by Bruce Bawer
Autumn Marie Reed of the University of Maryland is another young white woman who professes to be worried about Western rhetoric that “disempowers” non-Western women. Her topic: honor killing in Pakistan. She explains that when she watched TV news coverage of “honor-based violence” in the United States (she says she prefers that term to “honor killing,” but doesn’t explain why), she was troubled by the networks’ “Orientalist” discourse. On the one hand, “as an activist I felt coverage would help,” but “the more critically I watched . . . and thought about Orientalism and postcolonial feminist theory . . . the more uncomfortable I felt.” Why? Because while honor-based violence is, well, violent, the manner in which honor-based violence is discussed in the West “is also violent”—it involves “demonization of Muslim men”; it construes Third World women as “homogeneous and powerless”; and it implies, unforgivably, that the United States is “superior” to countries like Pakistan. Western rhetoric about honor killing is about “saving the brown woman from the brown man” and is used as a “way to demonstrate Muslim inferiority.” Reed’s reference to “saving the brown woman from the brown man” isn’t original; it originated with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as a way of scorning Western feminist solidarity with non-Western women who suffer abuse at the hands of their fathers, husbands, and sons. Instead of celebrating that solidarity, Spivak has characterized it as racist, colonialist, and imperialist. The phrase has since been echoed by countless Women’s Studies figures who are eager to show that they’re not racist, colonialist, and imperialist.
As Reed makes her comment about “saving the brown women,” she emits—incongruously—a condescending little laugh. She’s not alone. Throughout her presentation, the women in the audience laugh merrily in sympathy with her sardonic comments. The laughter is disturbing. Reed is talking, after all, about girls and women being beheaded by their fathers and husbands—but she transforms this horrific reality into numbingly familiar abstract rhetoric about imperialism, American supremacism, and so on. Reed maintains that while the media insist on associating honor killing with Islam, it takes place in “all religions” (an assertion that neatly skirts the fact that its frequency among Muslims is sky-high, while its incidence in other faiths, especially outside Arab and Muslim-dominated countries, is minimal). She talks about 9/11, the Times Square bomber, and other Muslim terrorist acts—but her focus is not on these acts themselves but on their representation by such media figures as Bill O’Reilly, who, she charges, present offensive images of “savage Muslim men infiltrating an orderly and morally superior U.S.”
As she builds her case, flippantly tossing off references to murderous atrocities, Reed keeps emitting that superior little chuckle. She’s so brainwashed that she can’t even see what the real story is here. And the same goes for the women in the audience, who are full of lofty, gleeful disdain for the U.S. media. The woman sitting beside me snorts contemptuously over the news reports quoted by Reed, which have the audacity to suggest links between the beheading of women and the Muslim religion and which, in Reed’s view, depict Muslim men as uniformly, monolithically dangerous. “This discourse degrades the Muslim community,” Reed charges, and is used to justify U.S. violence (that is, war) in and exploitation of the Muslim world. She asks: “Is there an alternate feminist method” of addressing honor-based violence? In a tone dripping with venom, she mentions Chesler, whose principled attention to honor killing in recent years has made her a pariah among the multicultural-minded feminist mainstream. “She positions herself as such a feminist,” Reed sneers, but Chesler’s work, in her view, only goes to show that any concern for the victims of honor killing “needs to be positioned within a transnational postcolonial feminist perspective” rather than within “white Western hegemonic feminist positions.” What we need, Reed argues, is “coalitions between women” in the West and those living under honor codes. She adds that we must also recognize that violence is everywhere and be sensitive to the “damage of racism and Islamophobia.”
As I walk numbly out of the room, I reflect that unlike Chesler—whose righteous rage about the subjection and abuse of women under Islam is rooted in her own harrowing experiences as the young bride of a Muslim man in Afghanistan and has flowered into decades of hands-on, productive activism on behalf of women in similar circumstances—these privileged white American girls are floating on clouds of theory; in some sense, the terrible things they’re pontificating about aren’t real to them at all. Women’s Studies has not taught them to bravely and usefully address the problems of real women in the real world; it’s taught them a lot of jargon that pretends to be about those people and their problems but that’s only about itself.
While second-wave feminism’s leaders were household names across America, third-wave feminism’s “stars” have tended to be far more famous in the academy than outside of it. Two exceptions are Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards—a pair of nonacademics who, in 2000, sought to define third-wave feminism in a book called Manifesta. My sojourn at the 2010 NWSA convention ends with session number 354, a Sunday afternoon workshop featuring these two writers. Pretty, blond, and energetic, they recall how, back in the late 1990s, having grown up with feminism, they envied their elders’ experience—sixties activism, bra burning. Unlike the second-wavers, “we didn’t have our epiphany moment as a generation”; instead of becoming activists, third-wavers chose to express their feminism “in more mainstream places,” making feminism “more dispersed than it ever was.” Today, in place of a few celebrated national leaders like Gloria Steinem, there are leaders all over; NOW is losing power, but feminists are taking their places “where the power is.” Whereas the second-wavers broke down barriers and kicked open doors, “we’re in the room—and that’s a more complicated negotiation.” Theirs is the generation of male feminists and of dramatic shake-ups in the American family. When their book came out, Baumgardner and Richards were “single women living in New York City”; now they’re mothers with “a greater openness to what feminism is.” They no longer feel that women need to call themselves feminists—“you can accomplish something” even if you don’t embrace the label. They say that some women ask them, “Do I have a right to be conflicted” about abortion? Their answer: yes.
After several days at this convention, I find the simple candor of this session almost mind-blowing. Baumgardner and Richards aren’t junior professors or grad students mindlessly mouthing Women’s Studies platitudes; they’re two women who are living their lives out in the real world and who have spent much of the last decade holding workshops with groups of ordinary women around the United States. (It occurs to me that they’ve probably never heard of “intersectionality.”) They’re not anxious about getting tenure or alienating faculty colleagues, and therefore don’t hesitate to say things that NWSA officers would consider heretical.
Today, Baumgardner and Richards suggest there are “more and more hints of a fourth wave of feminism” on the rise. What defines fourth-wavers? They’re “dualists.” Third-wavers “were escorted to clinics” for abortions; “dualism” involves all options, including the arrangement of adoptions for the infant children of women who don’t want abortions. What’s fresh here, they say, is the recognition that there are three options in the case of pregnancy, which they call “a profound way of looking” at the abortion controversy—a way of defusing it. This certainly sounds promising (even though I can’t help wondering: exactly when was adoption not an option?). But then a young woman in the audience stands up to talk about date rape. Praising the Take Back the Night events for helping young women to recognize that they’ve been raped, she speaks as if in the voice of such a young woman: “Oh, I really didn’t think that was rape, but now I realize it was.” She suggests that a person in such a situation might wish to write a letter to the man who assaulted her and tell him: “I know you may have a different view of what happened between us, but this is my view. . . .”
And with that, any hop
e I might have had for this discipline goes out the window. For while Baumgardner and Richards are the voices of the mainstream American women of their generation, that young woman in the audience is the voice—and, I’m afraid, the future—of Women’s Studies.
Chapter 3
The Ebony Tower: Black Studies
Every time I attend a conference of white writers, I have a method for finding out if my colleagues are racist. It consists of uttering stupidities and maintaining absurd theses. If they listen respectfully and, at the end, overwhelm me with applause, there isn’t the slightest doubt: they are filthy racists.
—James Baldwin, Professing Feminism
“I was one of those who were in on the founding of Black Studies programs,” Shelby Steele tells me. His tone, touched with rue, is almost that of a repentant sinner in a confessional booth.
But we’re not in the confessional. It’s a gorgeous spring day in 2010, and we’re having lunch at a sprawling restaurant near his home in Monterey, California. Outside the ultrahigh windows, the blue Pacific stretches to the horizon; inside, across the table from me, the courtly, gregarious Steele, whose 1991 book, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and who is now a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, smiles good-humoredly.
“I graduated from college in 1968,” he says, “in the middle of the whole Black Power movement.” He went on to grad school at the University of Utah—and at the same time entered the world of “Great Society programs in education.” First he worked as a teacher with Upward Bound in East St. Louis. That federal program was connected to another one, an “experiment with higher education” that sought to help inner-city youth make it through junior college. “The people who ran it hired me almost immediately to help design the first Black Studies programs in the country. So I was one of the people who helped come up with them.” He chuckles. “I was a twenty-two-year-old kid just out of undergraduate school, and I was designing higher education.” Now in his mid-sixties, he laughs at the absurdity of it all. “That’ll give you some idea of the intellectual heft that went into it!” He describes his role in that strange parturition: he flew around the country to places ranging from Long Beach State on the West Coast to City College of New York (CCNY) in the East. “We’d talk to the administrators, and talk them into having Black Studies programs.” This kept him busy “all the way through grad school.” And—he chuckles again—“there was so much white guilt that you could just go into these places and they’d give you everything you wanted,” even though the whole thing was “ill-conceived” from the start.
Steele recalls that back in those days (his “far-left liberal days,” as he calls them), he and other founders of identity studies programs, “whether it was blacks or women or Chicanos or whatever,” debated whether they should be arguing for “an independent, free-standing academic department” or, more modestly, “an interdisciplinary collection of courses from within different disciplines . . . that people could take as a minor.” Steele believed in going all the way: “I was one of those who invented the idea. It was about Black Power. We wanted parity. We wanted our own separate departments, we wanted to grant degrees, we wanted our own curriculum, and so forth.”
But the scales soon fell from his eyes. “It didn’t take me long to realize that we completely lacked the wherewithal to have independent, free-standing academic departments. No one knew what Black Studies was, no one had any sort of clear intellectual handle on it. The fundamental problem is that we were trying to present ourselves as an academic discipline, but we had no methodology. In psychology there’s a methodology; obviously in the sciences there’s a methodology; even in literature there’s a methodology. We had no such thing at all, nothing to give coherence or meaning to anything.” In the final analysis, he perceived, the departments he and his colleagues were putting together had nothing to do with education: “It was just a joke from the very beginning.” He also began to notice—and this was no small detail—that Black Studies wasn’t attracting real educators but “obvious hustlers. Crooks.” He mentions a colleague in East St. Louis “who came to work one day in a brand-new Mercedes-Benz.”
Not only were they hustlers; they were dummies. “The guy I worked for was so illiterate!” Steele recalls. And he wasn’t alone: “Very few of the people I was working with were much more than minimally literate. I was the one who could actually write a grant [proposal]. And that was where I was useful.” Thinking back to those days, when “I was still so naïve and innocent,” he shakes his head in wonder at the way things worked. “You could say we want fifty thou to set up a library, and get it! You’d get the money! So I learned what white guilt was. But very quickly I came to see that we had no future that way. That we had no respect, we had no methodology, we had no discipline. Black Studies could just be anything. And so I thought the way to go was to go to already established academic departments, like history and sociology, and find scholars who were interested in working in our area and have them design classes that they would offer within their departments, under the imprimatur of their departments, and we would put together a collection of those courses that students could take. I thought—I knew—that that was the best way to go, because then you could have some seriousness, some academic stature, some gravitas, some credibility.”
He tried to make the case. “At Utah I said, ‘We don’t have a methodology; we haven’t yet conceived an academic discipline. We’re relying on other genuine academic disciplines. So we just ought to put together a collection of courses and offer that as an emphasis to students.’ I thought that was the respectable way to go.” This was the thinking at some other schools as well, where “you could find people in the literature department, for example, who were quite willing to offer a very serious class in African American literature. And I think African American literature is a full, rich subject—it’s almost the equivalent of a national literature. And so that was a place where you had real legitimacy. But it had to be taught under the auspices of an English department, where the formal conventions of criticism were applied vigorously. We had to be able to say why, for example, Ralph Ellison was a better writer than LeRoi Jones or somebody.”
The same approach was taken in other subjects. “You go to sociology and get somebody there to talk about inner cities. You study people like William Julius Wilson,” the distinguished black sociologist. While illiterate hustlers were setting up Black Studies departments at some universities, then, at others there were people who were “doing absolutely first-rate, legitimate academic work on the black American situation.” Hence Steele came to feel that “if you want to put together a bunch of classes doing that, then that’s great—nobody will have any problems and the people who teach these classes will have been vetted by their own disciplines. You could have serious study.”
But the people Steele was working with didn’t agree. They weren’t concerned about seriousness; they wanted power. They were “street guys who came to hustle.” And their numbers, if not legion, were considerable. Steele brings up Leonard Jeffries, who despite a long record of venomously anti-white and anti-Semitic statements, including his famous distinction between brutal, violent “ice people” (whites) and gentle, warmhearted “sun people” (blacks), served for more than two decades as chairman of the Black Studies Department at CCNY—where he remains a professor to this day. Jeffries, says Steele, was an “out-and-out hustler. And he got away with it.” Steele also mentions Edward Crosby, who “went to Kent State and started the Black Studies program there. He was just hustling the university, which felt no obligation to look at what they were teaching” under the rubric of Black Studies.
And so it went: at one university after another, these sharp characters hustled their way into lucrative careers while administrators more or less looked the other way. What did these new Black Studies curricula consist of? It seemed not to matter: “No autho
rity had ever even seriously looked at what they were teaching. They had no idea. And it was just slipshod, and jerry-built, and then you looked up by the mid-seventies or late seventies and there were four or five hundred Black Studies programs. I came to see very quickly that this was an avenue for minorities to gain the economic security of the university professorship. They had no real credentials, so their argument became ‘You have to hire me to do this because I’m black.’ So your blackness itself became your primary credential.” And how did Steele feel about this at the time? “I was still very left-wing and into Black Power, but I began to feel I was facilitating a corruption.” Looking at the Black Studies departments he’d had a hand in creating, he realized he didn’t want to see minority students wasting their time majoring or even minoring in the subject.