President Shirley M. Tilghman’s announcement of Princeton University’s recent decision to build up its African-American-studies program, developing a new major and adding a number of faculty positions, begins with the statement that “of all the challenges that confront America, none is more profound than the struggle to achieve racial equality.” It goes on to say that, although Princeton’s scholars have made their own important contributions to African-American studies, the university has in certain areas lagged behind its peers. Approximately “two-thirds of the nation’s highest-ranked universities” already “offer a degree in the field,” and that two-thirds includes “every Ivy League university except Princeton.” So enhancing its program will not only allow Princeton to confront the challenge of racial inequality, it will also enable the university to attract some of the “talented students” that members of the faculty believe they are currently “losing” to other universities “because of the absence of the option to concentrate in African-American studies at Princeton.”
The statement doesn’t say how many of the students Princeton worries about losing are black ones, but Princeton does have a strong commitment to diversity, and indeed, on the day the statement was released, the university also announced that its new entering class, the Class of 2010, was its most diverse ever: Thirty-seven percent of the 1,231-member class are “students of color.” Whether or not enhancing the program will also enhance the diversity numbers is not clear. The current associate director of the program, Noliwe M. Rooks, has published an important book, White Money/Black Power (Beacon, 2006), in which she points out that there is no demonstrated connection between African-American-studies programs and the recruitment of black students, and wonders “why the association between attracting black students and an African-American-studies program [is] still so strong, despite all the evidence to the contrary.”
Maybe part of the answer is that elite universities have come to think of African-American-studies programs on the model of state-of-the-art fitness facilities: No one goes to a college just because it has a great climbing wall, but, all other things being equal, the great climbing wall might clinch the deal. And if the climbing wall comparison seems to trivialize the commitment to diversity, insofar as that commitment involves one Ivy League university’s trying to lure some students of color away from other Ivy League universities, it already seems pretty trivial. In fact, from the standpoint of social justice, the question of whether kids who might otherwise have gone to Yale decide instead to go to Princeton couldn’t be more trivial.
But it’s almost certainly wrong to attribute the attraction of African-American-studies programs merely to their putative ability to attract African-American students (or even, as Rooks more plausibly suggests, to their ability at least to attract African-American faculty members). And we can begin to see why by thinking about the current vogue for another kind of racialized program, Asian-American studies. Right now there are far fewer Asian-American- than African-American-studies programs, but their number is increasing. Indeed my own university, the University of Illinois at Chicago, is looking to establish one. But the rationale here has very little to do with recruiting more Asian-American students either into universities in general or into our university in particular. On the contrary, we have lots of Asian-American students, as do most of the places with African-American-studies programs. For if African-Americans are still a conspicuously underrepresented minority at elite universities, Asian-Americans are an even more conspicuously overrepresented minority. At Princeton they’re 13 percent of the student body; at Harvard, 18 percent. And the reason for this is very clear: Asian-Americans are richer than African-Americans. In 2005 “black households,” as the U.S. Census Bureau puts it, “had the lowest median income ($30,858) among race groups. Asian households had the highest ($61,094).” With respect to whether you get to go to college, then, it’s money that matters; with respect to whether you get a program devoted to studying you when you are there, what matters is your identity.
Money matters in enrollment because it takes money to provide the kind of educational preparation that enables you to get into an elite college. Thus, althoughas Daniel Golden’s recent book, The Price of Admission (Crown, 2006), has shownAsian-American applicants are sometimes rejected by elite colleges in favor of kids who are even richer than they are, their numbers are still high, and their rejection is pretty inconsequential. Golden laments that Asians are the “new Jews,” kept by informal racial quotas out of colleges they deserve to be admitted to. But it’s hard to feel all that bad about a student (one of Golden’s prime examples) who, turned down by the Ivy League, is forced to settle for Johns Hopkins and who ends up in medical school. Indeed the designation “new Jews” makes a very different point from the one Golden intends. It’s blacks, not Jews, who were the victims of an American racism that required no quotas to keep their numbers to a minimum at selective universities, and it’s blacks, not Asians, who have inherited the legacy of that racism — or whose lack of inheritance is the legacy — keeping their numbers down today as well.
From this standpoint, the constitution of Asian-American-studies programs on the model of African-American-studies programs — as if Asian-Americans were comparable victims of American racism — looks almost like a kind of parody. Michael Rogin once brilliantly described the use of blackface in Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer as a device through which the immigrant Jew first becomes American by identifying himself with the African-American (putting the blackface on), and then (taking the blackface off) succeeds as an American by becoming white. “The jazz singer rises,” Rogin said, “by putting on the mask of a group that must remain immobile, unassimilable and fixed at the bottom.” There’s a certain sense in which Asian-American studies is a kind of blackface, a performance that produces the image of racialized oppression alongside the reality of economic success.
But there’s a more-important sense in which even African-American studies is a kind of blackface, a performance not only of blackness but of race itself. Asian-Americans are overrepresented in elite colleges like Princeton; African-American students are underrepresented. But no one’s as underrepresented in those colleges as poor people. And no one’s looking to get their numbers up to where, if you wanted to eliminate the underrepresentation, they would have to be. A Princeton that managed to lure enough black students away from the other Ivies to constitute 12 percent of its entering class (just as African-Americans constitute approximately 12 percent of the American population) would be a more diverse Princeton. A Princeton where 50 percent of the entering class consisted of students who came from households earning under $46,326 (the median income in the United States) would be an entirely different institution.
In the Princeton class of 2009, 196 students (out of a total of 1,229, a little under 16 percent) came from households that Princeton characterizes as low-income households earning under $50,900 a year. But even though those numbers aren’t all that wonderful, Princeton is a real leader here: According to Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose, roughly 10 percent of students at the 146 colleges and universities ordinarily ranked as highly selective come from the bottom half of the socioeconomic scale.
And, of course, the economic stratification at elite universities is only symptomatic of the economic stratification of American society more generally. In 2005 the richest quintile of American society got richer still — the top 20 percent now make 50.4 percent of the nation’s income. It’s the sons and daughters of that quintile who make up the majority of the students at Princeton. They’re the ones who will now be able not just to take a few classes, but also to major in African-American studies. They’re the ones — black and white and Asian and Latino — who need to be educated in the way that “everyone in this country” (here President Tilghman is quoting the committee that recommended establishment of the new center) looks when “viewed through the prism of ideas about race.”
And it’s not hard to see why, at this moment, they especially need this particular prism and this particular education. Rooks makes an interesting observation toward the end of White Money/Black Power. She describes the class discussion among a group of Princeton students who had been watching the television show The Corner, with its vivid depiction of a black neighborhood in Baltimore both structured and destroyed by drugs. Many of the African-American students hated the show and denied it had any relevance either to their lives or to “real life” in general since, they said, “black people just don’t really act like that.” The white students didn’t like it any better since, as one of them said, there was “no one in the show” they could “like and feel sorry for.” The problem for all the students, Rooks says, was that they were made to feel “uncomfortable,” and the problem for her is her own discomfort with the idea that “a successful argument about racial inequity” should be required to depend on the comfort of its viewers.
Although I don’t want to make too much out of The Corner, it’s possible to see a somewhat different moral in this story. We expect their shared blackness to form a bond between the African-American students at Princeton and the African-Americans on the streets of Baltimore, and the students themselves share that expectation. That’s why, when they don’t feel the bond, they deny that the people in the show are really behaving like black people. And they are right to deny it. What the people in the show are behaving like is not black people but very, very poor people. And when the white students complain that there is no one to feel sorry for, they too are complaining that the people in the show are not really black; they are not the victims of discrimination and racism; they are the victims of poverty. What both race and racism give the antiracist upper middle class is a way to “like” the victims of economic inequality. Take their race away, and what the upper middle class sees on that television show is not the image of its own virtue (that’s what make us comfortable), but the reverse face of its own success.
My point, then, is that the commitment to African-American studies, like the commitment to Asian-American studies, is a commitment to describing our social problems in a way that will make all of us — teachers as well as students, alumni as well as parents — feel comfortable. It does this by racializing injustice at a moment when race is less relevant to injustice — at least to the injustice done by elite universities — in America than it has ever been. Rooks quotes Orlando Patterson as saying, “The doors are wide open for ... black middle-class kids to enter elite colleges.” The relevant term here is “middle-class.” African-American- and Asian-American-studies programs tell us that, from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our identity, at the very moment when, again from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our wealth.
From this standpoint, African-American and Asian-American studies are two of the very many ways in which an elite (predominantly white, increasingly Asian, and still only a very little bit black) represents to itself a vision of social justice that has less and less to do with the great social injustice — economic stratification — from which that elite benefits. Which doesn’t mean that it may not be a good idea anyway for Princeton to build up its African-American-studies program and for the University of Illinois to start an Asian-American-studies program. Why?
One reason is that such programs remind us of the importance of groups and the irrelevance of a certain individualism in American life. They remind us, in other words, that the people who belong to those elites didn’t all get there because of hard work and ability. In the first half of the 20th century, white people didn’t get to go to better colleges because of their individual merits; at the beginning of the 21st century, rich people aren’t getting to go to better colleges because of their individual merits either. It’s true that, if I am right, race is the wrong prism through which to see American society today, but any prism is better than none. Any prism is better than the illusion that prisms are irrelevant and that everybody already has the equality of opportunity the removal of those prisms would establish.
Another reason is that these programs are the places where questions about the meaning of race (and its handmaiden, culture) get raised. No assertion is more common in American intellectual life today than the insistence that race and class (and gender) are inextricably intertwined, and, in a certain sense, this is obviously true. Everybody has a household income; everybody’s descended from somebody; everybody’s male or female or some combination of the two. But one of the things that thinking seriously about race makes possible is not just the imbrication of race with class, but the disarticulation of class from race. We live in a society where the struggle to achieve racial equality is not the most profound of the challenges that face us. A program in African-American studies that helps us to understand not just the importance of race but its limits (not just its relevance but its irrelevance) will be well worth the money Princeton plans to spend.
Walter Benn Michaels is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of The Trouble With Diversity, published in October by Metropolitan Books.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 53, Issue 17, Page B10
