What begins as a number of receptions and programs to make minorities feel welcome at Stanford quickly separates the freshman class along racial lines. “Within my first ten minutes at Stanford, I began to see the University dividing itself into separate groups,” remarked freshmen Benji Jenkins, upon observing in 1989 that exclusive signs such as “Welcome Black” helped to segregate minority students from other freshmen.4 Orientation's emphasis on differences can sometimes be so overpowering as to disorient new students. Recalling one such experience, freshman Brady Mickelson described “Faces of the Community,” an orientation program designed to introduce the 1993 freshman class to Stanford's “diverse” student population:
Professor James Adams, head of the VTSS CIV track, led us on a literal safari. He prefaced his remarks with the comment that “orientation is designed to disorient you.” Then the fun began. Dividing us into groups by last names, he asked that we assume the voice of an animal—G through L, an ape; M through S, a seal, etc. Then, on his cue, we made our animal's sound at the top of our lungs. The resulting cacophony was likened to our lives as members of the Stanford community: “By the time you leave Stanford, you should be completely disoriented,” declared Adams.5
The claims of racial difference are broadcast to all students. Thus, orientation features as “a celebration of cultural heritage and political will” a theatrical production called The Fire Within, sponsored by the Asian American Student Association, the Black Student Union, MEChA, and the Stanford American Indian Organization.6 For two hours, freshmen watch a series of dances and plays with ethnic themes—such as a Pueblo hoop dance, scenes from Paper Angels (a play about mistreatment of Chinese immigrants in the 1910s), Ballet Folklorico (a Chicano dance troup), and the Kuumba Dance Ensemble (Kuumba is Swahili for “creativity”). The dancers attempt to get students to “understand what being African is, or what being African-American is.”7 These performances are punctuated with the reminder that “the culture and politics of students of color cannot be separated.”8 At the end of one year's events, representatives from the United Stanford Workers’ Union—whose members, the audience was reminded, are mostly Hispanic—asked for student help in upcoming contract negotiations with the university.9
Further differentiation along ethnic and gender lines is reinforced in subsequent years. On the academic front, there are separate departments and courses (“Black Hair,” “Group Communications”) and special events that celebrate and reinforce these differences, such as Stanford Law School's “Women of Color and the Law” conference. In extracurricular matters, separate deans and ethnic centers exist to meet the supposedly very specialized needs of “students of color.” There are even separate commencement ceremonies for Chicanos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans.10 It is not inconceivable that a minority student, if so inclined, could spend all four years at Stanford without ever eating, living, speaking, or graduating with someone from a different race.
For those who may be of such a mind, Stanford provides separate racial residences (Ujamaa for blacks, Casa Zapata for Hispanics, Muhwekmataw-ruk for American Indians, and Okada for Asian Americans).11 These racial theme dorms have the effect of removing a large number of minority students from the rest of the university. Much of the activity in these dorms revolves around “racial programming,” in which special events are held to celebrate each race's unique differences. Invariably, members of racial minorities claim to gain a special appreciation (or gnosis) for what it means to be of that minority group. And, not surprisingly, such racial theme dorms often become rather uncomfortable places for the few students forced to live there who are not members of the preferred group—that is, those whose identities are not specially celebrated. “Some residents who are not members of a theme house's ethnicity,” the Stanford Daily observed, “become more alienated and isolated as a result.”12 For multiculturalists, however, such discomfort is a sign of success. Because they believe themselves to be restoring real identities (rather than creating new ones), such discomfort becomes further evidence of the successful rediscovery of a real difference that more mainstream society had ignored for too long.
Naturally, claims of ethnic difference and special needs are translated into demands for minority-based services. Thus, at one demonstration against racism, Octavio Pedroza of MEChA repeated familiar demands:
A multicultural education is an education that insures that students of color at Stanford feel comfortable and respected, not singled out or ostracized because of their differences…. How can we make this happen? Our community centers and theme houses must be strong. They are integral in creating an atmosphere on this campus where we can come together, talk and organize ourselves. That's why we are demanding a full-time dean, and increased staffing and resources for El Centro Chicano. Our center, like all university departments, should receive the adequate care, maintenance and respect that it deserves. Yet, with a half-time dean and few resources, the university is clearly showing its lack of commitment to the diversity we so often hear about.13
Pedroza's talk does not bring to mind the 1960s civil rights efforts at racial integration or school desegregation. Instead, it suggests a different approach—only if racial groups separate themselves from the rest of the community, secure in the blanket of university largesse, will they be able to “feel comfortable and respected…because of their differences.”
There are few specifics on what exactly is so “different” about these groups, or how society is suppressing these “differences.” Perhaps these details are missing because, upon their arrival at the university, most minority students are not nearly as different as the multiculturalists like to pretend. As with nonminority Stanford students, most minority students come from intact homes (that is, fairly traditional two-parent families), are from middle- to upper-middle-class backgrounds, and have families that placed a considerable stress on the value of education—likely the reason they achieved the academic success in high school needed for admission. Most minority admits have led lives similar to those of other prospective Stanford students: relatively tough academic classes, sports, a range of school clubs, participation in student government. They watched the same movies and TV shows. “Studies were done…showing that something like two-thirds of the black students from Stanford went to predominantly white high schools,” explains Senior Hoover Fellow Thomas Sowell, “and so the notion that you've now got to create an enclave in which you're dealing with people who came from the South Seas or almost from another planet is just fraudulent.”14
Although some minority students had different kinds of precollege experiences—for instance, growing up in South Central Los Angeles or the slums of Mexico City—they are very few in number. An unusual admission of this fact was made by Stanford Daily columnist Delia Ibarra, who complained about the low number of inner-city Hispanic students at Stanford:
The thing I found most startling when I came here was how few people were like me…. My problem with Stanford diversity is that there really isn't much diversity at all. We have a wide assortment of students of color; the numbers are quite impressive. Eight percent are Chicanas and Chicanos. But there are almost no students of color from the inner city.15
Ibarra's observation raises some interesting questions: If most minority students share backgrounds similar to those of most white students, then why is there a need for separate racial theme dorms? Why does orientation exaggerate differences that were almost nonexistent upon students’ arrival at Stanford? Along these lines, one begins to realize that Pedroza's causation is backwards: Multicultural minorities do not need to be separated because they are different, but can become different only after they have been separated.
Creating Identity
The accentuation of differences between groups has a counterpoint in the forging of identity within groups. Or, to frame the matter in Dr. Sowell's terms: If one is going to try to convince others that one is “dealing with people…from another planet,” then it wou
ld be helpful for all of the people from that other planet to be different in exactly the same way.
Since not all minority members think or act the same, however, multiculturalists have found it necessary to redefine what it means to be a member of a minority group. This process can be quite Orwellian. The Real News, a student newspaper published intermittently by the Black Student Union, went so far as to declare that many people with black skin were not really “Black.” The editors explained that racial identity is “not a biological actuality.” Other criteria were also necessary to qualify for membership in the “Black” community (the newspaper used the uppercase “B” to distinguish from mere membership in the lowercase “black” community):
Black, we will define, as not a state of melanin but a state of mind. The state of mind of one realizing that she or he is in a local culture that systematically negates the humanity of Blacks…. We assert that by accepting the system on its own terms, and by aspiring to the goals of wealth and over-consumption (the white aesthetic), which are only possible at the expense of the American inner cities and the people of third world countries, is to be in a white consciousness (more descriptively, a western oppressive consciousness) and therefore by definition, not Black. If you believe in an ideology and think in a manner that benefits whites at the expense of Blacks, then you, by definition, cannot be Black….
The factor of melanin is only significant in that it fosters the forming of the Black consciousness, that it is because of melanin that one will be persecuted and conceived of as the “conceptual other” to our western culture definition of the human; but melanin alone does not constitute Blackness, and is no free pass. The consciousness is all.16 (emphasis in original)
The editors’ key distinction is between uppercase “Blacks” (who also have the proper politics) and lowercase “blacks” (who meet only the biological qualifications). Lowercase “blacks” do not count because they are trapped within the “white aesthetic,” have accepted “a western oppressive consciousness,” and have thereby forsaken their racial identity. Conversely, uppercase “Blacks” possess the proper consciousness and may speak for the group. Because they are a far more homogeneous group than blacks as a whole, uppercase “Blacks” can purport to have a distinct racial identity.
The special identities of multicultural minorities, then, are not based solely on a birthright. They also entail a complex of social values and political views. The most important of these views is that racial minorities, women, and homosexuals face deep-seated discrimination. Spanish and Portuguese professor Sylvia Wynter, for example, is one who defines the “Black” identity in terms of oppression. Professor Wynter contends that American society is primarily ordered by race, with white and black at the extremes: “The real distinction is between black and white…. This basic difference…functions for our order as the difference between the celestial and the terrestrial functioned for the feudal order.”17 Whites, she says, derive their identity by discriminating against blacks: “Through the negation of black, they can imagine themselves as white, as a sacred body of people.”18
Out of suffering, in turn, blacks supposedly developed their own race consciousness. Since every victim of racism must have a victimizer, the new identities necessarily are defined in terms of the relation between oppressor and oppressed. Along these lines, Stanford Daily columnist Omar Wasow defined the new racial identity “blackness” in relation to its opposite, “whiteness”:
Now that I am more attuned to blackness, I am beginning to see whiteness as well. Spotting blackness in this country is easy: it is focused, visible and different. Whiteness, in contrast, is like air: it's everywhere yet no one can see it…. In order for white people in this country to grow beyond their contemporary strains of bias and bigotry they must also see whiteness. Not whiteness just as skin color, but whiteness as culture, history and politics. Whiteness as the experiences and privileges that fairer people have in this society.”19
Thus, while whites derive their identity from racial privilege, the unique gnosis accompanying “blackness” is forged from discrimination. Neither identity can exist in a vacuum. Just as day cannot exist without night, “whiteness” cannot exist without “blackness,” and vice versa. Wasow's comments indicate that Professor Wynter could equally well have framed her principle the other way around: Through the negation of white, individuals like Wasow (or the editors of the Real News) can imagine themselves as Black, as a sacred body of people.
Individuals like Wasow can discover their group identities (or achieve “consciousness”) only when they start thinking of their lives as experienced in opposition to some form of oppression. Once identity is conceived in such a way, it tends to become self-reinforcing. Tension between individuals of different races can become evidence of pervasive discrimination, and even the most insignificant setbacks can be taken as confirmation of one's oppressed status—of deep structures within society that are conspiring against one's success. Multicultural Educator Greg Ricks explained to the Stanford Daily how it all worked: “I started looking for racism everywhere, and I found it everywhere.”20 Kwame Anku, a 21-year old junior, also saw racism in unlikely places: “There's been a systemic misdiagnosis” by economists, psychologists and others in the humanities of the significance of deep-seated racism in the shaping of American culture, he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We're saying, hey look, blacks are not responsible for destroying the planet or laying off 150,000 people at IBM. But the culture is trapped in a mythology that would lead people to come to those conclusions.”21 Anku did not give any examples of such people, likely because no one has ever blamed blacks (or Blacks) exclusively or even primarily for layoffs at IBM or for “destroying the planet.” Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Anku was trapped in a mythology that led him to believe that people reached those conclusions.
Casa Zapata RF Cecilia Burciaga even kept a diary of racist episodes. Like Greg Ricks, she looked for racism everywhere and claimed to have found it everywhere. She called her anecdotes “all very small daily daggers one feels in the environment.”22 Some of these “daily daggers” included:
One student told to shut up by a parent who was in the audience because he was translating a speech that Don Kennedy was making, from English to Spanish to some parents so the parents could understand.
One very senior administrator, more concerned about asking over and over again why a minority student was admitted, rather than how you were going to help that minority student.
Stanford tour guide refusing to take a group by a theme house because he felt the group wouldn't in fact be interested in that theme house anyway.23
There are numerous possible explanations for why any of these minor incidents occurred. But when oppression is perceived as ubiquitous, the most unintentional slight towards someone who happens to be a member of a minority becomes a painful reminder of racism. To the extent that multiculturalists simply read too much into these episodes, the psychological wounds of these “daily daggers” are self-inflicted. But they also receive something in return: By turning each episode into testimony of the prevalence of oppression, they bolster their victim status. Since a belief in their own oppression is the cornerstone of the new racial identity, these self-created episodes thus serve the useful purpose of reaffirming their identities.
Race and “Institutional Racism”
Race has always been an American obsession. No doubt the greatest injustices perpetrated in the history of America were committed against racial minorities: the enslavement of blacks, the second-class status of Mexicans and Asians for many years, not to mention the outrageous mistreatment of American Indians during the 16th through the 19th centuries. The awkward notion that each black person counted for three-fifths of a white person, a compromise between slave and free states during the writing of the Constitution, suggests that the founding of the Republic was far from complete. The troubled racial past serves as a reminder that this nation has not always lived up to the
lofty ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence concerning the inalienable rights of each individual.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement sought to end racism once and for all. Jim Crow laws were abolished, and most forms of racial discrimination were made illegal; new opportunities opened for nonwhites. The dream of a color-blind society attributed to Martin Luther King appeared within reach. Even more significantly, perhaps, the vast majority of the population properly came to see racism as a great evil, or at the very least an unacceptable sin of blind ignorance. The awareness of history promised a genuine break with the past, as those who could learn from the racist legacy would not be doomed to repeat it.
In recent years, however, race relations have taken a turn for the worse. King's dream is rarely mentioned, and the races remain divided. The reasons for this division have changed drastically, however. As paradoxical as it may seem, the extreme focus on racism has become the source of much acrimony, as multiculturalists charge whites with more evanescent and intangible forms of racism, such as “institutional racism” or “unconscious racism.” As a result, the awareness of racism, once the main hope for ending racial division, today has become a major cause of debate and friction.
The Diversity Myth Page 21
