alternative to the canons of unity, a license, a crowbar, a direction for change, a tool, a principle, a theory. I hope that Fraiman's essay will promote constructive thought about how to practice that theory better rather than further recriminations against women academics who already feel the pressure of not having done nearly enough.
Correspondence should be sent to Estella Lauter, Chair, English Dept., University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, 800 Algoma Blvd., Oshkosh, WI 54901.
On Being the Object of Concern
RANU SAMANTRAI
Claremont Graduate SchoolI write from California, shortly after the passage of Proposition 9, the so-called Civil Rights Initiative that bans state-supported affirmative action programs. In California, debates regarding affirmative action and diversity, particularly within educational institutions, are urgent and acrimonious. In July 1995 the University of California Board of Regents voted to end affirmative action within the University of California system (SP-1: "Resolution of the University of California Board of Regents Adopting a Policy 'Ensuring Equal Treatment' of Admissions"). And a year ago Californians passed Proposition 187, the "Save Our State Initiative," which excludes undocumented aliens from state-funded services and bars their children from attending public schools. Here, perhaps more obviously than in a state such as Virginia, questions of diversity and justice are intertwined with definitions of America, and with the physical and symbolic borders that delineate legitimate and illegitimate claims upon the nation.
Susan Fraiman correctly points out that in far too many instances "diversity" has become the alibi for the failure of American universities to fulfill the antiracist, antisexist intention of affirmative action programs. In these instances, she argues, diversity is opposed to affirmative action, for it allows us to substitute a "cheerful cosmopolitanism" for the difficult history of American racial and sexual politics. More specifically, Fraiman writes, "What I am noticing time and again, in short, is an emotional transaction in which African Americans get traded for, or at least subordinated to, a blur of diverse but distant peoples from around the globe" (42). Insofar as American universities are shirking their responsibility to honor the spirit, and not only the letter, of affirmative action policies, I wholeheartedly agree with Fraiman. Hence I offer the following comments in a spirit of solidarity and not criticism. However, I am also weary of the oft-articulated opposition created between African Americans and everyone else. Despite Fraiman's good intentions, the opposition she invokes is false and divisive. It is also seductive, for it holds out the possibility that African Americans can be assimilated into the genuine Americanness defined by white Americans, while everyone else is dismissed as a distant foreigner. Ethnic minorities are warned regularly against aligning their interests with those of white Americans and against those of African Americans. The claims made upon certain Asian American groups during the affirmative action debates at the University of California provide numerous recent examples. But we must caution as well against the paradoxical alignment of black and white Americans against ethnic minorities, along the divide of national belonging. The opposition between African Americans and other people of color is part of a revived nativism that promises to level inequalities internal to the nation in exchange for the externalization of difference and the constriction of the nation's boundaries. The discourse of nativism invites African Americans to claim their true Americanness by uniting with whites against their common enemy, the foreigner/immigrant. But as is being demonstrated painfully in California, xenophobia is not the cure for American racism.
Affirmative action policies were of course designed to address the historical discrimination suffered by African Americans as a consequence of slavery. The strategy of affirmative action arose from the black civil rights struggle, and in response to the recognition that formal, legal equality did not lead to the leveling of disparities between black and white Americans. Hence affirmative action carries the moral justification of reparation for historical wrongs. Its advocates understand the current distribution of oppression and entitlement in the United States as the result of America's foundational sins: slavery, segregation, and racism. Affirmative action programs are designed to intervene in this history and thus to change the relationship between black and white Americans that lies at its heart.
While other minoritized groups have been included in the civil rights/affirmative action model developed as a result of African American political organizing, their differential histories leave them open to the charge that they are interlopers in the defining relationship of American history. Relegated to the margins of that historical relationship, they now benefit illegitimately from policies designed to redress the inequities resulting from slavery and segregation. In her work on recent debates regarding affirmative action in California, Rachel Moran suggests that the black-white dichotomy that dominates our thinking about American race relations offers a strange choice to people who are neither black nor white: either they must be included in the civil rights model under the term "black" or, following the model of immigration and assimilation developed from the history of white European immigrants, they must be cast as immigrants under the term "white." Moran argues that the tension between race and ethnicity in American legal discourse, with the former indicating an immutable characteristic and the latter a flexible affiliation, accounts for Latinos' ambiguous placement in the civil rights model.1 I suggest we modify Moran's argument by considering how the notion of history is used to distinguish between real Americans and interlopers. When history is used as such a measure, real Americans become those who have historically participated in the central racial dilemma of the nation. Affirmative action addresses these Americans, for they are the people to whom (if black) a debt is owed or from whom (if white) reparations are demanded. All others enter American history by virtue of their proximity to one or another side of the black-white divide-as white if they enter voluntarily as immigrants, or as black if they can demonstrate that their history of oppression approximates the African American history of slavery and segregation.
Perhaps in Virginia, the setting of Fraiman's tale, it makes some sense to present diversity and affirmative action in stark contrast to each other. It makes no sense to do so in California, or in the southwest, or in most other regions of this land. Richard Walker provides a useful summary of California's history:
California has been a state of immigration since the Spanish conquest in the late eighteenth century. It has never known a decade when the number of newly arriving people did not exceed the number of those born within the state. Since the extermination of the indigenous people, the vast majority of Californians have been of European origin. Nevertheless, Asians and Mexicans have been a constant presence, and people of African origin finally arrived in large numbers in the 1940s for wartime work. Race in California and the West has never been a simple black-and-white issue. (163)Even if we accept the parameters of the historical model, the various groups populating California's history cannot be excluded from the moral economy of distributive justice that undergirds Fraiman's concerns. But because we limit American history to the nation's physical borders, the historical model that we use to gauge the legitimacy of claims made and debts owed forces us to take an isolationist view of the United States. For example, in the San Fransisco Bay area opponents of affirmative action frequently point to increasing numbers of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees and immigrants and ask whether these recent arrivals should benefit from racial preferences in hiring and education. Even if all native-born Americans owe each other a level playing field, what do any native-born Americans owe to these refugees and economic migrants? Posing the question in this manner makes the answer uncomfortably obvious: by no stretch of the imagination can phenomena such as the disruption of the political and economic formations of Vietnam and Cambodia and the subsequent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodian people be considered external to American history.In California's blood-stained racial history, the list of horrors unleashed in the name of commercial conquest and the civilizing mission of the white race is long. The native peoples were murdered and enslaved, the Californios divested of their property, African Americans denied the rights of citizenship, the Chinese lynched and driven into ghettos, the Japanese denied land as their enterprise proved threatening, Mexicans deported en masse when labor surpluses appeared in the Great Depression, and Japanese Americans thrown into concentration camps in the Second World War. (175)
American influence abroad, circuits of migration that cross national borders, supplies of accessible labor and raw materials, international industrial and class-based alliances-such considerations have never been external to American history.2 Indeed, even if we focus on the relationship between black and white Americans at home, we would do well to ask how the racism of a particular era is articulated with and perhaps enabled by the position of the United States in the world. Fraiman notes a tendency of American academics to overlook domestic race relations in favor of attention to distant political movements, as when "a group of feminists planning events to commemorate '25 years of coeducation at UVA' was tempted to allow a program on Palestinian women largely to replace any attempt at addressing domestic race relations" (41-42). Israel is the recipient of the largest cumulative contribution of U.S. foreign aid. I am reminded of this fact every month when I receive my paycheck and glance at the federal tax deduction. There is a connection between my income and the fate of Palestinian women. There is a connection between U.S. influence abroad and the dispersal of funds for social programs at home. Attention to the domestic scene should not necessitate avoidance of the international context. Instead, a proper analysis must expose the full array of connections, whether immediate or complex, between our home and the world.
Fraiman appropriately warns against allowing "anti-imperialist uprisings . . . in other places and (most often) other times" to substitute for "Los Angeles today" (41). Fortunately, we have options beyond either ignoring the international context or using it to avoid the domestic scene. Within American studies, for example, scholars are developing the paradigm of "critical internationalism" to challenge the provincialism of their field and the presuppositions of the knowledge produced within it (Desmond and DomĂnguez). But citing an economy of scarcity, Fraiman argues that we must choose whether to direct our attention and sympathy toward problems at home or abroad. Hence, instead of rejecting attempts to oppose diversity to affirmative action, she completes the unnecessary opposition of the two complementary goals by arguing for complete alignment with one side of the divide. The choice between diversity and affirmative action is false, as is the opposition (genuine and false Americans) on which the choice is based. When the nation's borders are evidently porous and national and international concerns continually leak into each other on both micro and macro levels, then it is neither good scholarship nor good politics to insist on the selective blindness required for belief in an internally generated, hermetically sealed American history. Fraiman's concerns regarding the depoliticization of the affirmative action agenda are especially urgent in light of Supreme Court decisions that allow affirmative action programs premised on diversity and disallow those premised on reparations or distributive justice.3 Like it or not, future affirmative action programs will have to invoke the language of diversity, and they may have to forego historical claims altogether. In rejecting the insularity of a selective American history, I do not mean to propose that a cheerful, depoliticized cosmopolitanism take its place. Rather, we must seek ways to articulate the language of diversity with an antiracist, antisexist, and anti-imperialist agenda. We can begin by adopting a critically international perspective to reevaluating the contemporary contours of the nation, and particularly the history of its racialized and gendered positions.
Correspondence should be sent to Ranu Samantrai, Cultural Studies Program, Claremont Graduate School, 710 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711.
Notes
1. Moran's comments provide a useful alternative to Fraiman's regret that we in the academy have moved from a focus on race to a focus on ethnicity.
2. See Walker for an assessment of migration and California's economy.
3. See McGowan 129-30.
Works Cited
Desmond, Jane C., and Virginia DomĂnguez. "Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism." American Quarterly 48.3 (1996): 475-90.
McGowan, Miranda Oshige. "Diversity of What?" Representations 55 (1996): 129-38.
Moran, Rachel F. "Unrepresented." Representations 55 (1996): 139-54.
Walker, Richard. "California's Collision of Race and Class." Representations 55 (1996): 163-83.
Power not Plurality: A Response to Estella Lauter and Ranu Samantrai
SUSAN FRAIMAN
University of VirginiaI want to begin by thanking Estella Lauter and Ranu Samantrai for their very thoughtful responses to my grouchiness these days about the rhetoric of "diversity." It is clear to me that the three of us basically march in the same picket line, have similar political goals and not so different views of how to achieve these. Insofar as we disagree, I am grateful to Lauter and Samantrai for making me think harder about my claims and pushing me to the elaboration below. Coming from the Midwest and West Coast respectively, their comments point up the shaping of debates about "diversity" by conditions peculiar to place. Thus Lauter focuses on building an American Indian Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Samantrai stresses the racial complexity of California, and both help to situate my own remarks in an East Coast if not specifically Virginian context.
Needless to say, the meaning and value of "diversity" is always contingent on a host of variables, including geographical/institutional location. My concern, then, is not with the inherent significance of this term but rather with its uses at a given political moment. In cases where "diversity" has been mobilized for positive ends, as Lauter shows it was in broadening the curriculum at Green Bay, I applaud it. To the extent that a concept of racial and ethnic "diversity" can help to justify affirmative action-and, as Samantrai suggests, to complexify the paradigm of black versus white-I celebrate it. I nevertheless believe that the language of "diversity" has flourished in a period of reaction in part because it remains politely vague concerning its political affiliations and intentions. Unlike "affirmative action," "diversity" has been highly susceptible to appropriation and has, in practice, lent itself to a wide range of sometimes questionable uses. A case in point is the 1995 move by the University of California Regents to abolish affirmative action in UC admissions. Students protesting the decision chanted "no University without diversity," tying "diversity" to their defense of affirmative action. But they also chanted "UC diversity, we see hypocrisy." This was a reference to the Regents' own claiming of "diversity," in the wording of their resolution, as an alternative to the practice (and ironic concession to the spirit) of affirmative action.1 As in my original Women's Center example, "diversity" was invoked by both sides-one of them part of a national movement to roll back the gains of recent decades.
The reason, as I see it, for the ideological instability of "diversity" is that, in contrast to affirmative action, it makes no mention of history and has no notion of power. What Lauter sees as its strength as an educational principle-a validation of "multiformity"-is also its weakness as a principle of social change, in that every variant is valued equally without regard to longstanding structural inequities. "Diversity" may therefore be used, as I have said, to rally for more Swedes at UVA or more sorority girls in the Women's Center. This kind of variety for its own sake is not bad, but it doesn't necessarily help to root out injustice. Affirmative action policies, on the other hand, forged in the crucible of social protest by women and blacks, have the virtue of clarity about who has traditionally had power in the United States and who hasn't. They allude with outrage to specific patterns of privilege and exclusion while promising concrete and systematic measures to challenge them.
Samantrai argues that affirmative action narrowly conceived as reparation for historical wrongs on American turf may benefit native-born blacks at the expense of recent refugees and immigrants, unless the latter can assimilate their experiences to those of African Americans. I think she is right to urge a more racially diverse account of American history as well as a sense of American nationhood penetrated by and implicated in world affairs. But I would like to see affirmative action accommodate an enlarged sense of "history" and "nation" while insisting on the logic of reparation for past and present race and gender wrongs. Unlike Samantrai, I believe this logic-in its bold determination to redistribute power-is precisely what makes affirmative action so radical and distinguishes it from a less stringent and less situated precept like "diversity."
The stinging recollection of slavery, lynching, and segregation that drives affirmative action is especially necessary today, as black women and men are ever more viciously and "scientifically" blamed for their own disenfranchisement. With one quarter of young black men in jail and many more unemployed, with black women daily demonized as crack mothers and welfare queens, African Americans can scarcely be accused of benefiting, as Samantrai fears, from racial paradigms that align them with white Americans against "foreigners." Nor, consequently, can support for American blacks and social programs addressed to them be dismissed as simply "nativist," as if national justice and nationalism were one and the same. In conflating these concepts Samantrai risks fostering the antagonism between blacks and other ethnic minorities she rightly wishes to overcome. Indeed, it seems to me that all people of color stand to benefit, not lose, from upholding the "civil rights model" and need not do so at the price of their particular cultural experiences. Though Samantrai follows Rachel Moran in worrying that Latinos, Asians, and others may blur into (never quite legitimate) "blackness" by adopting this model, the language of civil rights and the strategy of civil disobedience have already been successfully borrowed many times and have quite effectively served the struggles of such groups as women, Native Americans, and sexual minorities. For blacks, then, but also for other embattled racial and ethnic populations, including recently arrived ones, the paradigms of civil rights and affirmative action are in my view indispensable national resources in the fight for genuine democracy.
While Samantrai takes my preference for "affirmative action" over "diversity" as the promotion of an exclusively black-white nativism over a more inclusive internationalism I would, instead, frame it as the promotion of a theory of power over a theory of manyness. The first, I believe, has gained considerable political leverage for the most vulnerable members of our society and represents a structure of feeling on behalf of all subordinated groups; the second has been known to help these groups as well-but it has also, with a hypocritical smile, been used to obscure and effectively oppose their interests. So I stand by my assertion that "diversity" represents a falling off from "affirmative action." At the same time, Estella Lauter and Ranu Samantrai have both made me recognize ways in which these two formulations can help each other out. Lauter's story demonstrates that, practically speaking, "diversity" has served to motivate curricular reform on Wisconsin's Green Bay campus, even while "affirmative action" remained useful on its Oshkosh campus in the area of faculty hiring. And Samantrai's comments suggest that, theoretically speaking, "affirmative action" may need some nudging from "diversity" lest it fail to affirm the many, changing colors of America.
Notes
1. These student chants are mentioned by Omi and Takagi (158). See the epigraph of Marianne Constable's essay for the Regents' allusions to "diversity" in section 9 of Resolution SP-1 (92).
Works Cited
Constable, Marianne. "The Regents on Race and Diversity: Representations and Reflections." Representations 55 (1996): 92-97.
Omi, Michael and Dana Y. Takagi. "Situating Asian Americans in the Political Discourse on Affirmative Action." Representations 55 (1996): 155-62.
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