Multiculturalism and Its Masks: The Art of Identity Politics

Multiculturalismand Its Masks The Art of Identity Politics Daryl Chin SINCE THE MID-1980S, there have been intense debates on the condition of culture both in and out of the academy. Initially formulated as the positing of an expanded canon, these debates have evolved into the codification of alternative canons, the categorization of culture symbolized by connotations such as "interculturalism," "multiculturalism," and "political correctness." The recent debates over the National Endowment for the Arts are symptomatic of the embattled arena of aesthetics invaded by politics. One of the problems of this debate is that the polarities (as such polarities inevitably must be) are grossly exaggerated, so that the oppositional debate has degenerated into the most extreme of caricatured positions. From this vantage point, to open a discussion is to invite instant screams of politicized posturing. To begin by stating the obvious: these debates on culture are not about "art," they are not about aesthetics as it is understood to be a subset of philosophical theory. They are about politics, they are about power, they are about the ways in which "culture" is embedded in the societal matrix. These debates are about "representation," about people's feelings of disenfranchisement and exclusion within the cultural industry. The reason the debates are so painful is that they strike at the very heart of who people think they are. At this time, the cynicism about our political processes is at an all-time high: when 50% of potential registered voters actually get to the polls during an election, it is regarded as a landslide of citizen involvement. If public opinion polls are any indication, the American public is worried about the economy; there is great fear about 1 what is perceived as the disintegration of the society, and hope is all but nil that there will be any major changes. So people latch onto something they think they can change: one of those things just happens to be culture. The debates on the canon within the academy are formulated on the assumption that the educational system can be changed, and that these changes can affect the attitudes of students, and, from that, there can begin to be changes in society. But that is placing an awful burden on the schools: schools were not meant to replace everything else in students' personal environments. The rise in white supremacist sentiment among the embattled white working classes and rural classes is one of the results of the diminishing economic prospects most of these people are facing: instead of striking back at the politicians who are the cause of their problems, they strike back at those they perceive as having usurped power. I thought we were intelligent enough to know this, to know that the obfuscations in American political life result in these extreme displacements of affect, and to try to deal with political realities without further obfuscations. If getting students to read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is a step towards opening their minds, that cannot be an entire program for alleviating racism in our society. The reason politicians can seize on these issues and examples is that they understand it as a diversionary tactic: when Jesse Helms attacks gay artists, he is not addressing the rising chronic unemployment rate in the state of North Carolina, nor the fact that the industries that had provided employment there have gone multinational and moved out of the country, taking employment possibilities with them; he is not addressing the needs of education to retrain those workers in need of jobs and to ensure that future generations will have jobs. Instead, he is attacking gay artists by appealing to the basic conditioning of a fundamentalist population which does not know enough to realize that gay artists are not their problem: Jesse Helms is their problem. How can they know, when the illiteracy rate in North Carolina is one of the highest in the country? How can arguments be reasoned, when people can not read? Implementing education programs to get these people to read might be a start in helping to open up the discourse on aesthetics. But when gay artists respond with self-righteous indignation and attack "family values" (those values...