HALF A century after the great Civil Rights Movement began breaking down barriers in American society, the struggle for racial equality and harmony has turned into a travesty. The university elites pay ever-greater fealty to "diversity," with their classes catering to ethnicity and commissions on "diversity." But their talk is sophistical banality. Unless we move beyond quaint discussions like last Tuesday's "Soul Awakenings: Personal Journeys of Race and Identity," we will never advance as a pluralistic society that respects individuality.
Despite its compelling title and setting in the grandeur of the Rotunda, last week's talk, sponsored by the Office of African-American Affairs (OAAA), was unimaginative and uninspiring. Not to belittle the experiences of the six University professors who traipsed into the Dome Room, but their discursive stories about racial taunting, watching minority acquaintances treated differently and growing up in the segregated South spoke to the past instead of pointing to the future.
The professors on the panel cannot take all of the blame. The problem lay in the very assumption of the OAAA lecture series, entitled "Race Matters." Well, duh. Race matters -- in an empirical sense. And it will keep on mattering as long as we keep making it matter. But try finding a lecture on whether race matters in a normative sense. The sad and ironic truth is that the academic community shouts down as a "racist" anyone who questions whether race should matter. Quite bluntly, the academic elite desperately wants race to matter.
OAAA Interim Assistant Dean Brandi Collins best demonstrated this presumption of race when she introduced last Tuesday's talk. The panelists, Collins stated, would discuss "what it means being black, being white, being Hispanic or being Asian." Whether or not Collins purposely left out "multiracial" -- an intractable problem that profoundly challenges the foundations of race-based ideology -- the omission of the "nonracial" category was certainly not unintentional.
Instead of talk after talk about how people first became aware of their race, it would be refreshing to attend a lecture on how individuals first became aware of their selves, and their separate and distinct existence from the group identities imposed by society. Imagine panelists sharing their experiences of rejecting the soft bigotry of racial assumptions. Imagine speakers debunking the racist notion that those who look a certain way should have certain proclivities or share some sort of inherent bond with others who look like them. Imagine visionaries rejecting the cookie-cutter conformity of racial categories and asserting their individuality.
Since the academic establishment and group identity programs like OAAA refuse to give individuality a chance, this forum is as good as any to share my own "soul awakening" and "personal journey of race and identity." In a nutshell, my story begins with a dark journey through the public school system and its dead-end culture of racial divisions masquerading as "multiculturalism." As an impressionable youth, I bought into the canard that students who look a certain way should be familiar with their "own history" and their "own culture." Teachers wrought by white liberal guilt felt good espousing to me notions of "my history" and "my culture" from the bowels of their own perverse imaginations and conceptualizations.
In college, I saw those around me cloister themselves in school-sanctioned racial groups, which are no different, intellectually, from racial street gangs (the only common denominator underlying both is membership based on race). When asked why I wasn't a member of the Chinese or Asian-American student groups, I shocked everyone by espousing the novel idea that it is proper to associate on the basis of interests that are inherent or acquired from within, but never on the basis of attributes that are forced on us from without.
Also in college, I took an introductory philosophy class that taught me to think about identity from a metaphysical perspective, instead of through the false lens of sociology and anthropology. I found salvation through the works of Ayn Rand and other libertarian thinkers. I fought the groupthink foisted by the academic establishment.
I'm not asking academic institutions to go so far as to abandon their iron fidelity to the racial status quo. But if they want to be intellectually honest about "diversity," they can begin by including more diverse viewpoints on the subject of race. They do not have to adopt the revolutionary idea that society can transcend race. But they can at least acknowledge such a vision exists. That would be a real "soul awakening" indeed.
Eric Wang's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ewang@cavalierdaily.com.
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