Hunger of Memory, page 13
I became a highly rewarded minority student. For campus officials came first to students like me with their numerous offers of aid. And why not? Administrators met their angriest critics’ demands by promoting any plausible Hispanic on hand. They were able, moreover, to use the presence of conventionally qualified nonwhite students like me to prove that they were meeting the goals of their critics.
In 1969, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., prompted many academic officials to commit themselves publicly to the goal of integrating their institutions. One day I watched the nationally televised funeral; a week later I received invitations to teach at community colleges. There were opportunities to travel to foreign countries with contingents of ‘minority group scholars.’ And I went to the financial aid office on campus and was handed special forms for minority student applicants. I was a minority student, wasn’t I? the lady behind the counter asked me rhetorically. Yes, I said. Carelessly said. I completed the application. Was later awarded.
In a way, it was true. I was a minority. The word, as popularly used, did describe me. In the sixties, minority became a synonym for socially disadvantaged Americans—but it was primarily a numerical designation. The word referred to entire races and nationalities of Americans, those numerically underrepresented in institutional life. (Thus, without contradiction, one could speak of ‘minority groups.’) And who were they exactly? Blacks—all blacks—most obviously were minorities. And Hispanic-Americans. And American Indians. And some others. (It was left to federal statisticians, using elaborate surveys and charts, to determine which others precisely.)
I was a minority.
I believed it. For the first several years, I accepted the label. I certainly supported the racial civil rights movement; supported the goal of broadening access to higher education. But there was a problem: One day I listened approvingly to a government official defend affirmative action; the next day I realized the benefits of the program. I was the minority student the political activists shouted about at noontime rallies. Against their rhetoric, I stood out in relief, unrelieved. Knowing: I was not really more socially disadvantaged than the white graduate students in my classes. Knowing: I was not disadvantaged like many of the new nonwhite students who were entering college, lacking good early schooling.
Nineteen sixty-nine. 1970. 1971. Slowly, slowly, the term minority became a source of unease. It would remind me of those boyhood years when I had felt myself alienated from public (majority) society—los gringos. Minority. Minorities. Minority groups. The terms sounded in public to remind me in private of the truth: I was not—in a cultural sense—a minority, an alien from public life. (Not like los pobres I had encountered during my recent laboring summer.) The truth was summarized in the sense of irony I’d feel at hearing myself called a minority student: The reason I was no longer a minority was because I had become a student.
Minority student!
In conversations with faculty members I began to worry the issue, only to be told that my unease was unfounded. A dean said he was certain that after I graduated I would be able to work among ‘my people.’ A senior faculty member expressed his confidence that, though I was unrepresentative of lower-class Hispanics, I would serve as a role model for others of my race. Another faculty member was sure that I would be a valued counselor to incoming minority students. (He assumed that, because of my race, I retained a special capacity for communicating with nonwhite students.) I also heard academic officials say that minority students would someday form a leadership class in America. (From our probable positions of power, we would be able to lobby for reforms to benefit others of our race.)
In 1973 I wrote and had published two essays in which I said that I had been educated away from the culture of my mother and father. In 1974 I published an essay admitting unease over becoming the beneficiary of affirmative action. There was another article against affirmative action in 1977. One more soon after. At times, I proposed contrary ideas; consistent always was the admission that I was no longer like socially disadvantaged Hispanic-Americans. But this admission, made in national magazines, only brought me a greater degree of success. A published minority student, I won a kind of celebrity. In my mail were admiring letters from right-wing politicians. There were also invitations to address conferences of college administrators or government officials.
My essays served as my ‘authority’ to speak at the Marriott Something or the Sheraton Somewhere. To stand at a ballroom podium and hear my surprised echo sound from a microphone. I spoke. I started getting angry letters from activists. One wrote to say that I was becoming the gringos’ fawning pet. What ‘they’ want all Hispanics to be. I remembered the remark when I was introduced to an all-white audience and heard their applause so loud. I remembered the remark when I stood in a university auditorium and saw an audience of brown and black faces watching me. I publicly wondered whether a person like me should really be termed a minority. But some members of the audience thought I was denying racial pride, trying somehow to deny my racial identity. They rose to protest. One Mexican-American said I was a minority whether I wanted to be or not. And he said that the reason I was a beneficiary of affirmative action was simple: I was a Chicano. (Wasn’t I?) It was only an issue of race.
It is important now to remember that the early leaders of the northern civil rights movement were from the South. (The civil rights movement in the North depended upon an understanding of racism derived from the South.) Here was the source of the mistaken strategy—the reason why activists could so easily ignore class and could consider race alone a sufficient measure of social oppression. In the South, where racism had been legally enforced, all blacks suffered discrimination uniformly. The black businessman and the black maid were undifferentiated by the law that forced them to the rear of the bus. Thus, when segregation laws were challenged and finally defeated, the benefit to one became a benefit for all; the integration of an institution by a single black implied an advance for the entire race.
From the experience of southern blacks, a generation of Americans came to realize with new force that there are forms of oppression that touch all levels of a society. This was the crucial lesson that survived the turbulence in the South of the fifties and sixties. The southern movement gave impetus initially to the civil rights drives of nonwhite Americans in the North. Later, the black movement’s vitality extended to animate the liberation movements of women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and the homosexual. Leaders of these groups described the oppression they suffered by analogy to that suffered by blacks. Thus one heard of sexism—that echo of racism, and something called gray power. People in wheelchairs gave the black-power salute. And homosexuals termed themselves ‘America’s last niggers.’ As racism rhetorically replaced poverty as the key social oppression, Americans learned to look beyond class in considering social oppression. The public conscience was enlarged. Americans were able to take seriously, say, the woman business executive’s claim to be the victim of social oppression. But with this advance there was a danger. It became easy to underestimate, even to ignore altogether, the importance of class. Easy to forget that those whose lives are shaped by poverty and poor education (cultural minorities) are least able to defend themselves against social oppression, whatever its form.
In the era of affirmative action it became more and more difficult to distinguish the middle-class victim of social oppression from the lower-class victim. In fact, it became hard to say when a person ever stops being disadvantaged. Quite apart from poverty, the variety of social oppressions that most concerned Americans involved unchangeable conditions. (One does not ever stop being a woman; one does not stop being aged—short of death; one does not stop being a quadriplegic.) The commonplace heard in the sixties was precisely this: A black never stops being black. (The assertion became a kind of justification for affirmative action.)
For my part I believe the black lawyer who tells me that there is never a day in his life when he forgets he is black. I believe the black business executive who says that, although he drives an expensive foreign car, he must be especially wary when a policeman stops him for speeding. I do not doubt that middle-class blacks need to remain watchful when they look for jobs or try to rent or when they travel to unfamiliar towns. ‘You can’t know what it is like for us,’ a black woman shouted at me one day from an audience somewhere. Like a white liberal, I was awed, shaken by her rage; I gave her the point. But now I must insist, must risk presumption to say that I do not think that all blacks are equally ‘black.’ Surely those uneducated and poor will remain most vulnerable to racism. It was not coincidence that the leadership of the southern civil rights movement was drawn mainly from a well-educated black middle class. Even in the South of the 1950s, all blacks were not equally black.
All Mexican-Americans certainly are not equally Mexican-Americans. The policy of affirmative action, however, was never able to distinguish someone like me (a graduate student of English, ambitious for a college teaching career) from a slightly educated Mexican-American who lived in a barrio and worked as a menial laborer, never expecting a future improved. Worse, affirmative action made me the beneficiary of his condition. Such was the foolish logic of this program of social reform: Because many Hispanics were absent from higher education, I became with my matriculation an exception, a numerical minority. Because I was not a cultural minority, I was extremely well placed to enjoy the advantages of affirmative action. I was groomed for a position in the multiversity’s leadership class.
Remarkably, affirmative action passed as a program of the Left. In fact, its supporters ignored the most fundamental assumptions of the classical Left by disregarding the importance of class and by assuming that the disadvantages of the lower class would necessarily be ameliorated by the creation of an elite society. The movement that began so nobly in the South, in the North came to parody social reform. Those least disadvantaged were helped first, advanced because many others of their race were more disadvantaged. The strategy of affirmative action, finally, did not take seriously the educational dilemma of disadvantaged students. They need good early schooling! Activists pushed to get more nonwhite students into colleges. Meritocratic standards were dismissed as exclusionary. But activists should have asked why so many minority students could not meet those standards; why so many more would never be in a position to apply. The revolutionary demand would have called for a reform of primary and secondary schools.
To improve the education of disadvantaged students requires social changes which educational institutions alone cannot make, of course. Parents of such students need jobs and good housing; the students themselves need to grow up with three meals a day, in safe neighborhoods. But disadvantaged students also require good teachers. Good teachers—not fancy electronic gadgets—to teach them to read and to write. Teachers who are not overwhelmed; teachers with sufficient time to devote to individual students; to inspire. In the late sixties, civil rights activists might have harnessed the great idealism that the southern movement inspired in Americans. They might have called on teachers, might have demanded some kind of national literacy campaign for children of the poor—white and nonwhite—at the earliest levels of learning.
But the opportunity passed. The guardians of institutional America in Washington were able to ignore the need for fundamental social changes. College and university administrators could proudly claim that their institutions had yielded, were open to minority groups. (There was proof in a handful of numbers computed each fall.) So less thought had to be given to the procession of teenagers who leave ghetto high schools disadvantaged, badly taught, unable to find decent jobs.
I wish as I write these things that I could be angry at those who mislabeled me. I wish I could enjoy the luxury of self-pity and cast myself as a kind of ‘invisible man.’ But guilt is not disposed of so easily. The fact is that I complied with affirmative action. I permitted myself to be prized. Even after publicly voicing objections to affirmative action, I accepted its benefits. I continued to indicate my race on applications for financial aid. (It didn’t occur to me to leave the question unanswered.) I’d apply for prestigious national fellowships and tell friends that the reason I won was because I was a minority. (This by way of accepting the fellowship money.) I published essays admitting that I was not a minority—saw my by-line in magazines and journals which once had seemed very remote from my life. It was a scholarship boy’s dream come true. I enjoyed being—not being—a minority student, the featured speaker. I was invited to lecture at schools that only a few years before would have rejected my application for graduate study. My life was unlike that of any other graduate student I knew. On weekends I flew cross country to say—through a microphone—that I was not a minority.
Someone told me this: A senior faculty member in the English department at Berkeley smirked when my name came up in a conversation. Someone at the sherry party had wondered if the professor had seen my latest article on affirmative action. The professor replied with arch politeness, ‘And what does Mr. Rodriguez have to complain about?’
You who read this act of contrition should know that by writing it I seek a kind of forgiveness—not yours. The forgiveness, rather, of those many persons whose absence from higher education permitted me to be classed a minority student. I wish that they would read this. I doubt they ever will.
II
When civil rights leaders first demanded the admission of minority students to higher education, academic officials could have challenged their critics to seek the more important reform of primary and secondary education. Academics might have agreed to commit themselves to the goal of helping more nonwhite students enter college. But they should have simply acknowledged (the truth) that higher education is out of the reach of minorities—poorly schooled, disadvantaged Americans. That admission would have taken great courage to make. But more than courage was lacking. When educators promised to open their schools, it was partly because they couldn’t imagine another response; their schools were rooted in the belief that higher education should be available to all. (This democratic ideal had made possible the post–World War II expansion of higher education.) Academics would have violated their generation’s ideal of openness if they had said that their schools couldn’t accommodate disadvantaged Americans. To have acknowledged the truth about their schools, moreover, academics would have had to acknowledge their own position of privilege. And that would have been difficult. The middle-class academy does not deeply impress on students or teachers a sense of social advantage. The campus has become a place for ‘making it’ rather than a place for those who, relatively speaking, ‘have it made.’ Even academics on the Left who criticized the ‘elitism’ of higher education seemed not to recognize how different they themselves were from the socially disadvantaged. Many supported affirmative action, assuming that only access kept minority Americans out of college.
So it happened: Academia accepted its so-called minority students. And after the pool of ‘desirable’ minority students was depleted, more ‘provisional’ students were admitted. But the academy was prepared to do little more for such students. (Getting admitted to college was for many nonwhite students the easiest obstacle to overcome.) The conspiracy of kindness became a conspiracy of uncaring. Cruelly, callously, admissions committees agreed to overlook serious academic deficiency. I knew students in college then barely able to read, students unable to grasp the function of a sentence. I knew nonwhite graduate students who were bewildered by the requirement to compose a term paper and who each day were humiliated when they couldn’t compete with other students in seminars. There were contrived tutoring programs. But many years of inferior schooling could not be corrected with a crowded hour or two of instruction each week. Not surprisingly, among those students with very poor academic preparation, few completed their courses of study. Many dropped out, most blaming themselves for their failure. One fall, six nonwhite students I knew suffered severe mental collapse. None of the professors who had welcomed them to graduate school were around when it came time to take them to the infirmary or to the airport. And the university officials who so diligently took note of those students in their self-serving totals of entering minority students finally took no note of them when they left.
On every campus, on every faculty, there were exceptions—remarkable professors who took it upon themselves to act as tutors, advisors, friends. Rare women and men, always well known to nonwhite students needing help. More common, however, were those faculty members who simply passed their provisional students. Teachers confronted with evidence of a student’s inadequate comprehension found it easiest to dispense a grade that moved a student toward meaningless graduation. The new minority students had been treated with such generosity before. That is how many of them had passed through twelve years of grammar and high school, in the end still needing to be considered culturally disadvantaged.
My experience was different. No professor simply passed me. None treated me with condescension. I was well schooled. Ironically, it was because of what I was so well taught in the classroom that my unease over affirmative action deepened. I was instructed to hear in the Renaissance poet’s celebration of pastoral life the reminder of his reader’s own civic responsibility and power. I learned how a popular novelist like Dickens, writing for a middle-class audience, makes his readers aware of their ability to effect social reform. Teachers made me aware of D. H. Lawrence’s felt separation from his working-class father. And I was made to listen to George Orwell’s admission that, as a literate man, he would never be able to imagine what it is like to be one of the uneducated poor.
