But then he concludes that such programs are good becauseNoliwe M. Rooks...has published an important book, White Money/Black Power (Beacon, 2006), in which she points out that there is no demonstrated connection between African-American-studies programs and the recruitment of black students, and wonders "why the association between attracting black students and an African-American-studies program [is] still so strong, despite all the evidence to the contrary."
Maybe part of the answer is that elite universities have come to think of African-American-studies programs on the model of state-of-the-art fitness facilities: No one goes to a college just because it has a great climbing wall, but, all other things being equal, the great climbing wall might clinch the deal...
But it's almost certainly wrong to attribute the attraction of African-American-studies programs merely to their putative ability to attract African-American students (or even, as Rooks more plausibly suggests, to their ability at least to attract African-American faculty members). And we can begin to see why by thinking about the current vogue for another kind of racialized program, Asian-American studies. Right now there are far fewer Asian-American- than African-American-studies programs, but their number is increasing... But the rationale here has very little to do with recruiting more Asian-American students either into universities in general or into our university in particular. On the contrary, we have lots of Asian-American students, as do most of the places with African-American-studies programs...the constitution of Asian-American-studies programs on the model of African-American-studies programs — as if Asian-Americans were comparable victims of American racism — looks almost like a kind of parody. Michael Rogin once brilliantly described the use of blackface in Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer as a device through which the immigrant Jew first becomes American by identifying himself with the African-American (putting the blackface on), and then (taking the blackface off) succeeds as an American by becoming white. "The jazz singer rises," Rogin said, "by putting on the mask of a group that must remain immobile, unassimilable and fixed at the bottom." There's a certain sense in which Asian-American studies is a kind of blackface, a performance that produces the image of racialized oppression alongside the reality of economic success.
But there's a more-important sense in which even African-American studies is a kind of blackface, a performance not only of blackness but of race itself. Asian-Americans are overrepresented in elite colleges like Princeton; African-American students are underrepresented. But no one's as underrepresented in those colleges as poor people. And no one's looking to get their numbers up to where, if you wanted to eliminate the underrepresentation, they would have to be. A Princeton that managed to lure enough black students away from the other Ivies to constitute 12 percent of its entering class (just as African-Americans constitute approximately 12 percent of the American population) would be a more diverse Princeton. A Princeton where 50 percent of the entering class consisted of students who came from households earning under $46,326 (the median income in the United States) would be an entirely different institution.
In the Princeton class of 2009, 196 students (out of a total of 1,229, a little under 16 percent) came from households that Princeton characterizes as low-income households earning under $50,900 a year. But even though those numbers aren't all that wonderful, Princeton is a real leader here: According to Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose, roughly 10 percent of students at the 146 colleges and universities ordinarily ranked as highly selective come from the bottom half of the socioeconomic scale...
Rooks makes an interesting observation toward the end of White Money/Black Power. She describes the class discussion among a group of Princeton students who had been watching the television show The Corner, with its vivid depiction of a black neighborhood in Baltimore both structured and destroyed by drugs. Many of the African-American students hated the show and denied it had any relevance either to their lives or to "real life" in general since, they said, "black people just don't really act like that." The white students didn't like it any better since, as one of them said, there was "no one in the show" they could "like and feel sorry for." The problem for all the students, Rooks says, was that they were made to feel "uncomfortable," and the problem for her is her own discomfort with the idea that "a successful argument about racial inequity" should be required to depend on the comfort of its viewers.
Although I don't want to make too much out of The Corner, it's possible to see a somewhat different moral in this story. We expect their shared blackness to form a bond between the African-American students at Princeton and the African-Americans on the streets of Baltimore, and the students themselves share that expectation. That's why, when they don't feel the bond, they deny that the people in the show are really behaving like black people. And they are right to deny it. What the people in the show are behaving like is not black people but very, very poor people. And when the white students complain that there is no one to feel sorry for, they too are complaining that the people in the show are not really black; they are not the victims of discrimination and racism; they are the victims of poverty. What both race and racism give the antiracist upper middle class is a way to "like" the victims of economic inequality. Take their race away, and what the upper middle class sees on that television show is not the image of its own virtue (that's what make us comfortable), but the reverse face of its own success.
My point, then, is that the commitment to African-American studies, like the commitment to Asian-American studies, is a commitment to describing our social problems in a way that will make all of us — teachers as well as students, alumni as well as parents — feel comfortable. It does this by racializing injustice at a moment when race is less relevant to injustice — at least to the injustice done by elite universities — in America than it has ever been. Rooks quotes Orlando Patterson as saying, "The doors are wide open for ... black middle-class kids to enter elite colleges." The relevant term here is "middle-class." African-American- and Asian-American-studies programs tell us that, from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our identity, at the very moment when, again from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our wealth.
From this standpoint, African-American and Asian-American studies are two of the very many ways in which an elite (predominantly white, increasingly Asian, and still only a very little bit black) represents to itself a vision of social justice that has less and less to do with the great social injustice — economic stratification — from which that elite benefits.
the people who belong to those elites didn't all get there because of hard work and ability [and] these programs are the places where questions about the meaning of race (and its handmaiden, culture) get raised. No assertion is more common in American intellectual life today than the insistence that race and class (and gender) are inextricably intertwined, and, in a certain sense, this is obviously true.
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