[Adapted from Dean Shirley
Newman’s Lecture Series (Facing Up to History: Racism’s Pasts and Presence) at
the University of Michigan, 22 March 2001]
A few years ago I had the
fortune of spending a morning debating Dinesh D’Souza on the question of
affirmative action. It was in Chicago at the South Asian Students’ Association
annual meeting. I was a bit apprehensive. I’ve debated people before, indeed I
like the format at times. But D’Souza is a formidable debater: he does not
listen to what you are saying, he has great one-liners to earn the audience’s
support and he is ruthless. Our contest went much as I had anticipated. He
railed against quotas and preferences and asked how a society pledged to
equality could countenance unfairness in the admission to colleges. He appealed
to white fear, to the sense that one’s qualified white friends would be
disadvantaged. It is hard to argue against this except to say that there has
been past injustice and that our present system still does not allow for
fairness in the process. Fight for more fairness, he counters, not preferences.
Indeed the logic of equality mobilized by D’Souza militates against the general
liberal argument for affirmative action. He quoted from King on the "content of
character" and not the "color of skin," a strong claim to race-free or
color-blind egalitarianism or merit. To the point of past injustice, D’Souza
took refuge in the weakness of the courts on the issue of remedy: who should
bear the burden for the unfairness of the past? Should it be the descendents of
the slavers, for instance, who did not themselves enslave people?
D’Souza and the neo-cons are
onto something. They are not perverse fools who are out to hoodwink us into the
gallows of the Klan (although it sometimes does feel like that, with Trent Lott
in the wings, hooded and eager). What they have identified is the limits of the
argument for equality in a bourgeois democratic system. When the bourgeois
revolution was completed in the mid-1960s with the various laws that called for
political and legal equality, these laws ended the value of "equality" (as a
concept) in the fight for social justice. Once we won political equality in the
bourgeois sense we won the right to be treated equally at the same time as we
forfeited the right to the accumulated gains of the past, accumulated legally in
the old system, but illegally in our own context. There was to be no retroactive
redistribution of ill-gotten gains: these were to be protected by the law, in
perpetuity. Since equality, within the bourgeois democratic set-up, means
equality before the law and the franchise, the most that one could do was to
call for an equality of opportunity (not equality of result): equality of
opportunity was, and is, the grounds for the debate on affirmative action — do
all people have equal access to education? Are the standardized tests as
standard as they appear? Should there be other means to ensure that people have
the opportunity to enter college? And so on.
Bakke, Hopwood, these are the
words of infamy for us, perhaps the same may happen to the Michigan case now
before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals [Judge Friedman’s ruling on 27 March
is a blow to the Michigan case and to affirmative action — one more victory to
the Center for Individual Rights]: each time the neo-cons demonstrate that they
have the upper hand in terms of the rhetoric of a bourgeois-democratic system.
Our language in defense of affirmative action is inadequate, because we tend to
weigh in with moral rhetoric about diversity which does not win us too many
adherents. The fact is that the language of equality is over. We have already
gained from the days of Jim Crow segregation. The Civil Rights Act of 1964’s
Title Six states that any institution that takes federal money cannot
discriminate "based on race, color or national origin." Jim Crow is over, no
doubt about that, even if Jeb Crow is still alive and well. We need to fight Jeb
Crow with new tactics, with a new language, not with the language that served us
well to overthrow Jim Crow
The problem of the 20th
Century was the problem of the Color-Line (as W. E. B. Du Bois put it so well in
1899); the problem of the 21st Century will be the problem of the Color-Blind.
The naked white supremacy of the Klan is alive and well, no doubt, but it is
fundamentally illegitimate. Our principle contradiction now is not the Klan, or
Jim Crow, but the language of equality itself, the idea of the colorblind, the
notion of an ahistorical and almost Darwinist contest between equal citizens.
George the Second won a perfect score from the Campaign for a ColorBlind America
in 1998; in 1999 he said that "I support the spirit of no quotas, no
preferences"; now, as President, he has surrounded himself with those who are
fervent proponents of racism as the colorblind, people like Grand Wizard John
Ashcroft and Elaine Chao. They tell us that we are already equal in opportunity
(but for a few snags here and there) and that we should be able to compete
without preferences and quotas (indeed Chao, like Susan Au Allen and other Asian
conservatives suggests that quotas for African Americans and Latinos hurt Asians
— this is wrong and misguided as I’ve shown in the latest issue of Amerasia
Journal). We may be equal as juridical subjects, but we are not subjected to the
same pains and penalties as each other. Jeb Crow may not be Jim Crow, but it’s
racism nonetheless.
What does it mean to say that
the bourgeois revolution was generally complete by the late 1960s? This means
that the tactical demand for equality had worn out its value. The struggle for a
hundred years, from the mid-19th Century to the mid-20th Century, had been about
equality: equality, however, was not the goal of the struggle only the tactical
device toward the larger goal of human freedom. By the late 1960s, equality had
been enshrined, but it had not itself led to freedom. Equality, as the
foundation of a bourgeois-democracy, meant equality before the law, juridical
equality, but not freedom. This equality was almost mathematical, with numbers
on one side of the equation being bound to equal those on the other side. The
world of mathematics, however, is axiomatic: the rules are made up and our
operations conform to the premises we set up. The world is not an axiomatic
place. We have to live within the contradictions of history. Bourgeois law
treats the world as an axiomatic place, where those what come before the bar of
the court, in its best world, are to be seen as equal once the state grants them
equality. The grant of equality, indeed, is the final task of the bourgeois
revolution. It cannot go any further than that. In that sense, "equality" has
run its course.
The completion of the
bourgeois democratic revolution means simply that the idea of "equality" is by
now established as the norm and that racism is seen generally as abhorrent. It
is hardly brave to speak out against racism. But since "equality," in the neocon
framework, means equal treatment for all regardless of the depravations of
history, then "equality" itself ceases to be a worthwhile horizon for
progressive social change: its task is done. We need a new framework for our
struggles, one that reflects the social conditions of those struggles, not a
nostalgic politics against a Jim Crow that has become a Jeb Crow. For the
former, Jim Crow, violence was the condition of its being, it was its first
gesture; with Jeb Crow, violence is immanent, but it does not strike until the
disobedient fail to act according to its orders (such as in Iraq and Florida —
you can rule yourselves as long as you do so according to our rules). If once
people were violently enslaved to work, now they are left hungry, forced to seek
workfare or else to do crime, do the time, and work for slave wages for the
Correctional Corporations of America. Equality won freedom from slavery;
equality can’t win us freedom from the lockdown conditions in our cities, from
the routine (and equal) police violence against crime.
If "equality" now privileges
the language of the colorblind, then "freedom" is no better. The Right has
kidnapped the word and reduced it to reflect on the relationship between the
individual and the state, notably individual liberty from what is sees as state
tyranny. But "freedom" is an expansive term, less able to be made mathematical
than "equality." The horizon of our struggle should be freedom, not equality.
For a brief instant in its history, the Indian judiciary tried to marry the
notion of an expansive freedom to bourgeois democracy, first in 1951 (equality
did not mean that "every law must have universal application for all persons who
are not by nature, attainment or circumstances in the same position, and the
varying needs of different classes or persons require separate treatment") and
then in 1964 ("advantages secured due to historical reasons cannot be considered
a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution"), but neither of these brave
judgements stood the test of "equality." Property trumps justice in the courts
each time.
One task of a movement driven
by freedom is to raze privilege. For example, Lon Burnham (state representative
from Fort Worth, Texas) has once more put forward his innovative, and simple,
bill (this time H. B. no. 954) which makes the following case: "Consideration of
Kinship to Student, Former Student, or Donor in Admissions Prohibited," in other
words, legacy admissions must be stopped. Defend affirmative action, but end
legacy admissions. Build power for the oppressed (and help ease their
sufferings), but at the same time ensure that the by now "normal" advantages of
the past are not flagrantly used on behalf of the well-heeled. If "equality" is
now the norm, then it must be so not only against those of color, but also those
who eat high on the hog. No need to be defensive about that. Affirmative action,
anti-legacy, welfare: these are our tactical fights in a broad struggle for
freedom. The goal is freedom, not equality. The neocons keep trying to reduce
the horizon of freedom to equality, but those of us who spend our time with
ideas need to join the intellectual charge against this reduction. We need to
keep up, to stumble after, the movement in the streets that seek freedom against
equality, that seek something more than Miranda and Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board
of Education and Sheff v. O’Neill.
We should not be interested
in the blandness of "equality" which is as much a straightjacket these days as
an impetus for further struggle. I went after legacy in the debate with D’Souza.
He tried to make me out to be a surly, humorless Leftist who was jealous of the
virtue of prosperity. He stayed with the language of the colorblind, a language
that enrages us so much that we want to yell "racist." But that is the easiest
way to lose the ideological fight. The only way to engage the colorblind is to
reject its ground of "equality" and to engage it with freedom, not freedom as a
moral imperative, but freedom as the only condition for real equal opportunity,
to ensure that the votaries of the colorblind don’t hide from their own premises
and make us look silly. Equality in an unequal world is the silly thing.