What I think about race
In 2020, in the “impact statement” that she submitted as part of the workplace investigation, Professor Herman accused me of “fail[ing] to take leadership in pursuit of the core value of the College.” What was the college’s core value? She provided an explanation a few pages below, where she referred to “the College’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as core moral and pedagogical values of the institution.”
I have a few thoughts about that.
First I think of the scene from A Thousand Clowns where one of the social workers explains to Murray what his problem is.
Social Worker: You know what you are? Maladjusted.
Murray: Ooh!
In the film (as I recall), Murray, played by Jason Robards, does an impression of James Cagney doing a death scene: shot through the chest, falling against the wall, slowly collapsing.
Thinking of Murray, I’m tempted to stipulate that the college’s core values are not mine. Insufficient enthusiasm for diversity, equity, and inclusion? Ooh! Ya got me!
My second thought is: are those really the college’s core values?
I used to think the college was a liberal institution. I thought the college’s core value, if it had one, was the professional ethic of academic freedom. The first thing one sees in the Pomona faculty handbook is the AAUP definition of academic freedom, followed by the assurance that no other policy written in the handbook can be understood to compromise the freedom of the faculty to teach and research their subjects, and to speak their minds as citizens. The college is not supposed to be in the business of telling the faculty what to think.
Does the college stand for liberal values? Or does the college value being a narc? Herman actually seemed to suggest the latter. As she saw it, her pattern of taking every available opportunity, no matter how remote, to enforce conformity and denounce one of her colleagues to the dean’s office for not having the right values was itself “not only ethically and legally correct but fundamentally in line with the core values of the college.” Perhaps she was right. As Laura Kipnis has documented, modern colleges and universities are essentially “a hotbed of craven snitches”; as John Gray has said, they are “institutions devoted to the eradication of thought crime.”
(When I read Gray’s essay in 2018, I thought he was exaggerating. In 2024, I don’t have the heart to argue with him.)
With regard to race, does the college stand for liberal values of freedom, equality, and tolerance, and policies such as nondiscrimination and desegregation? Or does the college stand for nebulous values that go by the names diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and (confusingly) antiracism, any of which might be intended as synonyms or antonyms of the liberal values?
In my last post, I discovered a remarkable inconsistency just in the college’s way of seeing race: the same member of the faculty, in different official statements by the college, might appear to be black and not black, a person of color and not a person of color. This example reflects deeper conceptual inconsistencies. In some official statements, race might appear as a social construction; in others, the single substance out of which everything in the universe is constructed. One college policy might require that faculty not treat their colleagues and students differently based on immutable characteristics such as skin color. Another policy might presume that racial identity is the most basic fact in a person’s life, and require faculty to treat people differently depending on skin color.
What about me? What do I think about race?
Remember my meeting with the college’s diversity officer in May 2019? The diversity officer probably did not think the study of English and American literature could contribute any useful knowledge to the education of students at Pomona. But she did think the English department could help to embody the value of diversity, for example, by hiring Asian American professors to teach works of literature by Asian American writers, which would make Asian American students feel included.
Foolishly, I tried to express my real beliefs. I said that we did not hire professors to teach their identities, and that it was bad pedagogy to encourage students to enter into works of literature by way of their identification with the author’s race. I said the reasons to study literature were in poems: things like beauty, humor, imagination, adventure, and skill. These are ways of entering works of literature that professors should make available to all students, regardless of race.
(In her interview with the workplace investigator, the diversity officer remembered that I “emphasized the ‘high quality’ of British literature. She stated that while he [Kunin] did not say anything about race or gender during this discussion, she believes his valuing ‘old’ over ‘new’ literature inevitably has an impact on issues of diversity in the Department.” It’s possible that the workplace investigator garbled the diversity officer’s testimony. It’s also possible that I utterly failed to communicate my love of literature and my anti-essentialist view of race to the diversity officer.)
The historian Barbara Fields, whose essay “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America” was formative for me, has something to say about the tendency to value some works of literature as literature, and other works of literature for the racial identities of the authors. She uses this tendency to exemplify the incoherence of the notion of race:
Americans regard people of known African descent or visible African appearance as a race, but not people of known European descent or visible European appearance. That is why, in the United States, there are scholars and black scholars, women and black women. Saul Bellow and John Updike are writers; Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison are black writers.
In the book Racecraft, Fields, writing in collaboration with her sister Karen Fields, compares the explanatory power of race to the superstition of witchcraft. For the Fields sisters, it makes no more sense to say that Ellison’s writing has value because he was a black man than to say that John Proctor was hanged because he was a witch.
Ellison himself inveighs against this kind of racism in many of his essays. He calls himself a writer, not a black writer. “My pride,” he says, “lies in earning the right to call myself quite simply ‘writer’” (“The World and the Jug”). On a different occasion, channeling his old piano teacher Hazel Harrison, he considers the possibility that “artistic talent might have something to do with race”:
Look, baby, the society beyond this campus is constantly trying to confuse you about the relationship between culture and race. Well, if you ask me, artistic talent might have something to do with race, but you do not inherit culture and artistic skill through your genes. No, sir. These come as a result of personal conquest, of the individual’s applying himself to that art, that music -- whether jazz, classical, or folk -- which helps him to realize and complete himself. And that’s true wherever the music or art of his choice originates.
(“The Little Man at Chehaw Station”)
Harrison, in Ellison’s reconstruction, is not a strict anti-essentialist. She recognizes the possible role of genetic inheritance in an artist’s aptitude for making art. She is careful not to say more than she knows; she even leaves open the possibility that traditional racial categories might be a way of tracking this genetic inheritance. But she vehemently rejects the idea that “culture and artistic skill” -- the whole history of art, and the long sequence of decisions that artists make, moment by moment, as they figure out how to make better art -- are part of this inheritance. “No, sir.” There is no art without work, “personal conquest,” or, as Ellison calls it elsewhere, “discipline.” Harrison tells Ellison that his talent for art might possibly be “something” that he inherited. But there’s no way for his talent to get into a work of art unless he becomes, through personal conquest, a clever enough artist to put it in there.
What would the world look like if art and aesthetic education depended on race? One possibility is the world of the diversity officer. Another is the world of H.L. Mencken’s fascinating essay “The Sahara of the Bozart.” In this essay, Mencken looks at the artistic production of the American south in the half-century after the Civil War, and he sees a desert. With a significant exception:
It is not by accident that the negroes of the south are making faster progress, economically and culturally, than the masses of the whites. It is not by accident that the only visible aesthetic activity in the south is wholly in their hands. No southern composer has ever written music so good as that of half a dozen white-black composers who might be named.
According to Mencken, the explanation for the cultural flowering of art by black Americans is “not by accident,” and not by the discipline of art either, but rather by the ancestry of the artists. Their cultural superiority is an effect of their genetic superiority: they inherit the culture of the “old gentry,” the white slaveholders, along with their blood, because “in the south the men of the upper classes sought their mistresses among the blacks.” In this account of culture, it’s remarkable how references to particular works of art and individual artists vanish. What remains are impressions of ever-more-particularized micro-races that maybe you never heard of before, “old gentry,” “half-breeds,” “octaroons,” “poor white trash,” and so forth. A world made entirely of race.
Fields, Ellison, and Mencken all start from the same historical fact: that black people and white people in the U.S. have common ancestry. For Fields, this fact is merely historical, not biological. (There have been some surprising developments in biology, including studies of population groups and epigenetics, since Fields published her essay in 1990, but scientists have not vindicated the one-drop rule which is the American way of seeing race.) Ellison is agnostic on the question of the biological meaning of race, which he sees as tangential to the autonomy of the individual artist: what he chooses to put into his art “is there not because I was helpless before my racial condition, but because I put it there” (“The World and the Jug”). For Mencken, race is a biological fact, and it explains the history of art. Artists inherit art through their genes, and black artists, by virtue of the fact of racial mixing, are heirs of the culture of the slaveholding class.
As for me, in my meeting with the diversity officer in 2019, when I criticized the pressure on literature professors to teach books by writers of their own race, and on students to read books by writers of their own race, it’s because I saw that pressure as a kind of racism.
That is certainly not how I put it to the diversity officer. I usually soften this point. I think the charge of racism is overused, and should be reserved for obvious, egregious instances. And, anyway, no one wants to hear it from me. Maybe it would go down easier if I called it Menckenism instead of racism. My colleagues would probably reject Mencken’s idea of race as a biological fact -- they would probably agree with Fields that race is a superstition -- but they attach works of art to the superstition of race more firmly than Mencken does. (Mencken at least has the advantages of recognizing aesthetic value and allowing for exchanges between different races and cultures.)
My thoughts on this subject are unoriginal. Nonetheless there is some value in articulating them. Saying what you think has a special value in an atmosphere of self-censorship.
When I wrote about self-censorship a few years ago, I said that it’s my privilege as a writer “to say what I think, and think that I am right.” Outside of a system of self-censorship, this line would be extremely redundant. You wouldn’t have to add “I think” to what you say, because the fact that you said it would mean that you thought it. And you wouldn’t have to add “I think I am right” to “I think,” because there wouldn’t be a difference between thinking what you think and thinking that it was right. When people censor themselves, they are thinking things they don’t say, and saying things they don’t think, until they don’t know what they think.
Then it becomes meaningful to give a clear account of your thoughts, even the unoriginal ones.