Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History

Hungers: Reflections on Affirmative Action

Hungers: Reflections on Affirmative Action We could settle this whole race mess over a long lunch. —From a conversation overheard on a New York City bus The pasts of his ancestors lean against Him. Crowd him. Fog out his identity. Hundreds of hungers mingle with his own, Hundreds of voices advise so dexterously He quite considers his reactions his, Judges he walks most powerfully alone, That everything is—simply what it is. —Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith” Some months ago a good student of mine, during a luncheon to celebrate his fine stories, told me angrily that he had not been accepted to Harvard because of “affirmative 60 action.” Had this remark come from someone who was smallminded , racially insensitive, or less socially involved, I would have been saddened but not surprised. But that it came from a student who had worked in area prisons helping inmates to write better, who had struggled to increase his fraternity’s awareness of social injustice, and who had, in wonderfully wrought stories, written tenderly about every manner of dispossession , I was sufficiently stymied. This student had written poignantly about a young woman’s inability to see the implications of her own self-absorption, in prose as trenchant as Annie Dillard’s; in a luminous novella, he deftly conveyed the small misfortunes of a romantic businessman, “lost in his own irrelevancies.” Like Raymond Carver, with whom he shares much, my student’s stories were always pithy, worldwise , and full of human empathy. He understood human beings, he was usually generous, and I expected much of him. But here, I was confronting someone hurt, sullen, and disconsolate —someone as cut off from good sense as a stone. It was painful and ugly. As Gunnar Myrdal quipped, race in America seems to turn everybody insane. And this occurs, I think, because race, in this country, remains the province of the patently unexamined . Race—whatever else it is—is a notion informed by a multiplicity of tributary ones, all involving our difficult, illexplored histories, and all inexorably personal. That we fail to understand America’s racial past—as James Baldwin brilliantly shows—stems from a congress of self-deceptions and self-deformations, all of which, in various guises, seem to inhabit us like errant cells. On the one hand, we speak about our “great progress,” and there has been much progress indeed, as I am the first to concede; on the other—and with far too great frequency—we seem to confront the inevitable paralysis: why won’t the racial problem end? What do these people want? Why the incessant, dreary carping about race? 61 h u n g e r s Much of this “racial fatigue” stems, I submit, from America ’s unique ability to view race as something we’ve largely confronted, since it has been with us for so long, and we’ve spent so much psychic time on it. (Here, of course, we confront the American penchant to confuse involvement with evolvement, as if spending a week with an unopened book is the same thing as reading it.) And by the same token, Americans are afraid to acknowledge how painfully personal our confrontation with race is, as if such a concession would dislodge the Earth’s axis. And yet one has simply to look at our fiction, from Melville to Faulkner, Emerson to Cheever, to comprehend how indissolubly race remains at the center of the American psyche—it haunts us, like that terrible white whale, reminding us that it is our imaginings of “the other,” indeed, which can send us to hell. And, of course, it is not simply our imaginings, but how we act on them, that is central : rape, lynching, Jim Crow, “separate but equal,” three- fifths of a person, miscegenation laws, slavery. Whatever else can be said, our confrontation with race, certainly, has been dramatic, brutal, and agonizing. That we haven’t been able to respond adequately to our participation in this mess, that we will argue that slaves are stupid and incapable of learning on the one hand and then punish them and their benefactors for teaching them to read on the other, this illogic, quite frankly, enters the realm of the pathological. Much of the affirmative action debate is focused, at least in the media, on the ideal of fairness. Is it fair to use legal or...