The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Moderator: Michael, President Bush criticized this policy as a quota system. Is it? Is it discrimination?

  Dyson: Absolutely not. Twenty points granted, as Professor Cohen has indicated, is part of a number of points granted for a number of categories and considerations other than color, or even academic achievement. So that if we give twenty points for race, we give points for legacy; we give points for being an athlete; we give points for being from a diverse part of the country. So race is a consideration, a factor, not the exclusive factor, and certainly not the dominant factor.

  Cohen: Of course it’s not the exclusive factor. No one thinks that. But it is wrong to consider race, morally wrong and legally wrong, to give preference in our country on the basis of skin color or national origin.

  Dyson: I agree, and Carl, as a white man, you would understand that more than anyone else in this room, because racial preferences have been predicated upon pigment. We live in, as some scholars call it, a pigmentocracy [where] the distribution of goods, like employment and education, [is] based upon white skin privilege. So I certainly agree [we’ve got to attack] racial preferences. However, speaking to affirmative action, that’s different than racial preference.

  Cohen: Oh no, we’re talking about racial preference. That’s the issue before the courts right now.

  Dyson: Let me finish my point. Affirmative action is about conceding the fact that the historical practices of white supremacy have excluded people, unfairly, based upon race, and we cannot now pretend that race shouldn’t be a consideration in trying to redistribute those goods.

  Moderator: Carl, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Powell, in the majority opinion in the Bakke case, wrote that “achieving diversity on campus is an important and legitimate part of the university’s educational mission.” Was he wrong?

  Cohen: I think diversity is a very genuine value, and I think the university is right to seek diversity of all kinds, not just racial and ethnic diversity, but intellectual diversity. I think that’s a genuine merit. But I don’t think that it justifies discriminating by race.

  Moderator: Michael, isn’t there something a little elitist and even patronizing in the university’s argument? They seem to be implying that the presence of minorities enhances the educational experience offered to the white majority, and that blacks will get a better education in the presence of whites. You’re an African-American professor on a majority white campus. What do you think?

  Dyson: Well, I think that in the abstract these arguments may appear to be patronizing, condescending, and altogether typical of the liberal attempt to engineer social diversity. But in the concrete context in which we find ourselves, given the diminution of any intense interest in racial justice for many students of color on predominantly white campuses, I think it’s a salient point that needs to be reinforced. And diversity in this case, racially speaking, is a compelling interest, because A, it allows majority students to interact with, yes, minority students; B, it does allow minority students to engage with those students with whom they will be working in the future; but [C], and most important, it provides an intellectual context to demystify some of these prejudices and biases that feed racial injustice. So I think that there are a variety of ways in which diversity is a compelling interest, both to the college and the university, and to the society at large.

  Cohen: You don’t want to suppose that absent these preferential programs there would be no minorities on campus? There are a very substantial number of very able minority students and faculty members who would be, and who are, on our campus, quite without preference. What’s at issue is the increment in the degree of diversity which is provided, by a degree of deliberate racial preference. And that increment, it is supposed, is sufficient to justify deliberate discrimination by race.

  Dyson: No, I’m not suggesting that absent these so-called, what you termed preferences, what I call racial modifications, black students will not thrive. What it suggests is that there are other considerations than intelligence and test scores that play into the acceptance or rejection of students of color. For instance, a recent study just showed that the name of an African-American person is sufficient grounds for excluding them from even being brought in to compete for the job. So don’t tell me, Professor Cohen, you’ve been living in a cocoon, somehow, in the United States of Amnesia, where you have rejected the legitimacy of the fact that racial preferences have historically accorded white men, first of all, and white people secondly, extraordinary access to the goods and resources that are available.

  Cohen: With respect, I am not being ahistorical. I am keenly aware of the long history of racial discrimination in our country, and I think we cannot approach this question without attending to it. I share with you, Professor Dyson, a concern for the way in which race, as you put it in your book, has poisoned the atmosphere in our country in many respects. But the way to bring that to an end is not to take another dose of the same medicine.

  Moderator: Let me butt in here a second. Carl, you’ve been at the University of Michigan for nearly fifty years. Over the five decades that you’ve been teaching, hasn’t the growing presence of African-American students in your courses made a qualitative difference to the kinds of discussions your students had in class?

  Cohen: I don’t know that one could say a very substantial difference. There’s been a growing number of minority students over the years. That’s a good thing. There was a growing number of minority students in the ’60s before preferential programs began. One of my colleagues at the University of Michigan Law School, Terrance Sandalow, remarked after many years of teaching at the law school, that he never found that any one of his minority students contributed in the discussion an idea or a point of view that wasn’t contributed by others.

  Dyson: If you’ve been, for instance, subject to police brutality, and you’re discussing police brutality in your classroom, it makes a heck of a difference if you’re a white man who has had the ability to teach at the University of Michigan for 50 years without the compunction of the law, as opposed to a person of color who has been subject to police brutality, like myself, where the marks are borne in the body. That makes a heck of a difference epistemologically, as well as existentially.

  Cohen: We are not going to be without that representation when preference is done away with. It’s not as though we were choosing between the presence of minorities and the absence of minorities. We’re choosing between the presence of minorities in a substantial degree, and the presence of minorities in a somewhat greater degree. And that increment is the only thing that can justify this system. Now I want to say, the way to transcend our tradition, our unhappy tradition, of racial prejudice and discrimination, is to cease to do it, to resolve never again to use race and national origin as the criterion for judgment. That is what I think it is time for us to resolve.

  Dyson: I would agree with [the latter part of your statement], except to say racism is a key distinction. Not race.

  Moderator: Carl, some studies show that without affirmative action, enrollment of African-Americans at highly selective schools like the U of M, would drop from 9 percent to 2 percent. The state of Michigan is 14 percent black, has three of the ten most segregated cities in the country. Are you saying that the university would be a better place with only a token presence of black students?

  Cohen: I don’t believe that the result of the elimination of preference would yield a token presence of minority students. The numbers will drop because they have been artificially inflated. I think they will drop, but there will be a substantial number of minority students, as there were a substantial number of minority students before the introduction of preference. But I do think the university will be a better place when the hostilities and the tensions that are created by preference are no longer there, and when all the minority students who are on campus are recognized as being there on their own merits. I think we do the minorities a great service when we eliminate preference in their behalf.

  Dy
son: Well, let me respond to that by saying, first of all, thank you so much for your concern about the psychological state of African-American students who, in the embrace of so-called racial preferences, are thought to be somehow inferior. Surely Professor Cohen, as a teacher of philosophy, is aware of the long legacy of the disbelief in the essential humanity and intelligence of black people—long before affirmative action, I might remind you. So when I went to Carson-Newman College, a historically Southern Baptist school, [a] white school, I got a Ph.D. fellowship to go to Princeton University. I made straight A’s in philosophy, [and] graduated at the top of my class in philosophy. A white man—whose son was graduating with me—at an awards banquet came up to me and said, “Son, you know, you’re not just going to Princeton because you’re black.” Now he excluded all of the evidence and the data that suggested that my superior academic standing was the basis, was indeed the engine that drove my acceptance into Princeton. I’m suggesting to you that if we ever stoop to perceptions of minority students as the basis from which to include or exclude them, we will reproduce the very pathology you’re seeking to avoid. I think that affirmative action has been a credible tool and a critical tool to implement real diversity, and therefore real racial justice.

  Moderator: Carl, Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard, wrote that “no applicant has a right to a certain college. Instead the school has an obligation to choose students carefully so as to advance the purposes it seeks to serve.” Aren’t the white students suing the University of Michigan, essentially asserting a right to go there?

  Cohen: Most certainly not. These students—I happen to know them—are not claiming that they have a right to enter the University of Michigan. What they’re claiming very clearly is they have a right to have their credentials viewed in a race-neutral system. They have a right not to have the color of their skin counted against them.

  Moderator: Let’s bring our audience now into the debate.

  Question: My question is for Professor Cohen. If you believe that race should be eliminated as a specific preference in college admissions, do you also believe that race affected factors like legacy students, or geography even, should also be somehow altered to reflect the race-neutral idea that you seem to be advocating? Is that something that you would also support?

  Cohen: I would support the elimination of these other preferences. But you really have to see that they are quite a different kettle of fish from race, because race has a role—the Constitution speaks to race in a way it doesn’t speak to legacies, it doesn’t speak to athletics or to playing music. But I happen to believe, in fact, that the legacy is a bad sort of preference, and I think we probably ought to eliminate it. But it’s not something which is constitutionally required.

  Question: In view of the fact that I feel as though we are still suffering the consequences of the African Holocaust, which was called slavery, which lasted for over 300 and some odd years, how is it that you could have affirmative action for such a short period of time and feel as though it has solved everything? And quite often there are situations where there is not a painless solution, where some people might be inconvenienced. But when you look at the greater majority of the people that were inconvenienced strictly on race, how is it all of a sudden race should not matter?

  Moderator: Carl, I think that’s for you.

  Cohen: No one will deny that there has been a long history of racial oppression in our country. The issue before the Supreme Court is the use of race preferences for admission in universities. And even the University of Michigan does not argue that those preferences can compensate for the long history of oppression. The only issue before the Court is whether the diversity of the class can justify special preference by race.

  Dyson: If you look at the rhetorical legerdemain deployed by Professor Cohen—who continues to talk about racial preferences, not in regard to white supremacy, or racial preferences to white men—what’s interesting [is that] he avoids your question by engaging in what they call in philosophy a logical fallacy. He refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of your claim by suggesting that what’s before the Court is only a narrow consideration. That he’s absolutely right about. But what’s interesting is that in the broader picture of justice in America, of course . . . the legitimacy of talking about the African Holocaust, or the incredible discrimination that was suffered by African-American people, is already ruled out. I too will focus my comments upon diversity, which for me, is a compelling interest. But let it be noted that the broader picture cannot be talked about, simply because those who dominate the conversation are the very people who have historically been responsible for putting us in the position we are in, in the first place.

  Question: Given that one of the goals of affirmative action is supposedly to bring disadvantaged students access to higher education, I wonder if you both could comment on the argument that the policies wrongly focus on race when they should actually be focusing on class, for example.

  Dyson: What’s amazing to me is that many Americans who have been selfconfessed conservatives, even, become Marxist when it comes to race. All of a sudden the incredible outpouring for poor white people—I’ve never seen it [before]. The incredible upsurge of, “Oh, we’re concerned about the poor.” [Yet we] devastate them every day; refuse to reinforce their communities with economic policies that can uplift them. But when it comes to race, all of a sudden there’s a historic legacy of pitting poor whites, and working-class whites, against poor blacks and working-class blacks. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

  Cohen: Whether we should give preference on the basis of socioeconomic disadvantage as the question asked, is an important question. Certainly there is no constitutional objection in doing so. There is a constitutional objection to giving preference on the basis of race.

  Moderator: Carl, let me ask you this: Even if this is not the question of the past, and the question of, let’s say, slavery, cannot be an argument before the Supreme Court, on some level, isn’t that still the point? Blacks and whites don’t yet have a level playing field. Affirmative action in higher education might not be the first or best place to close the gap. But isn’t it in some way the last chance for justice?

  Cohen: In the first place, those who get advantage from preference in admission to universities are not those who have been damaged by the tradition of history. The advantage goes to the wrong people. And those who have been damaged never get to apply to the law school at the University of Michigan, so that the instruments do not address the issue of injury in the first place. And the second reason is that these programs are instituted by universities, and universities are not competent, they have not the authority, to decide who has been hurt, and who shall be remedied. I mean, Justice Powell in the Bakke decision made it clear that you can only award compensation after a court or a legislature has made a finding that there has been a constitutional injury, and universities are not in a position to do that. The University of Michigan understands all of this very well, and therefore does not make the compensatory argument at all.

  Moderator: Let me ask Michael a question also. If diversity is critical to a college education, how much diversity is optimal? When you say diverse, don’t you really just mean black? For example, why shouldn’t a Vietnamese-American applicant be given the same number of points as an African-American or Latino?

  Dyson: Well, first of all, I believe in a diversity of diversities. I believe in a cosmopolitan view of complex integration. But secondly, all diversities are not equal. Vietnamese people, who have certainly been subject to historical forces of oppression, have not in this country been slaves, seen as three-fifths human, [and] used as chattel to reproduce the mechanisms of capitalism, and furthermore, to underwrite the very leisure to engage in white supremacist thinking that slavery provided.

  Question: When I think of getting rid of affirmative action, it’s not that colleges shouldn’t be able to decide who they want and who they don’t want. If the college wants more black p
eople, then they accept more black people. They already do that. They shouldn’t get an automatic point that makes it a rule that the college has to follow. It’s not up to the college anymore.

  Dyson: Sure. When we talk about points, you say automatic. It’s not automatic. This is something that has been historically fought over for a long time. The University of Michigan case has used a system of granting points along a continuum, and that’s the point I’m trying to reinforce here, that race is but one consideration. If I saw white Americans who were equally outraged at the fact that we have a president who himself has been the recipient of legacy, geographical distribution—with patent mediocrity, and yet is the president of the United States—if we had the ability to acknowledge that . . . and go equally as aggressively after that unfair distribution of a social good like an education and an admission slot, I would say I would be much more willing to listen to the argument [against considering race]. Unfortunately, for many of our white brothers and sisters, they are not equally aggressive in pursuing litigation against those who have been treated to unfair advantages that only reproduce their already unfair advantage.

  Moderator: Carl, Michael, what do you think about economic figures [cited by Ted Cross of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, who argues that for the last forty years, the median income of black families has been 60 percent of whites, but that when blacks hold a college diploma, their income is 90 percent of whites, so that college is the engine of racial equality in the country]? How would you comment, Carl, on what Ted said?

  Cohen: We have a fundamental social and economic problem, of course. And we’re going to change that only when we transform the education of minorities in the public schools. We’re not going to change that by putting a thumb on the scale, as you put it, in admission to a University of Michigan or similar universities. That’s just a Band-Aid which is not going to do any real good at all. And, in fact, is going to create hostility and division within the universities, and more tension for the minorities than would otherwise be the case.