Moving from Professor Sidney to the introduction will signal a turn toward the larger societal problem of institutional racism, such that his case is the microcosm and the systemic phenomenon of racism is the macrocosm. The academy is an institution in which power is codified and kept in the hands of a few select individuals. By reviewing the historical
development of institutional racism, we can understand how it operates on both on grand and small scales and how it resonated in the life of Professor Sidney as well as the fifteen other faculty members that comprise the major findings of this study.
In 1985, a group of sociologists published one of the most widely read, provocative and insightful works on American culture to have been written in the waning decades of the
twentieth century. Habits Of The Heart (1985), in its broadest intent, sought to plumb the American character, particularly the "extent to which private life either prepares people to take part in the public world or encourages them to find meaning exclusively in the private sphere" (ix). Using Alexis De Tocqueville's resonant phrase as the title of their work, Robert Bellah et al. sought to give voice to "the tension between how we live and what our culture allows us to say" (1985, vii), to bring the hidden and complex springs of our national character into the
mainstream of public discourse. What is as significant as the clarity and force of this book is what it had to do to achieve that clarity; it completely excluded "the racial diversity that is so important a part of our national life" (1985, ix).
problems of race in the coherent and compelling ways that it can address other dimensions of our cultural life; it cannot address such issues because the academy itself is riven by a deep
ambivalence towards the real differences in perspective that emerge from differences in social experience between whites and non-whites in American life; it cannot address such issues because at present, it does not contain even a modicum of the racial diversity that Bellah sees as so important to our national culture. The diverse faculty who are needed to address such complex problems are less likely to be retained and when they are successful, their successes come at a very high personal cost.
Public discourse on race is, to put it mildly, highly polarized. The debate on race is carried on in terms that are often as memorable as they are simplistic (c.f. Geoffrey Nunberg’s book Talking Rightii) with increasingly little consensus on what counts as evidence. The chasm among the various theoretical camps and cultural pundits can only be bridged by a multifaceted approach.
Broadly speaking, this essay attempts to create a middle ground in the debate on race. It does so by presenting unequivocal evidence of the persistence of racism in the academy and the complexities of its expression. Although it differs in severity from institution to institution, and from discipline to discipline, institutional racism is the predominant factor in the paucity and isolation of minority faculty in the academy. In general, the effects of racism are more
pronounced in the social sciences and the humanities than in the natural sciences where there are fewer minority scholars. This essay also examines the language of contemporary race discourse and suggests what can be saved and what can be discarded.
Specifically, this essay recounts the experiences of sixteen African Americaniii scholars who teach at predominantly white institutions. Significantly, all but three of them claim to have
been the target of direct or indirect racism, that is, to have been treated in unfavorable ways that their white colleagues were not. This study relies not only on personal narratives, but also on the hard data of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint that eventuated in favorable settlements for the complainant who was one of the scholars interviewed.
Paradoxically, the academy richly rewards those whom it most egregiously mistreats (such as Professor Sidney and his settlement from College Q) and non-disclosure agreements prevent the frequency and severity of such mistreatment from becoming public knowledge, and thus from becoming part of our public discourse on race. Because almost every college and university has a public policy prohibiting discriminatory behaviors, institutions aggressively conceal the disparity between their public rhetoric and their less visible administrative actions. Even when they settle a lawsuit publicly for hundreds of thousands of dollars, every administration will deny any wrongdoing.iv As Habits of the Heart (1985) did for American culture in general, this monograph seeks to do for the more circumscribed world of the academy: to illuminate the tension between what we say and “how we live.”
What is unique about this essay is the detail with which it will discuss how the process of discrimination operates. Chapter one does several things: first, it introduces the primary positions in the contemporary debate on racism as a social force in America; second, it analyzes the
argumentative fallacies exemplified by the various antagonists and contextualizes some of the more colorful rhetoric in the statistics of social reality; finally, it outlines the purpose and contribution of this study as well as provides an overview of the major concerns of faculty of color, concerns which will be examined more closely in the ensuing chapters.
Positions: Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, and Dinesh D’Souza
Surprising at it may seem, not all African American scholars believe racism is a factor in the lives of African Americans or that it can have deleterious consequences for domains as various as employment, bank loans, housing, romantic relationships, college entrance, and medical treatment. Because few scholars announce their explicit beliefs about racism, one can use his or her stance on affirmative action as an index of the degree to which he or she
acknowledges the effects of racism. Perhaps the most notorious opponent of affirmative action is African American writer Shelby Steele, who wrote about it in The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (1990). John McWhorter, another African American writer, in his book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (2000), discusses what he calls “the evils of Affirmative Action,” despite having personally benefited from such programs. A third representative, Dinesh D’Souza, an East Indian, attacks the concept of institutional racismv in his book, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (1995). All three are some of the most outspoken poster-boys from the anti-affirmative action movement and all, although they are former professors themselves, coincidentally, currently work for conservative think-tanks.
An opponent of affirmative action, Shelby Steele, who is a fellow at the Hoover
Institution and holds a Ph.D. in English, opposes any public policy that offers racial preferences. Steele, like Clarence Thomas and Ward Connerly, opposes affirmative action especially within the realm of higher education. Steele’s work is representative of neo-conservative African Americans whose numbers have risen significantly but not dramatically over the last fifteen years. In his book The Content of our Character (1990), Steele devotes a chapter to:
“Affirmative Action: The Price of Preference.” He writes that his children have endured racial insensitivity, listing examples: they “have been called names, have suffered slights, and have
experienced firsthand the peculiar malevolence that racism brings out in people. Yet, they have never experienced racial discrimination, have never been stopped by their race on any path they have chosen to follow” (Steele, 1990, p. 111).
Proposing that African Americans lose more than they gain from affirmative action, and that it “does very little to truly uplift blacks” (1990, p. 115), Steele asserts that:
One of the most troubling effects of racial preferences for blacks is a kind of
demoralization, or put another way, an enlargement of self-doubt. Under affirmative action the quality that earns us preferential treatment is an implied inferiority . . . the implication of inferiority that racial preferences engender in both the white and black mind expands rather than contracts this doubt. (1990, p. 117)
Here, Steele argues that affirmative action actually is more harmful than beneficial because it makes African Americans skeptical of their own rightful place in the work place and it
“indirectly encourages blacks to exploit their own past victimization as a source of power and privilege” (1990, p. 118). He shares these sentiments with McWhorter and redefines affirmative action is “a form of reparation” (1990, p. 119). Critics of institutional racism like Shelby Steele dismiss the validity of institutional racism as a formal mechanism that operates in the culture today.
A Manhattan Institute fellow and a U.C. Berkeley linguistics professor, McWhorter is African American and admits, like Steele, to having been raised in a middle class home.
According to McWhorter, the “evils” of affirmative action are as follows: 1) “Affirmative action creates private doubt”; 2) “[it] makes black people look unintelligent”; 3) “affirmative action for people who have not suffered unique disadvantage is unfair; and 4) “[it] hinders African
Americans from achieving parity with whites” (2000, pp. 229-32). He even acknowledges that he benefited from affirmative action and that critics might accuse him of “pulling the ladder up after” himself because he received a minority graduate fellowship while at Stanford, a post-
doctoral fellowship for minorities at U.C. Berkeley, and was hired by Cornell University from a minority recruitment fund, rather than a regular department fund (McWhorter, 2000, pp. 248-51). “I deeply regret,” he laments, “having applied for that minority postdoctoral fellowship, and I consider it my duty to work against tokenism infecting the life trajectories of future members of my race as it has mine” (McWhorter, 2000, p. 252). McWhorter also muddies the ideological waters by insisting that most proponents of affirmative action ignore the fact that African American students are statistically more likely than whites to drop out of college and that they should be concerned about “whether or not it is fair to reject qualified white students in favor of less qualified minority ones” (2000, p. 177, emphasis mine). McWhorter and Steele signal a change from the way in which conservatives of the fifties and sixties, such as William F. Buckley,vi address the problem of race.
Unlike Steele and McWhorter, Dinesh D’Souza is an immigrant from India. He graduated from Dartmouth with a B.A. in English and, like Steele, is a fellow at the Hoover Institution. He claims at the beginning of The End of Racism (1995) that because he grew up Catholic in India, was educated by Spanish Jesuits, had an African American roommate his freshman year in college, and is married to a white Protestant woman named Dixie, that he is “uniquely qualified to address the subject of multiculturalism because [he is] . . . a kind of walking embodiment of it” (p. vii). In his chapter entitled “Institutional Racism and Double Standards,” D’Souza rejects the concept that proportional representation is a valid measure of diversity. He argues that colleges and universities should aim for quality applicants rather than diverse applicants. D’Souza dismisses what he refers to as the “proportional fallacy,” (1995, p. 297) which is the notion that the employment sector should reflect a proportional cross -section of the ethnic mix of the U.S.A. He asserts that the logic of proportional representation in America’s civil rights
laws is flawed because if an employer fails to hire a representative pool of minority applicants, then he or she is “presumed guilty of illegal racial discrimination” (D’Souza, 1995, p. 297). vii
After invalidating the value of proportional representation, D’Souza focuses on the fines that employers must pay if they violate EEO standards and he labels adherence to these standards “preferential hiring programs” (1995, p. 297).viii By emphasizing what he terms “rational
discrimination,” (p. 259) which is a view that because young African Americans are convicted of a high percentage of violent crimes, most Americans “have good reason to take precautions” when they see African American males (1995, p. 261), he claims that racial bias is “attributable to accurate perception of group traits rather than a belief in black inferiority” (1995, p. 289), D’Souza seeks to give an empirical foundation to his position by using specious analogies while ignoring the current demographics of the academy.
Analyses of Positions: Steele, McWhorter, and D’Souza
Shelby Steele's discursive innovations are emblems of the turn in the discourse about race that occurred in the late eighties and early nineties. Before Steele, American discourse about race featured blunt, brilliant, public analyses such as Up From Liberalism (1959) in which Buckley suggested that racism in the service of "civilization," unfortunate as the consequences might be for the "Negro," might not only be justified, but inevitable, because the “leaders of American civilization are white— as one would certainly expect given their preternatural advantages, of tradition, training, and economic status" (p. 127). These incisive mainstream apologiae were replaced by their academic counterparts exemplified by such as writers like Stephen Balch, Executive Director of the National Association of Scholars, who, reducing the vestiges of racism to mere unpleasantness, asked, "Does it really help... to label insensitivity as a form of racism, as if those who are insensitive are of a type with Bull
Connor" and Balch’s academic adversaries who argued that "institutionalized racism, which is the action of your standard power structure in the university. . . is able to actualize
prejudice and oppress others" (qtd. in Bunzel, 1992, p. 3). By the eighties, race discourse had left the mainstream, was intensely polarized, and was vigorously debated only within the limited confines of the academy.
But in 1990, Steele entered the conversation. An English professor with an engaging writing style, whose only real credential was that he was African American himself, he gave a new twist to the conservative values of an earlier generation of thinkers. Steele replaced the empirical arguments of the Buckleys with a definitional argument, redefining "racial
discrimination" narrowly as the social force that would prevent individuals because of their race from pursuing "any path they have chosen to follow" (Steele, 1990, p. 111). All other acts of animus became "racial insensitivity," "slights," or "the peculiar malevolence that racism brings out in people" (Steele, 1990, p. 111). Using Steele's definition, there can be no inherently discriminatory act; the nature of the act can only be decided a posteriori by evaluating the consequences of the act.ix This particular definition of racial discrimination requires an understanding of the relationship between actions and their consequences that is not so easily obtained by human beings. How can Steele be certain that the "slights" and acts "of racial insensitivity" his children experienced did not condition or determine his children's choice of paths? Steele's brother, Claude, a Stanford psychologist, who conducted studies about stereotype threat has shown very clearly that everyone experiences stereotype threat, “the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype, or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype.” Wary of readers misapplying this phenomenon only to minorities, Claude Steele verified that stereotype threat affects everyone because “we are all
members of some group about which negative stereotypes exist” (1999, p. 46).x Shelby Steele does not believe that his children experienced racial discrimination, even though they “have been called names” and know “the peculiar malevolence” of racism.
Shelby Steele's other important innovation was to redefine affirmative action, something he claims, "many blacks and some whites" justified as something "owed" as "a form of
reparation" (1990, p. 119). Owing, of course, does not necessarily imply "reparation;" it can as easily imply a simple debt. Affirmative action, however, had a specific purpose in a specific historical context; Lyndon Baines Johnson’s 1965 Executive Order 11246 banned employment discrimination.xi In June of 1965, at Howard University’s commencement, Johnson used an analogy to clarify how affirmative action would be applied: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” Johnson did not confuse affirmative action with reparations.
Like D'Souza's analysis, Steele's comes directly into conflict with both the letter and the intent of federal statute. Civil rights legislation was forward looking in its intent. It did not seek to repay anyone for suffering incurred in the past but to ensure that the suffering associated with certain types of injustice, based on race, did not occur in the future. Steele's redefinitions were, of course, not the first aimed at changing social policy. They are reminiscent of economist Isabel Sawhill's work “Poverty in the U.S.: Why is it so Persistent?” in which she redefined the poor as the "underclass” (1988, p. 1074).xii
While Steele acknowledges that “subtle discrimination” exists, yet, he argues that “racial preferences” are not “a protection against this subtle discrimination” (Steele, 1990, p. 120). He then declares that racial preferences “implicitly mark whites with an exaggerated
superiority just as they mark blacks with an exaggerated inferiority” (Steele, 1990, p. 120- 21). Undercutting his own argument, he reveals that taint can become a further excuse to discriminate against African Americans. Steele criticizes his professions’ “unrealistically high demand for black professors” as “entitlement by color” (Steele, 1990, p. 121-22). Steele impugns the value of proportional representation when he states that “racial imbalances are not always an indication of racial bias” (1990, p.123). To his credit, Steele does acknowledge that affirmative action “can help institutions evolve standards of merit [. . . and] define exactly what racial discrimination is and how it might manifest itself within a specific institution” (1990, p. 123).
Building on the work of Steele and others, McWhorter continues the tradition of argument by ethos, adding his own personal mea culpa. He believes that minority
fellowships, and by extension, all forms of affirmative action, are emblems of "tokenism" that can infect "the life trajectories" of African American academics as they apparently infected his. His substantive addition to the debate is his contention that "affirmative action for people who have not suffered unique disadvantage is unfair" (2000, pp. 229-32). His argument, however, is reversible. He logically commits himself to the position that affirmative action is admissible for those who have "suffered unique disadvantage." Statistical data more than confirm the claim that African Americans as a class have historically suffered "unique disadvantage." It probably cannot be decided when the
innumerable "slights" and acts "of racial insensitivity" that any individual African American experiences constitute "unique disadvantage." He ignores the fact that no African American is required to apply for a minority fellowship or for admission if he or she does not choose to