Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays On Race and Sexuality

7. Affirmative Action and White Rage

7 Affirmative Action and White Rage Affirmative action is the last topic to which I ever thought I would consent to address myself publicly. This does not mean that I don’t consider affirmative action to be among the leading issues of our time, because it most certainly is. If there is any doubt on that score, we need look no further than the nearHerculean political, rhetorical, and legal efforts undertaken to bring about its very dismantling. And if one needs any further proof of its significance in our time, we need only consider the bitter and sometimes regressive and odious quality of the rhetoric that animates the debate around the issue of affirmative action. Nor is my caution about addressing this question like the trepidation Emerson records when he did finally address himself to the Fugitive Slave Law in 1854, saying: “I do not often speak to public questions. They are odious and hurtful and it seems like meddling or leaving your work.” While I certainly more than appreciate Emerson’s sentiments about the odious quality of public questions—because they are not mere stylized, textbook philosophical considerations only, but have something of the difficult and irksome added quality of responsibility and real human consequences— 154 still, if our modern-day debates about public intellectualism in the United States have taught us anything, they have surely convinced us of the pertinence of considering and of contemplating the role of our vocation as intellectuals in the public sphere. No, my hesitation about addressing affirmative action publicly, rather, has more to do with a frustration over the state of the discussion itself. That is to say that affirmative action has achieved status as one of the great issues of our time—like abortion or the death penalty— wherein the terms of its very articulation have become so concretized and overdetermined that saying anything that will not be all too quickly and with remarkable efficiency logged into a pre-existing position in the debate is an utter impossibility. Almost immediately the speaker’s racialized and gendered corporeality, along with what he or she might have to say on the issue, gets locked into the discursive echo chamber of positions that we think we already know all too well. In other words, the political right has effectively rendered affirmative action—like its first cousin, the category of “race” (discussed elsewhere in this book)—a thing about which nothing truly new can be said because everything constituting the “simple truth” about it worth saying is already known. It is this “simple truth” to which I want to return in very short order. So, we know enough to perceive that the set of circumstances defining the terrain upon which the would-be commentator on affirmative action must tread is dicey, a war-ravaged landscape left in the wake of a minefield wherein all the explosives have fired, a veritable terrain vague—a wasteland. But unlike most wastelands, this ostensibly barren soil continues to produce fruit—and strange fruit, indeed. The fruits of resentment, hatred, envy, bitterness, and, even more to the point, violence. In fact, it is my deep suspicion that the quest by those on the political right to reverse—legally, rhetorically, and politically —the small gains afforded by affirmative action to women and people of color has fostered an important by-product. That by-product is nothing other than a culture of righteous anger among white men. And as we have been instructed by the words of the late filmmaker Marlon Riggs in an ironically different context: “Anger unvented becomes pain unspoken becomes AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND WHITE RAGE 155 rage released becomes violence . . . cha, cha, cha!” Only this time, the violence being perpetrated is by white men against people of color. When I speak here of violence, I am not speaking simply of violent acts perpetrated against people of color by white men, like the slaying of FilipinoAmerican U.S. postal worker Joseph Ileto (August 1999), or the two black children outside Chicago who were run over by a pickup truck driven by a selfproclaimed white supremacist, or of the killing spree that one white male went on a few summers ago, killing people of color in his wake as he moved through several states in the Midwest, or of James Byrd (a black male in Jasper...