Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  In 1983, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Soon the list of writers of color who won a Pulitzer or a National Book Award grew to include Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Suddenly battles broke out—often gendered, and waged with the intensity of sectarian infighting—over whose stories represented “the real” and “the fake.” Reed’s ugly public rift with Walker, as well as his friend Frank Chin’s scabrous criticism of Kingston, seemed to indicate that multiculturalism had finally produced stakes—aesthetic, financial, personal—worth fighting over.

  But even as they quarreled, the onrushing wave of young people of color made their claims feel more prescient, urgent, and viable. “The United States is unique in the world,” Ishmael Reed wrote, “the world is here.”26 The browning young nation was the multiculturalists’ validation. People had to start paying attention.

  THE BACKLASH GOES TO WASHINGTON

  Perhaps it was impossible to stop all those brown bodies from streaming into American life. But you could try to stop the ideas they were bringing in with them. You could try to stem their prodigious production of new images of America. You could try to stop them at the level of culture. And that is how a minor government agency—the National Endowment for the Arts—became the focus of the anti-multiculturalist backlash.

  In 1989, George H. W. Bush was the new president, Lee Atwater was the new head of the Republican Party, and Communism was collapsing all across the Eastern bloc. By summer the intellectual Francis Fukuyama was declaring the “end of history,” the final triumph of Western liberal democracy and capitalism. In this context, Bush appointed John Frohnmayer his chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts. What was great for democracy over there might have been, in an odd way, spectacularly bad for Frohnmayer and even worse for American arts and culture.

  The NEA had been established in 1965. President John F. Kennedy first outlined a rationale for a national cultural policy in a speech honoring the poet Robert Frost at Amherst College delivered a month before his assassination. He said:

  Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much.… The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure.… If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda, it is a form of truth.27

  The speech bore the imprint of Kennedy’s close advisor, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who saw American arts and culture in the context of global soft power. Supporting it was a way to show the world that the United States was not, he said, “a nation of money-grubbing materialists.”28 Communism reduced Soviet artists to the role of functionaries for state propaganda. In the United States, Kennedy said, “the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may.”29 Artistic freedom was proof of the vitality of democracy.

  The NEA’s charge had been influenced not only by the expansiveness of sixties liberalism but by the long shadow of the 1930s Cultural Front and the continuing threat of Second World Communism. Kennedy’s revival of the romantic vision of the artist was twinned with a Cold War realpolitik. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of history came the end of the romance. The new enemy was within. Now cultural conservatives trained their sights on artists, and wrangling those high-plains drifters of the American imagination.

  In the spring of 1989, the Methodist minister and religious conservative activist Donald Wildmon began a direct-mail crusade to end government funding for the arts. He had been angered over a NEA grant given to the artist Andres Serrano, a New Yorker of Afro-Cuban, Spanish, and Chinese descent, who had displayed a Cibachrome print of a luminous crucifix in a pool of his urine, a work that he called Piss Christ. Wildmon sent a letter to members of his American Family Association linking Serrano’s print to Madonna’s Like A Prayer video and director Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ—all of it degenerate art that fostered an “anti-Christian bias.” “Maybe, before the physical persecution of Christians begins,” he wrote, “we will gain the courage to stand against such bigotry.”30

  Senators Alfonse D’Amato and Jesse Helms soon joined Wildmon in his NEA protest. Helms had been waiting for a moment like this. Fourteen years before, he had attacked the NEA for giving a grant to Erica Jong to write what became her best-selling feminist novel, Fear of Flying. To Helms, artists belonged with people of color and feminists, welfare recipients, and the poor—they were all despoilers of freedom.

  Debates over public art and publicly funded art spread. Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc was removed from Manhattan’s Federal Plaza. A judge ordered that a David Avalos sculpture of an undocumented worker being frisked by a Border Patrol agent be taken down from the plaza of the San Diego federal courthouse, not far from the Immigration and Naturalization Services office.31

  Not long after being appointed Reagan’s chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1986, Lynne Cheney denounced a public television series that her own agency had funded. The Africans, written by Kenyan American professor Ali Mazrui, had dared to discuss European colonization and exploitation, leading Cheney to call it an “anti-Western diatribe.” She pulled $50,000 earmarked to publicize the series, explaining that her action was, in fact, “a defense of free speech.”32

  Defunding public culture proved good Republican politics—it brought together cultural conservatives and fiscal conservatives. In his very first budget to Congress, President Ronald Reagan recommended that the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities budgets be slashed in half. For his part, the New York Times critic Hilton Kramer left the newspaper to launch the journal The New Criterion, with funding from the John M. Olin Foundation. Kramer immediately attacked the NEA and won, quickly bringing down its arts criticism program.33

  All of this happened before Frohnmayer took over the NEA chairmanship. In 1989, his first year as chair, he faced the controversy over Piss Christ and further Wildmon-led attacks on the work of queer artist David Wojnarowicz. He received a letter signed by one hundred Congress members denouncing an NEA-funded Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective.34 He faced Jesse Helms’s proposal—known as the Helms Amendment—to establish new limits on NEA funding of art considered obscene or indecent, or denigrating of people based on their religion, race, creed, sex, handicap, age, or national origin. And he confronted a torrent of bills meant to defund or abolish the NEA, one of which was unambiguously entitled the “Privatization of Art Act.”

  By the winter, Congress had approved a diluted version of the Helms Amendment, and Frohnmayer had inserted what the theater producer Joseph Papp would angrily label the “loyalty oath” into NEA grant applications: grant-seekers had to pledge not to make obscene work.35 Frohnmayer then revoked a $10,000 grant to Artists Space for its exhibition on the AIDS crisis, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, because the catalog included a Wojnarowicz essay critical of public figures, including Jesse Helms.

  Frohnmayer’s end came in 1992. The trigger was a poem by a young Black writer named Ramona Lofton, whose pen name was—in a nod to the stereotype of the Angry Black Woman—Sapphire.36 She had published a poem in a small literary magazine called the portable lower east side in an issue entitled “Queer City” that had received a $5,000 NEA grant.

  In “Wild Thing,” Sapphire took on one of the most infamous cases of the day—the 1989 Central Park jogger rape, in which four black boys and a Latino boy were, as it turned out, wrongly accused. Fictionalizing one of these rapists, she gave voice to a mother-hating, whiteness-fetishizing, fatherless, hopeless boy. The poem concluded with the shock of the violent act, and the even bigger shock of the boy’s apparently cold-blooded rage. But in
a letter to members of Congress, Donald Wildmon fixated on these lines:

  I remember when

  Christ sucked my dick

  behind the pulpit,

  I was 6 years old

  he made me promise

  not to tell no one.

  With these words, Sapphire had dared to give the boy-rapist some humanity—he too had been a victim of sexual abuse. But in the same way that Bill Clinton would later choose to read Sister Souljah and Charlton Heston would Ice-T, Wildmon read Sapphire the way that he read the Bible—literally. He contended that the poet was glorifying violence against the white female jogger and portraying the Lord Jesus as a pedophile.37 Even Frohnmayer had to blanch at Wildmon’s philistine silliness. But he likely sealed his political fate when he said that the poem needed “to be read in its entirety in order to receive a fair appraisal.”38

  Days later, taking a cue from Helms and the far right, Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan’s team lifted scenes of Marlon Riggs’s groundbreaking NEA-funded film on Black queer life, Tongues Untied, for a television attack ad that claimed Bush supported pornography. They hoped to trump Bush’s image of Willie Horton with the image of Riggs—Black, male, “criminal,” and gay. In the New Hampshire Republican primary, Buchanan received a surprising 37 percent, finishing a strong second behind Bush. The White House quickly sought and received Frohnmayer’s resignation.

  An April 1990 poll showed 93 percent of Americans agreed with the statement, “Even if I find a particular piece of art objectionable, others have the right to view it.” Sixty-eight percent supported federal funding of the arts.39 But Frohnmayer had left a legacy of controversy and defunding that had touched major alternative art spaces and established institutions alike.

  Lower down the food chain, hundreds of smaller organizations that funded artists of color faced the 1990s worried about their survival. Those who in 1979 had protested The Nigger Drawings exhibition at Artists Space could hardly have imagined how the right would adopt and deploy their protest tactics a decade later. The NEA’s artist grants were doomed, and the agency became a perennial budget target.

  The attack had been framed around questions of religion, obscenity, and taxes, but in practice it had been accomplished through the targeting of queers, women, and artists of color of the new avant-garde. The critic Michele Wallace, Faith Ringgold’s daughter, wrote, “The clear goal of the conservative movement is to discredit progressive reform on all fronts and shore up a hopelessly obsolete ‘white’ patriarchal status quo against the tide of demographic changes in U.S. populations.”40

  The battle over the NEA effectively destroyed the argument for public culture. Almost alone among the wealthiest nations, and also many of the poorer ones, the United States had all but abandoned a commitment to its national arts. The production of culture was effectively ceded to those who could find the money to do it or those who could make a profit at it. It was a quiet but lasting victory for neoliberalism.

  While the culture wars raged, George H. W. Bush had sent troops to the Gulf and Panama and raised taxes to deal with military-driven deficits. He was moving forward with the North American Free Trade Agreement amid a recession-ridden economy characterized by massive layoffs. Neoliberalism—which would strangle government, dismantle the welfare state, allow capital to flow across national borders, eliminate millions of jobs, exacerbate income inequality, and undo civil rights for corporate rights—could not be sold to the American electorate on its merits. Who would buy it?

  Instead the culture wars offered a kind of shock doctrine—if you don’t follow us, they will overrun your America.

  THE END OF WESTERN CULTURE

  The threat was perhaps most visible in higher education. In 1970, the United States had been 83 percent white. By 1990, whites had dropped to 76 percent and, more pointedly, made up only about two-thirds of all Americans under the age of eighteen.41 With the rise of affirmative action, students of color were finally reaching critical mass on many university campuses. America’s new identity crisis would break out amid the ceremonious greens and brick edifices of elite college quads.

  In 1985, the University of California at Berkeley reported that for the first time in history its freshman class was less than half white. This tipping point would fire national debates over affirmative action and campus diversity through the new millennium. Both sides agreed: what was being taught to these young people was crucial—universities produced the nation’s future.

  Albert Camarillo—a Stanford history professor who, at UCLA in 1966 had been one of only forty-four Mexican American undergrads on campus, and, upon his arrival at the Farm in 1975, joined a small number of Mexican American faculty—said, “You had a substantial cohort of students of color on campus with white students and others who had grown up in segregated communities coming to Stanford for the first time to make diversity or multiculturalism work. It was difficult. They were ill-equipped. They didn’t have language. There were a whole bunch of things that were percolating to blow up.”

  In these newly heterogeneous settings, routine personal interactions in close quarters—a dorm, a professor’s office hours, a Greek fraternity party—could become fraught with live-wire tension. Drunk white revelers in blackface, slant eyes, or sombreros; scrawled insults of students of color and gays on dorm doors; race riots on crowded university avenues—the casual microaggressions that once might have gone unremarked before now sometimes paralyzed campuses. Across the country students of color began to report increasing incidents of hate violence. They organized to demand that the institutions respond with sensitivity programs, ethnic studies courses, staff-of-color hirings.

  In California, where the demographic shifts were happening the fastest, insurgent demographics and ideas came together. In 1986, students in the University of California system succeeded in forcing the system to divest $3 billion in investments in South African apartheid. They then turned their efforts to focus on what they were calling “educational apartheid.” They pointed to the invisibility of people of color in the curriculum and the educational pipeline; demanded course graduation requirements in the study of race, gender, sexuality, and identity; and called for programs to increase racial diversity at all levels of the educational system.

  At Stanford University, where activists had registered voters for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential run and held a sit-in at the Hoover Institution in 1985 to demand a boycott of South African–made goods, a coalition of ethnic student organizations began to push for the replacement of a graduation requirement called Western Culture with a canon-expanding survey course called “Culture, Ideas and Values.” Steve Phillips, a leader of the Stanford Black Student Union who was later elected student body president, argued that they were “unleashing the social change potential of the aspirations of people for equality and justice, particularly people whose cultures are denied and are excluded and are diminished.”

  And so lines were drawn. Phillips recalled a meeting with Stanford Daily news editors after he had helped lead a large number of students of color and white students in taking over the Main Quad. One of the editors expressed sympathy for President Don Kennedy. “Poor Don Kennedy?” he responded. “I’m thinking, ‘Poor students who don’t have their culture reflected in the curriculum and are not validated here [at Stanford].’ Who do you empathize with?”

  On January 15, 1987, the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Student Union and what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s fifty-eighth birthday, Jackson visited the campus to speak to the students. “No one can be truly educated in this world limited to one language and obsessed with one race,” Jackson told the students. “We must live in a real world.”

  Then they marched to the Faculty Senate meeting where students would deliver hundreds of petitions to members. Along the way the students chanted, “Hey hey ho ho, Western Cultures got to go!” They thought the cry was pretty clever—transgressive and hilarious. To traditionalists, it was ev
idence that the barbarians were taking over.

  SAVING CIVILIZATION

  Published just weeks later, 1987’s most unlikely bestseller was a dense polemic by an obscure University of Chicago philosopher named Allan Bloom. Five years before, he had secured a small book contract based on a piece he had written for the conservative National Review. In it he had argued that, since the 1960s, the American student had become uninterested in the great questions of mankind, that the best now indeed lacked all convictions, and that universities that no longer valued the close study of the Great Books were inculcating an “easygoing American kind of nihilism.”

  “The palliation of beliefs culminates in pallid belief,” he wrote, echoing both the aesthetic concerns of Hilton Kramer and the judicial concerns of strict constructionists. “Schools once produced citizens, or gentlemen, or believers; now they produce the unprejudiced.”42

  By the time Bloom’s book-length argument, The Closing of the American Mind, was published, the nation was ready for its formalist foretelling of doom, even its detours into blanket denunciations of feminism, rock music, and affirmative action. American elite universities were slouching toward relativism and “relevance,” Bloom argued. “The new American life-style,” he wrote, “has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.”43 But truth remained truth, context was nothing, and all cultures were not made equal. The openness of cultural relativism indicated the closing of the American mind.

  The Stanford Black Student Union takes over the President’s office to press for curricular reform, 1987. Photo by and courtesy of James Rucker.

  Bloom’s unapologetic elitism offered its readers a bracing shot of intolerance for tolerance. It ratified a suspicion that the price of allowing all these dark-skinned youths into elite institutions was nothing less than the ruin of American civilization. Civilization versus culture—that old conservative preoccupation that Ralph Ellison had so casually dismissed in the prologue to Invisible Man—was back. The Closing of the American Mind created its own ponderous genre—the end-of-civilization jeremiad set on the colorizing campus—and focused the expanding anti-multiculturalist backlash.