Amid the culture wars, conservatives had been experimenting with new language around race. Conservative of color Dinesh D’Souza staked an extreme position: antiracism was an “intellectually bankrupt” agenda, and Blacks and other people of color were not victims of racism, but practitioners of dangerous dysfunctional cultures that brought them to ruin.
“[B]lack cultural pathology has contributed to a new form of discrimination: rational discrimination,” he wrote. “Rational discrimination is based on accurate group generalizations that may nevertheless be unfair to particular members of a group.”44 D’Souza had not only appropriated Democratic politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s LBJ-era language of cultural pathology but had found an odd resonance with the Black nationalist Louis Farrakhan’s calls to self-improvement.
But other conservatives gave up defending white privilege in explicitly racialized terms. Instead they tried to follow Nixon’s directive to “devise a system that recognizes [Blacks are the problem] while appearing not to.” The Southern-strategy alignment still depended on appealing not only to the angry heirs to the Wallace legacy but to the suburbanizing whites who were heirs to the Goldwater legacy. During the 1980s, Black thinkers like Shelby Steele, Black Reagan officials like Clarence Pendleton, and white ones like William Bradford Reynolds began arguing for “colorblindness” in government contracting and public education.
Connerly had drawn his language from them. He leaned especially hard on exactly one line from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech—by now canonized in post-multiculti elementary school classrooms everywhere—“that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.”
Historian Daniel Rodgers noted that among the lines Connerly and his fellow conservatives left on the cutting floor were King’s praise for the “[Black movement’s] marvelous new militancy” and his condemnation of “the sweltering heat of oppression.”45 Instead, this selective forgetting was simply the flip side of imperialist nostalgia, a denial of the inequalities of the present that complemented a denial of inequalities past.
Despite massive protests on all of its campuses, the conservative-leaning Board of Regents voted 14–10 in July 1995 to end affirmative action in the University. When the ban took effect in 1998, Black and Latino enrollments dropped by at least half at the most competitive campuses. “We still have to be a place of opportunity for all,” said UC Berkeley chancellor Robert M. Berdahl, “but the law is constraining us very, very substantially.”46 Despite the ban’s repeal in 2001, it would take over a decade for enrollments of underrepresented students to return to pre-ban levels. By then Connerly had succeeded in winning bans on state-administered affirmative action programs through referendum votes in California and Washington. He went on to sponsor similar efforts in Florida, Michigan, Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri, and Oklahoma.
Those in Michigan, Nebraska, and Oklahoma passed. Legislatures in Florida and New Hampshire passed more limited bans. (Similar laws in Texas and Georgia were ruled unconstitutional by state courts.) As late as 2010, Arizona voters approved their own anti–affirmative action referendum, the same year their legislature and governor passed the notorious anti-immigrant bill, SB 1070.
With these victories the grand conservative project of racial restoration begun under Nixon moved closer to completion. More than three decades into the Southern strategy, conservatives had figured out how to successfully deconstruct the language, music, and visuality of the Civil Rights consensus. Prominent white liberals were eager to be the proof.
ONE-NATION LIBERALISM: SUBTRACTING THE DIFFERENCE
In 1997, Mother Jones magazine devoted an issue to “rethinking race.” In it, cofounder and editor-in-chief Jeffrey Klein and writer Michael Lind blamed the left’s demise on its support for affirmative action and immigration.47 The politically correct move now was to swing back to the Big White Middle, a constituency that they argued was more united by its disdain for a “rainbow liberalism” that benefited Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans than anything else.
In “The End of the Rainbow,” Lind slammed “the multicultural right” led by country-club Republicans “who rail against ‘class war’ while finding many kind things to say about high immigration (which is good for business) and even affirmative action (which makes corporate America look more diverse to a diverse public).”48 He argued that this kind of politics not only divided whites, they presaged an all-out racial battle royale.
“As the percentage of whites diminishes [in states like California and Texas],” he wrote, “blacks and Hispanics and Asians will likely turn on one another, with representatives of each category demanding a ‘fair share’ of political offices, jobs, and opportunities for higher education.”
It was a peculiar, faithless charge, reminiscent of the kind made by the anti-multiculturalist liberals of the early 1990s. Lind seemed unable to believe that communities of color might be as invested as white liberals were in the project of making America. Conservative forgetting had found its soul mate in liberal fatigue.
Instead Lind proposed a “one-nation liberalism,” a return to a New Deal–style era agenda of economic uplift. He did not note that the housing and infrastructure-building policies of the oft-touted golden age of Roosevelt liberalism were far from color-blind and, in fact, had often been premised on exclusion and segregation. How might a new New Deal address the long-term effects of racialized poverty, ghettoization, and educational segregation left by the old one? He did not say.
But electoral politics is about addition, not subtraction. How would a new coalition that distanced itself from communities of color still hold them? Lind turned to pop culture for the answer. Americans, he argued, might forge a “common identity” through the “disproportionately Black vernacular culture shared by American whites and blacks alike.” He elaborated on this essentially Schlesingerian view:
That common national culture is Judeo-Christian, not Black Muslim; its holidays are Thanksgiving and Christmas and the Fourth of July, not Yul or Kwanza [sic]; its common institutions include sports and the military; its mythic homeland is not Europe or Africa, but North America; and it can find symbols in vernacular-culture heroes like Elvis Presley, the mixed-race, white/Cherokee prole who sang like a black man.49
Yet Chuck D’s line about dead Elvis was already eight years old. Lind insisted, “The radical transformation of American culture by the influx of new immigrants is unlikely.” But even Pat Buchanan had learned how to order Mexican and Thai food.
Lind could not imagine a nation that might be “all of the above.” Progressives unacknowledged by the men of Mother Jones were discussing the notion of “intersectionality,” an idea developed by Black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw and elaborated on by a new school of critical race theorists, to talk about how different oppressions operated simultaneously. But the message was hopeful: race, gender, sexual, and class identities produced opportunities for new vital coalitions to be born.
Lind still lived in a black-and-white world. A decade after Lee Atwater had renewed the Southern strategy and won, the anti-multicultural left was lurching into reverse, going back to the future, waxing nostalgic for that time before race complicated it all, and abandoning the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies.
Meanwhile the intellectual right swung forward. The same year that Lind’s screed appeared, neocon Nathan Glazer—whose book Affirmative Discrimination had been an inspiration for Ward Connerly—quietly changed his mind. He had been asked to participate in a controversial revision of the New York public school social studies curriculum and become “impressed” by the “strength of multiculturalism, the apparent inevitability of multiculturalism.”50
* * *
In a book called We Are All Multiculturalists Now, he wrote,
When I say multiculturalism has won, and that “we are all multiculturalists now,” I mean that we all now accept a greater degree of
attention to minorities and women and their role in American history and social studies and literature classes in schools. Those few who want to return American education in which the various subcultures were ignored, and in which America was presented as the peak and end-product of civilization, cannot expect to make any progress in the schools.51
A year later, Federal Reserve Board chief Alan Greenspan appeared before Jesse Jackson’s PUSH Coalition. Greenspan described a new Wall Street consensus when he said, “Discrimination is patently immoral, but it is now increasingly being seen as unprofitable.” When Grutter v. Bollinger, an affirmative action case involving the University of Michigan Law School, came before the Supreme Court, the U.S. Army, MTV Networks, General Motors, and other Fortune 500 companies filed amicus curiae briefs in defense of affirmative action. Although the Republican Party opposed affirmative action in its platform, it played its own representational game, becoming the party of Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice.
Multiculturalism now looked like what the scholar Vijay Prashad called an “ideology from above.” It was now merely “diversity,” and diversity was a cliché, an evasion. The fears of the anti-multicultural left and right had been misplaced. The state had hardly given way to a vast multicultural uprising. It had given way to a capitalism furiously reorganizing itself for a global, browning, urban world.
The right remained as divided about this development as the left. The leadership of the Republican Party—among them, Atwater’s protégé Karl Rove and Harvard Law School graduate Ken Mehlman—knew the census numbers well. In that sense, they, too, were multiculturalists now. And yet Republicans remained, even in D’Souza’s words, “the de facto party of whites.”
On July 31, 2000, the first night of the Republican National Convention, Colin Powell stepped before the Party in the evening’s showcase address to deliver a ringing endorsement of affirmative action. His words bounced off the ceiling of the First Union Center and dissipated into air. The arena audience’s tepid applause, cued by the maverick-hatted Texas delegation, suited and booted in blue denim and cowboy leather and seated dead center, was simply reflexive.
After George W. Bush’s acceptance speech on Thursday night, when the balloons came down and the Bushes had left the stage, Chaka Khan came out to sing “I Feel for You” and Brian McKnight followed with “One.” But if the Republican brass had hoped this closing-night programming would bookend its commitment to diversity, the Texans and the rest of the rank-and-file were already voting loudly with their feet.
CLINTON’S ONE AMERICA
Alone perhaps among his cadre of Democratic centrists, President Bill Clinton seemed, at least intuitively, to grasp the implications of colorization. Long before the madness of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the travesty of Florida, he had told those close to him that he hoped to leave his singular legacy around race. He had come into office in no small part because of the Rodney King riots. He had blamed Republicans for causing racial division by neglecting urban policy and poor people of color.52 But he, too, had played culture war politics, using a deliberate misquote of the rapper-activist Sister Souljah to mobilize white voters. Like Lee Atwater, Clinton was a Southern politician who could work both sides of the color and generation lines.
The president was in his fourth year of office, and his domestic agenda had already done its damage. He had pushed through welfare reform, a dubious achievement of upward income distribution that had eluded both Nixon and Reagan. He had advanced policing and criminal justice policies that had fueled the massive growth of what Angela Davis would call the “punishment industry,” the permanent feature of which would be racial disparities in arrests, sentencing, and incarceration. His agenda had so nakedly pandered to the archetypal Southern-strategy white voter that his efforts to address demographic and cultural change felt like another act of triangulation, utopian, unempirical, underthought.
Now as Clinton began his second term, the reporter John Harris wrote, he had become passionate about leading “a sustained one-year campaign of discussions, travel, study, and finally recommendations about the challenges of diversity.”53 He would choose a campus at the University of California, in the state where the Gettysburgs of the culture wars had been fought, to inaugurate his project of reconciliation.54
In June 1997, Clinton gave his race speech in commencement exercises at the University of California at San Diego, a university set at the southwestern edge of the continent like a city on the hill, its face turned to the western destiny of the Pacific, all the colors of future rippling before him in cerulean caps and gowns.
He spoke of growing up in the South, and his grandfather’s grace in teaching him that segregation was wrong. “But those who say we cannot transform the problem of prejudice into the promise of unity forget how far we have come,” he said, “and I cannot believe they have ever seen a crowd like you.” The young graduates burst into applause.
The day before, Clinton had signed Executive Order 13050 creating the President’s Advisory Board on Race to “advise the President on matters involving race and racial reconciliation.” Clinton argued that perhaps now—five years after the Los Angeles riots, in a time of a strengthening economy and relative domestic peace—the United States might be ready to have what he called a “constructive national dialogue to confront and work through challenging issues that surround race.”
There was an urgent business reason. Clinton said, “With just a twentieth of the world’s population, but a fifth of the world’s income, we in America simply have to sell to the other 95 percent of the world’s consumers just to maintain our standard of living. Because we are drawn from every culture on earth, we are uniquely positioned to do it.
“The best example of successful affirmative action is our military,” he added. “So much for the argument that excellence and diversity do not go hand in hand.”
There was a moral obligation, too, for the president who had stumbled in responses to ethnic wars in Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. He now needed to restate American exceptionalism in his own words. “Beyond commerce,” he said, “the diverse backgrounds and talents of our citizens can help America to light the globe, showing nations deeply divided by race, religion, and tribe that there is a better way.”
Now he was recasting Rodney King’s question—“Can we all get along?”—by asking, “Can we become one America in the twenty-first century?” He said, “We must be honest with each other. We have talked at each other and about each other for a long time. It’s high time we all began talking with each other.
“What do I really hope we will achieve as a country?” Clinton asked. “If we do nothing more than talk, it will be interesting but it won’t be enough. If we do nothing more than proposed disconnected acts of policy, it would be helpful, but it won’t be enough. But if ten years from now people can look back and see that this year of honest dialogue and concerted action helped to lift the heavy burden of race from our children’s future, we will have given a precious gift to America.”55
This, Clinton concluded to the students in La Jolla, was “the unfinished work of our time, to lift the burden of race and redeem the promise of America.” And so he left his advisory board chair, the esteemed Black historian John Hope Franklin, and the panel members to the work of drawing the nation into a final cathartic conversation on race.
Over the next 15 months the One America commission toured the country, logging dozens of public forums and hundreds more events. The board debated the relative legacies of anti-Black racism and the emerging forms that targeted Latinos and Asian Americans. They heard from workers, students, ministers, veterans, business owners, race experts, American Indians (who had not been represented on the board), affirmative action opponents, and not a few white hecklers.
A staff of thirty-five compiled long lists of programs, leaders, and organizations representing “best practices.” They put together downloadable info kits for civic groups that wanted to hold their own
dialogue sessions. They drew up a list of “Ten Things Every American Should Do to Promote Racial Reconcilation.” But what did it all add up to?
The scholar Claire Jean Kim argued that Clinton’s advisory board compared unfavorably to Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 report An American Dilemma and the 1968 Kerner Commission report on urban disorders because, unlike those landmark reports, it refused to press the government on racial justice or equality.56 This kind of racial reconciliation, Kim said, devolved the burden of change from the nation’s institutions to its communities and individuals.
Early on in the project, advisor Christopher Edley of the Harvard Civil Rights Project had warned that it was doomed: “The problem is that [a bold Marshall Plan–style agenda] would be dead on arrival because we don’t have the moral or political consensus to take those steps.”57 And in the end, the board did not turn in anything resembling a unified agenda. Their final product was a thicket of recommendations, without order or priority, presented as if it were an overstuffed folder of random clippings and incomplete thoughts scribbled on Post-its.
Between the convening of the panel and its final report, a politics inclined toward a moral call had been displaced by a politics of moral panic. On September 18, 1998, the day that President Clinton was to receive the findings of the One America board, the House Judiciary Committee voted to release the findings of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr in the strange Monica Lewinsky affair. Whatever remained of a national conversation on race and reconciliation would be sidelined by the unseemly details of an extramarital relationship—the sly smiles, furtive trysts, and a single stained blue dress—between the president and the young intern.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2001, President Clinton submitted his last message to Congress, “The Unfinished Work of Building One America.” In it he rehashed the highlights of his UCSD speech, and presented the recommendations of the advisory board as a long incoherent list of unimplemented policy proposals. That was how the Clinton’s great conversation on race ended, not with purgation but procedure, not with reconciliation but exhaustion.
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