On Being the Object of Concern

Abstract

I write from California, shortly after the passage of Proposition 9, the socalled Civil Rights Initiative that bans state-supported affirmative action programs. In California, debates regarding affirmative action and diversity, particularly within educational institutions, are urgent and acrimonious. In July 1995 the University of California Board of Regents voted to end affirmative action within the University of California system (SP-1: Resolution of the University of California Board of Regents Adopting a Policy 'Ensuring Equal Treatment' of Admissions). And a year ago Californians passed Proposition 187, the Save Our State Initiative, which excludes undocumented aliens from state-funded services and bars their children from attending public schools. Here, perhaps more obviously than in a state such as Virginia, questions of and justice are intertwined with definitions of America, and with the physical and symbolic borders that delineate legitimate and illegitimate claims upon the nation. Susan Fraiman correctly points out that in far too many instances diversity has become the alibi for the failure of American universities to fulfill the antiracist, antisexist intention of affirmative action programs. In these instances, she argues, is opposed to affirmative action, for it allows us to substitute a cheerful cosmopolitanism for the difficult history of American racial and sexual politics. More specifically, Fraiman writes, What I am noticing time and again, in short, is an emotional transaction in which African Americans get traded for, or at least subordinated to, a blur of diverse but distant peoples from around the globe (42). Insofar as American universities are shirking their responsibility to honor the spirit, and not only the letter, of affirmative action policies, I wholeheartedly agree with Fraiman. Hence I offer the following comments in a spirit of solidarity and not criticism. However, I am also weary of the oft-articulated opposition created between African Americans and everyone else. Despite Fraiman's good intentions, the opposition she invokes is false and divisive. It is also seductive, for it holds out the possibility that African Americans can be assimilated into the genuine Americanness defined by white Americans, while everyone else is dismissed as a distant foreigner. Ethnic minorities are warned regularly against aligning their interests with those of white Americans and against