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BETWEEN RACE AND REASON
Violence, Intellectual Responsibility, and the University to Come
By Susan Searls Giroux
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7048-4
Chapter One
Notes on the Afterlife of Dreams: On the Persistence of Racism in Post-Civil Rights America
Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of him who does not see or of him who sees and still does not see? Which deception is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake? -SØREN KIERKEGAARD One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. -MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
In 2007 the Dutch journal Nexus invited a number of young professionals and intellectuals, myself included, from various fields the world over-each of us then under forty years of age-to respond to a short story entitled "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" by Delmore Schwartz, originally published in the Partisan Review in 1937. The young Schwartz, heralded as an up-and-coming voice of his generation, penned a narrative describing an epiphanic moment in young man's life. The protagonist, upon waking from a dream about his parents' disastrous courtship and marriage, recognizes the necessity to assume responsibility for his own actions in the world. We were asked, in a similar vein, to ponder the world we were inheriting, the conditions of our own moral and political "awakening," our vision of and dreams about the future, the reach and content of our responsibilities. And in light of this, we were asked to account for what we had done thus far, and what, crucially, we would do in the decades to come. As I look back on it, the assignment seems uncannily prescient, recapitulating many of the themes-of inheritance, of forefathers, of dreams and responsibilities, and of change-that have been a central preoccupation in the autobiographical writings and campaign speeches of both presidential candidates in the run-up to the 2008 U.S. general election. In anxious efforts to stake special claim on some version of the vaunted American dream, each man produced a highly romantic and carefully differentiated bildungsroman-of self and nation-as well as, in decidedly more vague terms, the past and future challenges both entities confronted.
One would have thought that, given my years of experience teaching English, I was in familiar territory; not only were the canonical and counter-canonical texts I typically taught alive to such questions, but the insistent self-reflectivity and conceptual care required to negotiate these "big issues" lie at the heart of the pedagogical encounter. Yet, the more I have thought about these questions, the more difficult and ambivalent the very terms have become. As a woman born in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., in September of 1968, my interpretation of "dreams" and "beginnings" and "responsibilities" is undoubtedly shaped by my status as an American of the post-civil rights era. To be sure, the richly heterogeneous experiences of my generation and the generation I teach preclude the possibility of a singular, representative voice-least of all mine. Nonetheless it seems reasonable to assume that the post-civil rights generations share, by accident of birth, a common frame of reference, as they came of age in the wake (in both the temporal and funereal sense) of a mass movement for civil rights, the political and spiritual leadership of figures like the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the promise of the Great Society. They bore witness instead to a conservative counter-revolution, a new time of turbulence that arcs between the demise of Jim Crow and the birth of the carceral state, between the quagmire of Vietnam and the quagmire of an increasingly unpopular (if not also unwinnable) war on terror currently staged in Iraq and Afghanistan, between the infamous administration of Richard Nixon and that of George W. Bush, which will undoubtedly add war crimes to its own unique constitutional transgressions, and between the OPEC oil crisis of 1973 and the crisis of free market deregulation that spawned the global financial collapse of 2008. Those are some of the broad contours; the specificities of these epochal events, for the vast majority of my generation and the millennial generation that followed, have translated into a narrative of disinheritance. For them, the everyday is increasingly marked by volatility, instability, and precarity. It has meant and continues to mean, for most, the decline of the American dream and downward mobility; as well as "the dissolution of the family; growing child abuse and domestic conflict; drug and alcohol abuse; sexually transmitted diseases; poor education and crumbling schools; and escalating criminalization, imprisonment and even state execution."
Now as the inspiring rhetoric of the campaign season gives way to the hard realities of governance, one wonders if the era's conservative ascendancy is indeed over. With the historic election of Barack Obama in November 2008 comes no small degree of hope for the many millions, unprecedented millions, who were moved to join his campaign and organize for change. And change we desperately need. As Americans headed to the polls, the nation confronted a mind-numbing series of crises-protracted economic recession, a financial sector reliant upon a trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout, two wars costing billions more per month, cash-strapped states unable to repair crumbling infrastructure and dilapidated public schools, spiraling tuition costs and diminished student aid to universities, ever- widening unemployment, the plunging value of the family home, and retirement plans shrinking faster than polar ice caps-all of which threaten not only its immediate future, but also its very viability. Upon surveying the vast wreckage wrought by the past forty years of "colorblind" racial backlash and neoliberal rule, one hears again Dr. King's insistent query "Where do we go from here?" What America tolerated as the norm for the majority of its black citizens, who not only were dealt out of FDR's New Deal but also were among the first to suffer the bitter consequences of post-industrial decline-creeping poverty, higher unemployment, stagnant or depreciating home values, no or minuscule health care, pension plans, or job security, and deplorable schools-has now spread to the nation's once-robust middle class. And, as a result, the nation as a whole suffers forms of social dislocation and dissolution, once arrogantly assumed to be a special preserve of black dysfunction, that nonetheless accompany these shockingly inadequate conditions-broken marriages, broken families, shattered communities. Our capacity to transcend this inglorious epoch and achieve an American dream in keeping with King's vision of pervasive peace, social justice, and equality will largely depend not only on new leadership, but on the ways everyday citizens understand how we got here and adjust accordingly. That means understanding that America's futurity rests on the capacities of her citizens to recognize the weight of the historical evidence: to see that the freedom and dignity of one population cannot be ruthlessly sacrificed for the perceived improvement of another and to acknowledge that reciprocity is the key to our responsibility. Thus the challenge we face is educational as much as it is economic, political, or cultural; our future rests on our capacity to learn collectively from our past, a past that remains utterly embattled, and, to paraphrase Dr. King, remain awake and responsive in rapidly changing times.
What follows is my attempt to respond to the difficulty of the questions posed to me in 2007. It is an examination of the place where personal biography and national politics intersect in the formation of individual consciousness and public memory. In recapitulating the marital prehistory with which Schwartz commences his own narrative search for agency, I attempt to offer another discourse of self and social responsibility-and the inescapably pedagogical conditions of their possibility.
My father has his back to the camera. I don't see his face, just a dark suit and the familiar wavy hair, cut short to keep the unruliness in check. My mother, in white lace profile, tentatively delivers the customary forkful of wedding cake upward to the groom's lips. The pretty divorcee with two children smiles her curious upside-down smile. Head bent forward and down, his gray eyes, flecked with gold, hidden from me, appear fixed on her fingers. Concentrating on the tender task at hand, her eyes, warm brown and soft, are also elsewhere. Slightly out of focus and mellowed with age, the photograph beckons the observer into its gilded reverie. The seduction might well have worked, but for the presence of a third face in this intimate yet ubiquitous scene, still and stoic, staring back at me. Dressed in a crisp white tuxedo, his dark skin becomes darker still, his black eyes seem to take in everything. In the background I recognize the dining room of my uncle's estate where this peculiar triad is assembled. The couple is conscious only of each other, while the server pours champagne for the indifferent menagerie of distant, faded relatives and polished recent acquaintances, old back-slapping buddies and important Washington contacts. The guests have been assembled to witness both a new bond, ceremoniously enacted and spiritually sanctioned, and a very old one, deprived of dignity and unholy. A private dream and a social perversion. The young black server is there and not there, unacknowledged and yet vital to the unfolding fantasy of a perfect union-of future prosperity, security, and propriety-for both family and nation. A conscript in a collective refusal to take heed of shifting contexts.
Such was Georgetown in July 1965. But really such was the nation. A citizenry in a state of denial-save for those caught in reality's crosshairs. Several blocks in one direction from the marital scene we find the famed Washington Mall, the Capital building, and the White House, then home to Lyndon B. Johnson and "the Great Society." But that wasn't the society it was; neither its domestic nor its foreign commitments approached such lofty idealism. Several blocks in the other direction lies one of the poorest, most segregated districts in the nation. Its young became prison fodder-in a burgeoning mass incarceration experiment that by 2008's season of hope would jail nearly one in three black men in the nation's urban centers-or cannon fodder, in successive imperial wars fought in the name of democracy that would eventually become the shame of the nation. It occurs to me, as I'm drawn back to this four-decade-old photograph, that it has no present tense; it conjures both a fading past and not too distant future. A paroxysm of nostalgia and an ill-fated prophecy, it recalls the genteel side of southern segregation as it simultaneously forecasts a future morality, so-called, predicated on the pulverization of society into isolated, men, women, and their families, responsible for themselves alone. The denial of humanity that once ordered the world's variegated populations in rigid hierarchy would be reimagined and refashioned into the very denial of society, and so too its networks of social obligation, responsibility, reciprocity, and solidarity. Only recently have I come to understand these, consequentially speaking, as very similar if not quite the same thing.
Throughout the decade of the 1960s, worldwide transformation was occurring in ways seen and unseen by everyday people. A series of progressive social and political revolutions held the promise of freedom and a full schedule of rights for historically oppressed groups, but there were also technological and economic revolutions that, when tethered to narrow nationalist agendas or profitable market expansion, augured a less egalitarian and less just future. "Improved means to unimproved ends," Thoreau once said, in a suggestive phrase that effectively sums up the era. By 1968, the year of my birth, the national mood had turned less hopeful and more militant. Before his assassination in the spring of that year, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote an essay titled "The World House" that addressed the challenges facing a rapidly evolving new world order. He announced that the day had arrived when civilization was "shifting its basic outlook," the very presuppositions upon which society was structured were being interrogated, challenged, and transformed. "For several centuries," he wrote, "the direction of history flowed from the nations and societies of Western Europe out into the rest of the world in 'conquests' of various sorts. That period, the era of colonialism, is at an end. East is moving West. The earth is being redistributed." He warned that "nothing could be more tragic" than for men and women who lived in such revolutionary times to fail to "achieve the new attitudes and the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands." And he retold the tale of Rip Van Winkle, who failed to remain awake during a period of great social change, insisting that we as a nation must work "indefatigably" to "bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress," to meet the challenge of our vast material wealth and our moral and spiritual impoverishment. Against the terrible propensity for procrastination, he warned that "there is such a thing as being too late" and invoked, famously, "the fierce urgency of now." "The large house in which we all live," King maintained, "demands that we transform this world-wide neighborhood into a world-wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools."
Somewhere along the way, however, the nation's citizenry seemed to fall asleep-or only dreamed that they had awakened to King's moral vision. Indeed, the times took a great many by surprise. Neither of the unions frozen in the four-decade-old photograph would last for very long. The first was over in a few years. The groom, trapped in the basement of his own imagination, would survive scarcely a decade more before drinking himself to death. The bride, alone, facing financial hardship and responsible now for three children, would work until nervous collapse prevented her from ever returning. In a cold new world where, as Margaret Thatcher insisted, "there is no such thing as society," a world short on social provision and long on personal responsibility, hers would prove an unforgivable weakness. The poor were poor, after all, because they made bad decisions. The second union was, of course, doomed from the very beginning. Upon challenging centuries of overt repression and paternalistic imposition, the nation's black citizenry were eventually expelled from the American family romance, only to be recast as a primary threat to familial hearth and home. No longer a people victimized by the indignity and brutality of second-class citizenship under Jim Crow, they became a predatory population to be feared and contained at all costs. Technological advancement had rendered a significant part of that once-crucial labor force redundant, but young black men and women were called upon once more to perform another task for the nation, to enact yet another kind of fantasy. If by the 1980s it was clear that the American family, and its vaunted middle-class dream, was in danger, so this cheap and tawdry tale told, it was because of the ominous threat of "thugged out" young black males and "welfare queens," abetted by a government given over to special interests, living la dolce vita on the taxpayers' dime when not stealing from them directly. The avatars of individual choice, endowed with media omnipotence, denounced the taxing and spending abuses of "big government." But far from dismantling government or "drowning it in a bathtub," as Grover Norquist once promised, it was dramatically refashioned. If the mid-century social welfare state had been concerned, at least in theory, with citizens' social well-being in its performance of certain caretaking functions, including the funding of education, healthcare, and public housing-a set of commitments the civil rights struggles of the 1960s were meant to expand to all citizens-the neoliberal state that succeeded it grew more intrusive and more repressive, as resources drained from social safety nets were reallocated toward the police, military, prisons, border patrol, intelligence agencies, and an expanding homeland security apparatus. And, as fear overtook reason, personal safety trumped collective security-all the better for those who manipulated world markets and induced volatility into every aspect of daily life, who sought to inflame the apparently antagonistic interests of disconnected individuals to the detriment of the vast majority of humanity. According to the militarized metaphysic of the new American century, the malefactors have only increased.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BETWEEN RACE AND REASON by Susan Searls Giroux Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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