Among the Truthers (33 page)

Wilmot's Cold War–era Marxist jargon added to the retro intellectual vibe. Like just about everyone in the class, she took it for granted that racism is an outgrowth of capitalism, and that fighting one necessarily means fighting the other. At one point, she asked us to critique a case study about “Cecilia,” a community activist who spread a happy message of tolerance and mutual respect in her neighborhood. Cecilia's approach was incomplete, the instructor informed us, because she neglected to sound the message that “classism is a form of oppression.” The real problem faced by visible minorities in our capitalist society isn't a lack of understanding; “it's the fundamentally inequitable nature of wage labor.”

The central theme of the course was that this twinned combination of capitalism and racism has produced a cult of “white privilege,” which permeates every aspect of our lives. “Canada is a white supremacist country, so I assume that I'm racist,” one of the male students said matter-of-factly during our first session. “It's not about
not
being racist. Because I know I am. It's about becoming
less
racist.” At this, a woman told the class: “I hate when people tell me they're color-blind. That is the most overt kind of racism. When people say, ‘I don't see your race,' I know that's wrong. To ignore race is to be more racist than to acknowledge race. I call it neo-racism.”

All of the students were white (to my eyes, anyway), and most said they'd come so they could integrate antiracism into their activism and community outreach efforts. A good deal of the course consisted of them unburdening themselves of their racist guilt. The instructor set the tone, describing an episode in which she lectured a junior black colleague about his job. “When I realized what I was doing, I approached him afterward and apologized,” she told the class. “I said to him, ‘I'm so sorry! I'm unloading so much
whiteness
on you right now.' ”

Another woman, an activist with an expertise in media arts, took the floor to describe her torment when a friend asked her to give a presentation to a group of black students—an exercise that would have made a spectacle of her white privilege. “Should I say yes? Or is it my responsibility to say no?” she said, quite literally wringing her hands with apprehension. “But then he may say, ‘I want
you
to do it—because you have a particular approach . . .'

“But wait! Could it be that the reason I
have
that particular approach is that I've been raised to think that I
could
have that particular approach, that I have the ability, that I am able to access education in a particular way? All these things are in my head, in my heart, not really knowing how to respond. On the other hand, I also recognize that the person asking me has the agency to decide that I'm the right person . . . so I say yes! . . . But them I'm still thinking, ‘I don't know if I did the right thing.' I still struggle with this all the time . . .”

An especially telling moment came when someone raised the subject of Filipino nannies who immigrate to Canada under government-sponsored caregiver programs. The instructor told the class that the practice was inherently “superexploitative” (a Marxist term that, according to Wikipedia, means “exploitation that goes beyond the normal standards of exploitation prevalent in capitalist society”). She also pointed us to an article included in the week's reading, “Black Women and Work,” in which Canadian author Dionne Brand argues that cynical employers use appeals such as, “You know that you're part of the family,” to emotionally blackmail nannies, housekeepers, and elder-care workers into the continuation of abusive work relationships.

A community activist—I'll call her Kelly—interjected, apologetically. While she was all on board with the general thrust of the Brand article, she couldn't help but confess that her own family had employed a Filipino nanny who truly did seem “part of the family.” Kelly had been a flower girl at the nanny's wedding, and became close friends with the nanny's own children, who'd spent much of their lives in Kelly's own house.

This little speech from the heart—one of the rare instances in which someone had actually stepped outside the dogmas of antiracism and told a story in real, human language—caused a ripple of discomfort in the class. One woman suggested that the nanny has adopted a “coping mechanism” to deal with her subordinate situation. This led to a discussion about how we must recognize the nanny's “agency”—a popular buzzword signifying that minority members must not be seen as passive victims. The instructor listened attentively—but couldn't offer much more except that the example demonstrated the “contradictoriness” of antiracism studies. We moved on while Kelly just sat there, looking somewhat confused. I felt sorry for her.

In fact, I felt sympathy for just about everyone in that class. Like communist die-hards confessing their counterrevolutionary thought-crimes at a Soviet workers' council, or devout Catholics on their knees in the confessional, they were consumed by their sin, seeming to regard their pallor as a sort of moral leprosy. Their guilt was never far from the surface: Even basic communication with friends and fellow activists, I observed, was a plodding agony of self-censorship, in which every syllable was scrutinized for subconscious racist connotations as it was leaving their mouths. While politically correct campus activists often come across as smug and single-minded, their intellectual life might more accurately be described as bipolar—combining an ecstatic self-conception as high priestesses who pronounce upon the racist sins of our fallen society, alongside extravagant self-mortification in regard to their own fallen state.

As cultural critics have been arguing for decades, the mindset I am describing betrays many of the hallmarks of totalitarianism: humorlessness, Orwellian neologisms, promiscuous accusations of thought-crimes, and the sanctification of doctrinal purity over candid emotional expression. But I also found it interesting to observe how closely this militant critique of society hewed to a traditional conspiracist narrative, which divides society between an elite, all-controlling oppressor class and everyone else. Or as Wilmot tells it: “In the blinding whiteness that controls our society—who gets what jobs, who is running the governments and business, who controls the media—the lives of people are generally erased.”

Since Wilmot's dogmas are rooted in communist logic, this aspect should not be surprising: As noted elsewhere in this book, Marxism is, in its broad contours, itself a form of conspiracy theory that pits evil industrialists against the common workingman. But the rise of militant antiracism in the 1980s and 1990s injected a fresh element into conspiracist culture: the notion that the evildoers aren't Jews, or communists, or Bilderbergers, or aliens, or even capitalists—but rather
ourselves
. Under this politically correct, profoundly antipopulist form of conspiracism—which has found expression in not just radical antiracism, feminism, and anticapitalism, but a slew of more esoteric academic disciplines, such as postcolonial studies and queer theory—the very fabric of our society represents an invidious plot against anyone who doesn't happen to be rich, white, male, and straight.

The great irony is that all this was set in motion not by any of the epic crimes perpetrated by the white patriarchy (of which, let it be said, history records many), but by the civil rights movement and the legal and political victories that came in its wake. Once Western liberals launched themselves on the noble hunt for bald-faced bigotry, they expected to find their quarry everywhere—even once the hated creature had become virtually extinct.

Lessons from the
Yale Law Journal

Yale University is a diverse place. When it comes to admissions, educational programs, and employment, the school claims in its official policy statements that it does not discriminate for or against any individual on the basis of race, color, or ethnic origin. But it's widely known that Yale officials take whatever informal measures are required to increase the representation of minorities on campus. During my time at the law school in the mid–1990s, just under 10 percent of each year's slots were assigned to African Americans—this, despite the fact that, as at other highly ranked U.S. law schools, few black applicants meet the school's general standard for undergraduate grade-point averages and scores on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT).

If the benefits of “diversity” are to be reaped anywhere, Yale Law School is the place. On some campuses, the ugliest aspect of affirmative action is that, by bringing in a population of less qualified students, it inevitably generates a racially stratified hierarchy of academic performance. At Yale Law School, on the other hand, classes are pass/fail affairs that, in practice, everybody passes. While it's possible for students to earn an “honors” grade in their course work, the school's culture actively discourages
Paperchase
-style competition. An aphorism frequently recited among the faculty in my day was that, once admitted to Yale, students were “off the treadmill.”

But as my first year of law school wore on, it became clear that this was not quite true. Though grades count for less at Yale than at most schools, extracurricular activities count for more. The typical student has high ambitions. He does not merely dream of passing the local bar exam and joining a firm but rather aspires to become a judge, an academic, or a federal prosecutor—goals requiring, as a first step, the steady accumulation of accolades during one's term at law school itself. These include, most notably, membership on the editorial staff of the prestigious
Yale Law Journal
.

From the point of view of race relations, the
Journal
presents a problem. Under the rules in place during my time, applicants were required to complete a forty-eight-hour take-home exam testing their abilities in writing, editing, and the formatting of legal footnotes. The identities of the test-takers were unknown to the graders, and no accommodation was made for “underrepresented minorities.” Out of eighty-four white applicants in my year, fifty-two made the cut, as did five out of twelve Asians. Out of the seven black applicants, none was successful.

This was not a one-time phenomenon. In the previous year's competition, eleven blacks had applied, of whom only one was accepted. The result was that, overall, the editorial membership of the
Journal
was overwhelmingly white and Asian. Out of 113 members, only two were black.

When these numbers were released, a scandal erupted.
Journal
officials convened a public meeting to discuss the problem, filling one of the law school's biggest classrooms with a standing-room-only crowd that stayed for three hours. It was an angry meeting—and also an awkward one. The problem was that no one dared mention the most obvious explanation for the racial imbalance that everybody decried. To refer, even obliquely, to the race-tagged stratification of talent at the school would have been humiliating for black students. So instead we censored ourselves and invoked esoteric theories of racial exclusion. The most popular of these was that black applicants approached the writing component of the
Journal
exam with a special “black” style that was routinely and unfairly marked down by the test's administrators. Some speakers argued that the test itself, like other such standardized exercises, amounted to a collection of culturally biased riddles. At the meeting, and in other campus discussions of the issue, many of my classmates folded their criticisms into a more general argument: the will of black applicants had been sapped by the “institutional racism” that allegedly pervaded Yale Law School.

It was around this time that I began noticing a broadening social estrangement at the school along racial lines. Since the only way to explain the racial gap at the
Law Journal
while simultaneously preserving the academic dignity of black students was to endorse various theories of alienation, black students were encouraged to see signs of such alienation in the neo-Gothic law school's every frieze and stained-glass medallion. A great deal was made of the absence of black “role models” on campus—especially black female role models. One of my fellow students argued in a public complaint that “in this environment, women students of color must fashion their professional personas out of thin air, because almost none of their professional mentors look anything like them.” Another lamented: “How can I think that my ideas are respected here when people who are just like me—black women—aren't considered ‘good enough' to teach here as full professors?”

Much grist was provided by small incidents. When a study group ejected one of its members, a black student whose contributions apparently were subpar, the spurned member posted a
J'accuse
manifesto charging racism. In another supposed manifestation of “micro-racism” (as such phenomena would later be described by antiracism advocates), one of my classmates complained in an essay that she'd been “excluded and alienated from the classroom environment” by her criminal-law professor, who had unconscionably confined discussion about race to a three-week segment of the semester.

In the classroom, certainly, the promised educational benefits of diversity rarely materialized. By promoting the idea that blacks thought and wrote in a special black style, the fallout from the
Law Journal
scandal reinforced the conceit that blacks and whites inhabit mutually impenetrable ideological worlds. Whites became increasingly reluctant to offer any comment that might be interpreted as threatening to blacks, while classroom comments by black students on any race-charged issue would almost always go unchallenged. Among my white peers, there was a feeling that sentiments expressed by black students had to be treated, in some abstract sense, as correct
for blacks
, and therefore immune from refutation. In general, most students were terrified of being accused of racism; when a subject connected to race came up, they either uttered platitudes or kept their mouths shut.