FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH
Hypocrisy torpedoed diversity
BY HOUSTON A. BAKER JR.
Many of us who grew up and received our education prior to the birth and possibilities of ethnic, gender and area studies are prisoners of a pretty monotonous landscape of color and gender. We are called "educated" but do not have a clue about the real richness of the Americas.
But during the past three decades in the United States and in such places as the United Kingdom, Europe, India, Africa and Latin America, the history of the "New World" has been re-examined to include manifold cultures, conflicts, convergences, controversies and cultures that did not get their rightful place in the official record.
Inaugurated in controversy as American colleges and universities sought to enhance their diversity by recruiting black students and professors during the late 1960s, Afro-American Studies, for example, has a lineage as venerable and extensive as the pre-Columbian explorations of the Americas and as recent as the novels of Toni Morrison. In the recent life of the American academy, Afro-American Studies has pioneered and forged the way for other ethnic, gender and area studies programs such as Chicano/a Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Asian-American Studies and Women's Studies.
There is a huge cadre of brilliant scholars and teachers of ethnic and gender and other studies alive, well and hard at work in the United States today. Courses in United States college and university curriculums are bountifully enrolled and, usually, masterfully taught to student audiences whose composition resembles the UN General Assembly. We are talking, therefore, about one of the most successful and intellectually exciting developments in the United States academy during the past 30 years.
Enter Ward Connerly.
Connerly is the member of the University of California Board of Regents who gained notoriety when he successfully shepherded the California voter initiative known as Proposition 209 into law. Proposition 209 effectively outlaws affirmative action in California government and in the state educational system, stating that race, gender and ethnicity cannot be used as factors in granting preferred admission to schools or contracts to firms in California. Following the passage of Proposition 209, admission of minority students to professional schools in the University of California system fell off precipitously.
Connerly's stated motives for ushering in what seemed to some the "end of race" included, by his own personal admission, a belief that "merit" alone should serve as the criterion for any type of "preference," combined with a belief that affirmative action criteria, in their "lowering of standards" to secure "ethnic" admissions and jobs, caused divisive separatism in the United States.
The irony is that Connerly made and won his arguments in a state that boasted a university graced by one of the most successfully diverse and academically successful "ethnic" student mixes of any university in the world.
Savvy as a spokesperson and unflappable in the cynical levity with which he torpedoes life possibilities of the majority of black people in the United States, Connerly is a good politician for cynical times.
Surely, one hopes that students who enter any first-rate American college or university will emerge with far more consciousness of the dynamics of race and ethnicity in the United States than when they entered. Further, one certainly hopes such students will emerge with a clear sense of the proven academic excellence-- indeed the pioneering academic and intellectual roles--that have marked ethnic and gender studies in the United States and elsewhere during the past three decades.
Houston A. Baker Jr., who earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Victorian literature at UCLA, is the Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations and an English professor. He directs the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture.
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