Three—
The "New Racism" and Its Multiple Faces—
The Civil Rights Act of 1990–91, the Clarence Thomas Hearings, the Gulf War, and "Political Correctness"
For the time being, hold onto the idea that white male privilege is constructed in and through a racism that differentiates people of color as "less than" at the same time as it constructs racialized gender privilege. I will continue to uncover the racist and engendered priorities of the post-civil rights rhetoric that gained authority through the Reagan and Bush years. As we examine the process of racializing patriarchy through the 1980s, it helps to remember that white males feel under siege in a multicultural workforce.
Under discussion are the controversy over the Civil Rights Act of 1990–91, the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the orchestration of the Gulf War, and the right-wing caricaturing of the civil rights agenda as "politically correct" (PC). Also discussed is the 1992 presidential election, with these developments as its backdrop. These events map a complicated series of connections which are neither linear nor simply causal.
The politics of the last decade appear inchoate and inexplicable on the one hand, and self-conscious and deliberate on the other. This mix reflects the special inability of the predominantly white male Bush administration to address the overwhelming challenges affecting American society, including the increasingly complex internationalization of the market; the upheavals in Eastern Europe; the growing inequity between rich and poor; the prevalence of single-parent families; multiracial demographic shifts; abortion; and AIDS. The incompetence of these
officials stemmed in large part from their vested interests in an outdated status quo.
The Gulf War initially worked to silence dissent. At the time of the war, dissent was effectively muted through a fervent yellow-ribbon patriotism. The war was also used to discredit the sixties' civil rights agenda by calling attention to the large numbers of "women and minorities" who were fighting. The military was presented as a showcase of equal opportunity employment, distracting us from the first world / third world divide of the war itself.
The Gulf War was effectively used to silence at last the antiwar sentiment of the seventies. The American public seemed to accept the Bush administration's line that the anti-Vietnam war movement had been unfair to those who had fought that war. This time around, "we" should support "our" troops, even if we did not support the government's decision to attack Iraq. Although the distinction between support for the troops and support for the government's decision is an appropriate one, no significant antiwar stance was maintained once the air war began. The support of United States troops was quickly translated into and interpreted as support for the war.
In fact, it was against the backdrop of the Gulf War that President Bush made his first public statement criticizing "political correctness" on college campuses. Shortly after the United States withdrew from the Gulf region, Bush argued that a new intolerance was growing that was silencing freedom of speech for those who thought differently—that is, for those who did not support the "rights" agenda. He did not mention, of course, the curtailment of the press's freedom of speech—or of information, for that matter—during the Gulf War. The freedom of speech he was concerned with was the one that protects white men's privilege. Let us examine more closely the opportunism of the Bush administration's preoccupation with white male privilege and the politics of "reverse discrimination."
The Bush Administration—
Affirmative Ambivalence
While running for the Senate in 1964, Bush campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and has had an ambivalent relationship to it ever since. At the time that he spoke out against the Civil Rights Act, he also held that the Republican Party should not be a home for segregationists. In 1970 he supported the "Philadelphia Plan," which was
the first federal program that mandated the hiring of blacks.[1] But this support came after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Civil rights legislation had become more politically viable at this point, and less of a political risk for Bush.[2] He has somewhat inconsistently opposed federal civil rights legislation since then, based on his belief that individual "good will" was sufficient to guarantee equality. His reluctant signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1990–91 reflects this position.
In 1988, when running for president, Bush received only 10 percent of the black vote. In opinion polls, Bush received his lowest marks from the public on domestic and civil rights issues. In June 1991, in a USA Weekend survey of its readers, only 5 percent of respondents thought Bush was effective in protecting civil rights.[3] This public opinion reflects Bush's contradictions and unease surrounding the issue of race. The racist motivation for the Willie Horton image in the 1988 campaign is now well recognized. But Bush's appointment of the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, is used to soften this racist image. So is Bush's long-standing support of the United Negro College Fund. On the other hand, Bush fought the Civil Rights Act of 1990–91 on the basis of rejecting quotas. Then he turned around and appointed Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, seemingly supporting quotas by replacing one black with another. His administration appeared hostile and inept on the issue of race, and its mistakes were not without consequence.
If the Thomas hearings had gone better for the Bush administration, and if former Ku Klux Klan spokesperson David Duke had not garnered such a large national hearing in the Louisiana governor's race—with an appeal that sounded similar to the Republican line on affirmative action—it is not at all clear that Bush would have signed the 1990–91 Civil Rights Act. These unexpected events placed Bush in a tough political position. His own opportunist inconsistencies, as well as the bitter conflict over racial "rights" which ran deep in his administration, threatened to snap the tightrope he had been walking. His balancing act between speaking on behalf of those (white men) whom he saw as suffering from affirmative action law (so-called quotas) and looking like a racist himself was becoming more precarious. The tension over "race" and "rights" in his administration was palpable.
This internal conflict first became evident in December 1990, when Michael Williams, assistant education secretary for civil rights and a black man, issued the statement that colleges and universities receiving
federal money could not legally grant scholarships based solely on race.[4] Such scholarships were said to be in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The official statement caused much confusion and upset among civil rights groups and was quickly revised to say that racially based scholarships were acceptable so long as the money came from private donations designated for that purpose or from federal programs set up to aid minority students. Only money from general operating budgets was off limits.[5] Nevertheless, the guidelines distinguishing usable government and private funding remained unclear to everyone involved. This lack of clarity resulted from the dilemma that the Bush administration was not free to dismantle civil rights law, yet could not live with it. Factions in the administration were unable to find a middle ground that could work for them.
In December 1991, education secretary Lamar Alexander was still revising Williams's initial position. He said that race-exclusive scholarships were illegal because they were discriminatory, but qualified this statement as meaning that race could not be the only factor in granting scholarships.[6] One could mention race as a factor, but there should be no obligatory condition connected to it. On the other hand, Alexander said he was not challenging the existing forty-five thousand race-based scholarships then available.[7] These revised guidelines appeared to clarify little, if anything. He said they were meant to be race neutral, and were not meant to deprive minority students of opportunities for scholarships. But these contradictory statements left the issue no clearer than before.
Although the legality of race-based scholarships is still under review at the time of this writing, the Clinton administration has spoken in favor of them. The new secretary of education, Richard Riley, has said he considers race-based scholarships to be a "valuable tool" for providing equal opportunity.[8]
Reiterating the Court's 1989 decisions, the Bush administration further declared that the law had no obligation to correct historic inequities faced by women and minorities in employment.[9] Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr, in a major desegregation case, stated in the government's July 1991 brief that there was no "independent obligation flowing from the constitution to correct disparities" between the historically black and historically white colleges in Mississippi. This position did not sit well with many outside the administration. Bush intervened to quell the upset created. By October 1991, the administration's position
was reversed; its new brief declared that "eliminating disparities in financing is part of the state's duty to provide equal educational opportunity."[10]
One of the more public revelations of the conflict over race policy within the Bush administration occurred on the day of the signing of the 1990–91 Civil Rights Act. On that day, legal counsel C. Boyden Gray announced his intention to phase out affirmative action hiring policies that used racial preferences, which he considered "unfair." Such an action would have meant the reversal of regulatory policies that had been in place since 1965.[11] It stood in stark contrast to the spirit of the Civil Rights Act that Bush had just signed. So, in the eleventh hour, Bush reversed Gray's announcement: "I say again, today, that I support affirmative action"; he affirmed the necessity of ending barriers.[12] There was clearly a war going on here.
The Civil Rights Act of 1990–91
In an attempt to reverse the Court's 1989 civil rights rulings, which gutted established discrimination law, Congress initiated the Civil Rights Act of 1990–91, sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy and Representative Augustus Hawkins. The act was meant to restore civil rights protection, extend federal law to determine unlawful discrimination and compensate victims of such discrimination, and provide additional protection against unlawful discrimination.[13]
President Bush treated the legislation as a "quota" bill, although there was no mention in the bill of the use of quotas. In arguing against the bill, Bush continually stated that "group preferences" are unnecessary, and that what was needed instead was color-blind legislation. It is astonishing how much was said about quotas when the legislation addressed only the impact on hiring of employment practices and educational requirements. Bush argued that this language was equivalent to quotas: in order not to be charged with discrimination, businesses would hire racially, by numbers, rather than according to merit. Section 211 of the House bill made explicit that quotas were an "unlawful employment practice" and stated explicitly that "no provision of the legislation expressly, directly, implicitly, or indirectly requires or encourages such a result."[14]
Quotas were used as a smoke screen to make the very issue of remedying discrimination look unfair. Bush endorsed a diffused notion of discrimination—one that denied the group categories of race and gen-
der.[15] He stated that we must not think of ourselves as colors or numbers; that we must be measured by merit, not by creed or sex or color; that government's responsibility is to enhance, not redistribute, opportunity; and that public policy must enhance opportunity, not ensure racial success.[16] From his stance of a color-blind neutrality, he denied sex discrimination altogether and covered over racial discrimination by definitional fiat.
Bush also sought a narrowing of the definition of discrimination to include only "intentional" discrimination, which would be more in keeping with the Supreme Court's 1989 decisions. Bush wanted to keep unintentional discriminatory policies defensible, particularly if they could be shown to be "necessary" to do business. Instead, the 1990–91 Civil Rights Act restored the burden of proof to the employer in disparate-impact cases. Employers now must prove that a practice is essential to their business; the plaintiff no longer has to prove that it is not.[17]
This legislation should make it easier to sue in job discrimination cases. It should also make it easier to win a suit against unfair job qualifications that have disparate impact on persons of different race and/or gender. It makes it possible to get cash damages for sex discrimination cases, although the cap on such damages is lower than on race cases. The act does not, however, address the Supreme Court's ruling in Croson v. City of Richmond, which declared unconstitutional an ordinance that set aside 30 percent of public works contracts for minority contractors. It remains to be seen what effect the new law will have, given the significant skepticism and hostility expressed toward it.
There had been little substantive revision of the 1990–91 act when at last Bush approved it. Although Bush said he had signed the revised bill because it finally bolstered equality, this justification did not square with the facts. He gave in on the amount of compensatory and punitive damages allowed plaintiffs and compromised on letting existing affirmative action policies stand, even if certain current workers had not been party to such agreements.[18]
Then why did Bush sign? What had changed? Bush's positioning within the discourse of the "new racism" had changed. By October 1991, Bush had no choice but to endorse the 1990–91 Civil Rights Act. He had begun to step over the delicate line of acceptable public racial talk, which in part attests to the continuing saliency of civil rights discourse. He needed to disassociate himself from his anti-civil rights position and his apparent insensitivity to minorities.
It is important to note that Bush chose to represent the Civil Rights
Act of 1990–91 as "special legislation" for blacks, even though it is entitled "Civil Rights and Women's Equity in Employment Act." The false separation of the civil rights of people of color from the rights of women has ghettoized civil rights into a racial issue. Viewing it as a racial issue misrepresents the specific sex and gender concerns of women of color and disconnects these from the concerns of white women. It is more difficult to caricature civil rights as "special interest" legislation when it is recognized as including the interests of white women workers along with those of people of color. It then has majority status.
The Los Angeles Riots and Murphy Brown
The rioting in Los Angeles in May 1992 was sparked by the acquittal of several white police officers who had excessively and brutally beaten Rodney King, a black man. What made this case so explosive was that the beating was videotaped by an observer and shown repeatedly on TV news programs throughout the country. Hardly anyone could fathom an acquittal—not even Daryl Gates, then Los Angeles police chief, which might explain why he was so unprepared for the rioting that ensued after the verdict.
The acquittal had racism written all over it in the eyes of people of color, especially inner-city blacks. Several white jurors said race had nothing to do with it. They claimed that King was out of control, and the police had to protect themselves. It is difficult, however, to forget that there was only one of him—and he was on the ground—while there were at least four police officers at any given moment, upright and flailing batons.
Life in the inner city is dismal, a dead end for most people living there, who are looking for a way out of the drugs, the crime, and the unemployment. The Los Angeles acquittal sparked a rage that had festered within the system of racism. The riots that followed were understandable, yet made no sense. They were horrifically self-destructive. They were violent. They were anarchic. For some, they were a cry for help. For others, they were a sign of desperation. Whatever their meanings, the riots dumped the issue of racism—not just race—in Bush's lap.
This "multi-ethnic urban riot" was an outpouring of black rage and of the desperation of the Los Angeles Hispanic community. There were 58 deaths, almost 2,400 injuries, over 5,000 fires, more than 16,000 arrests, and damage of at least $785 million. The Korean immigrant
community felt much of the damage. And Los Angeles appeared to be a rigidly segregated and hostile city.[19]
According to African American cultural critic Cornel West, the Los Angeles riots were not simply either a race or a class rebellion. He instead depicts the riots as an enormous upheaval which was multiracial, cross-class, and largely male. Only 36 percent of those arrested were black. For West, race was a visible catalyst, not the underlying cause. "What we witnessed in Los Angeles was the consequence of a lethal linkage of economic decline, cultural decay, and political lethargy in American life."[20]
It is interesting to see how Bush chose to extricate himself from the aftermath of Los Angeles. First he tried blaming the riots on Democratic social welfare policies of the 1960s. He said these policies had created a culture of dependency and a crisis in family life which had caused poverty and the decay of the inner city. This well-worn neoconservative rhetoric did not work. People asked which policies? With what effect? Bush then shifted gears and said it made no sense to cast blame, that instead we must come up with better policies than the programs of the Great Society, which had required an overage of government spending.[21]
His next attempt at neutralizing the riots rerouted the earlier blaming posture and refocused the neoconservative rhetoric to a right-wing family values campaign. Bush had already used the restoration of "family values" as a theme of his 1992 election campaign—with little success. After the Los Angeles riots, he picked it up again. During a commencement speech at Notre Dame, Bush called for the rebuilding of strong families as an alternative to dependence on government social service programs.[22] He argued that we must start with a set of principles and policies that foster personal responsibility, choice, and competition where government once played a role. His rhetoric offered family values and a privatized role for the state to resolve the crises of inner cities.
Enter Vice-President Dan Quayle. Like Bush, he said that the Los Angeles riots were the result of a "poverty of values." Note that actual poverty is sidelined by the focus on values. Quayle affirmed that the lawless anarchy in Los Angeles had stemmed from a breakdown of family structure and personal responsibility in which the urban poor have lost their moral fiber. To make his point regarding the importance of creating stable two-parent families, Quayle criticized the TV character Murphy Brown for celebrating single motherhood and devaluing the importance of fathers.
Here we have moved from the racist verdict in the King trial to the ensuing Los Angeles riots and poverty-stricken African American and Hispanic inner cities, and from there to a discussion of family values and single mothers.[23] Murphy Brown, a white upper-class TV character who chose to birth a child without a husband, was used by Quayle to invoke a notion of families in crisis. We would seem to have moved from race to gender, but not really. In this instance, the character Murphy Brown (an upper-class white woman) stands in for single motherhood (poor women of color). Discussion of family issues and single mothers allowed the Bush administration to sidestep the problem of racism by talking about gendered family issues instead. Single motherhood is already encoded racially. Because the imagery of black single and often teenage mothers was already in place for Quayle, he did not have to speak of race. So he said little, if anything, concerning the racialized reality of single motherhood. Instead, he talked about family, which also meant race. He said, "I believe that children should have the benefit of being born into families with a mother and a father who will give them love and care."[24] This sounds simple enough, but it isn't.
It is incredible how messy the family values theme quickly became for the Bush administration. There are too many single mothers today for it to work as smoothly as once it might have. It also caught Bush and Quayle in their own antiabortion rhetoric. As all the news media were quick to ask, why criticize Murphy Brown? At least she did not have an abortion. Eventually, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater was forced to switch gears and praise the Murphy Brown show for exhibiting "pro-life" values. The following statement, which sums up the incoherence of Bush administration policy in this realm, was made by Diane English, the creator and producer of Murphy Brown: "If the Vice-President thinks it's disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child, and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he'd better make sure abortion remains safe and legal."[25]
The promotion of marriage and of heterosexual two-parent families constituted the Bush administration's antipoverty inner-city program. Their domestic policy seemed to suggest that the problems of unemployment and underemployment, especially of people of color, would be best addressed by marriage. This hardly seems like a serious policy formulation.
This lack of credibility underlines much of the Bush administration's policies on the racialized aspects of American life. The nomination of
Clarence Thomas, a black man, to the Supreme Court bespeaks a similar incoherence.
The Clarence Thomas Confirmation Hearings
If the Los Angeles riots remind us of an old racism deeply connected to the poverty of African Americans and, more recently, of Hispanics and Koreans, the Thomas hearings are a window into the newer, more complicated racism defined in and through a black middle class. Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas was dishonest. Even though Bush denied that he chose Thomas because of his race, it seemed clear that a man with Thomas's mediocre legal record would not have been chosen otherwise. Bush's nominee was a pawn to appease those within both the Republican and Democratic parties who thought a black should be chosen to replace Thurgood Marshall. And he found a black man who could also pass the right-wing litmus test: he had repeatedly spoken against the right to abortion and was extremely critical of affirmative action policy. As a Reagan-Bush neoconservative, he supported "self-help" as the best palliative against racism. There were numerous qualified African Americans from which to choose, but they were not rightist neoconservatives. And there were numerous neoconservatives from which to choose, but they were not black or sufficiently right-wing.
The Thomas nomination once again trapped the Bush administration in its own contradictory politics. Official administration discourse mandated that policy initiatives be color-blind. It also maintained that affirmative action wrongly brings attention to race rather than individual merit. Yet Bush appointed a black man to replace a black man. Then he denied the importance of color and said he chose Thomas for his merit, when it was perfectly clear that merit was not the deciding factor. To make matters worse, the black man, who was not spectacularly meritorious, was a benefactor of affirmative action programs at Yale Law School, but now argues that such programs create more problems than they solve. It is the very affirmative action that the administration and Thomas himself assail that gained him his nomination to the Supreme Court. This looks disingenuous at best.
Thomas had distinguished himself during the Reagan administration as an African American who supported an anti-civil rights approach to racial equality.[26] He favored the adoption of color-blind legislation: "I firmly insist that the constitution be interpreted in a color-blind fashion. It is futile to talk of a color-blind society unless this constitutional prin-
ciple is first established. Hence, I emphasize black self-help, as opposed to racial quotas and other race-conscious legal devices that only further and deepen the original problem."[27]
As part of the Reagan transition team at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), he at first defended numerical goals and timetables in hiring, but then reversed this position in 1984. He also rejected statistical disparities as proof of discrimination. During a commencement speech at Savannah State College in June 1985, Thomas summed up his views by saying that although racial prejudice exists, blacks should not use it as a crutch. Others, he said, jump too quickly to make excuses for black Americans, who should stand up for themselves instead. They should "overcome the lure of excuses" and the "temptation to blame others." The onus was on them. And, in a comment that may clarify Thomas's treatment of Anita Hill more than it clarifies the condition of African Americans, he charged that "we subdue, we seduce, but we don't respect ourselves, our women, our babies."[28]
In the early part of the confirmation hearings, Thomas stressed his poverty as a child and his ascent up the economic class ladder. Although he mentioned the help he received from his grandfather, from the nuns, and from affirmative action, he presented his story as one of self-help. His nomination became a public airing and national viewing of a black man rejecting affirmative action policy.[29] This was a problematic stance for one who also believed that "there is nothing you can do to get past black skin" in our society.[30] One might have expected from Thomas some recognition that you cannot substitute self-help for society's obligation to deal fairly with its members.
Thomas's black neoconservative agenda was articulated through a racialized patriarchal discourse about African American women. He used his sister's brief stint on welfare to advance the notion of the dependent black welfare woman, one of many blacks waiting for a handout. In fact his sister's story is one not only of welfare dependency but also of hard work. Emma Mae Martin's life held a series of low-paying jobs while she raised her own children and cared for other family members. Thomas simply ignored the way that his sister's options were different from his because of the way gender is encoded on her black skin.
Emma Mae Martin's story was misrepresented through the text of a dependent welfare mother. In her real story, a rich network provided support and strength in the face of racism and poverty and sexism: desertion by husbands and lack of child support even as she struggled
to enable boys and men to get ahead.[31] Thomas was oblivious. His world was male. Carol Delaney, an anthropology professor at Stanford University, who also attended a Roman Catholic school in Savannah, Georgia, countered Thomas's descriptions of the nuns. They might have taught him how to make something of himself, but girls were taught and trained by them to "learn their place" as women and to serve others.[32]
Thomas's sexism is completely relevant here. And so is his engendered viewing of black women through a racist lens, particularly given the charges of Anita Hill that Thomas had sexually harassed her on the job.[33] Nothing in his world view would lead one to think that it was unlikely for Thomas to act in this sexist manner. The fact that Hill was a black woman, and sexualized as such, made it all the more plausible. Nevertheless, Anita Hill's charges were denied by Thomas. When all was said and done, Hill was erased as a black woman, and her charges were said to be racist.
Although Anita Hill was a black woman, Thomas treated her as though she was not black, but just a woman, with no claims to racist stereotyping. This is the way Thomas transformed Hill's charges of sexual harassment into his own charge of a racist "high-tech lynching." Lynching was used as a racial metaphor that de-raced Hill.[34] It allowed Thomas to speak of the racist stereotypes of black men's sexuality as though there are no parallel stereotypes affecting Hill as a black woman. Thomas angrily stated at the hearings: "This [charge of sexual harassment] plays into the most bigoted, racist stereotypes that any black man will face."[35] It was a "stereotype you can't wash off."[36] Thomas called upon the very racism that he argued blacks should not hide behind so that he would not have to answer individually to the charge of sexual harassment.
Thomas shifted the ground out from beneath Hill. He attempted to make the issue the racist stereotyping of African American men rather than the sexual harassment of a black woman. In this shift, he denied the existence of sexism and sexual violence against black women, which indicts black as well as white men.[37] Instead of probing the sexually discriminatory action of Thomas, the committee was served up a series of charges concerning the racist treatment of black men in order to deflect the attack. In this case, racism was used to erase gender, even though there was no racial angle between Thomas and Hill. Or, as President Bush is supposed to have said: "If they are going to use the sex thing, we can use the race thing."
The hearings bespeak the very interconnections of race and gender. In order that Thomas be confirmed, the connections between racism and sexism had to be distorted and severed. Anita Hill would be sacrificed in the process. She would be depicted as either a traitor to her own race—and therefore not black—or as a traitor to her sex—and therefore not a woman. As black feminist Barbara Smith commented, "any black woman who raises the issue of sexual oppression in the African American community is somehow a traitor to the race, which translates into being a traitor to black men."[38] Hill was also seen as a traitor to her sex in that she remained silent about sexual harassment and did not come forward because she cared too much about her professional career. She was too much like a (white) man.
The impossible situation of Anita Hill was that she was both a woman and black. Language and its politics did not afford her a way to translate this double reality during the hearings. As Nell Irvin Painter argues, Hill lacked a clear stereotype like a lynching to rally support for her as a black woman.[39] Anita Hill, a year after the hearings, indicted the Senate Judiciary Committee during an address at the conference on "Race, Gender and Power in America" at Georgetown University Law Center. She stated that she was misrepresented by Senate members because she lacked the usual institutional attachments of patronage. Moreover, her gender and race, when combined with her education and demeanor and career choice, disallowed the senators their visual stereotypes and simplistic oppositions that pigeonhole women of color. They had no way to see or hear the complexity of her charges.[40]
This ploy of separating the mesh of racialized gender worked to the extent that Thomas was confirmed.[41] But it did not succeed in silencing the issue of sexual harassment. Instead, it unleashed an outpouring of anger by women repelled by sexual harassment abuses in the workplace. After ignoring much of the feminist civil rights agenda and dealing with affirmative action as a race issue, the Bush administration and then the Senate unleashed a tidal wave of feminist consciousness among white and African American women.[42]
The Senate Judiciary Committee had not thought Hill's charges important enough to investigate at the start. Once the committee was forced to conduct an inquiry, its members appeared callous and ill informed.[43] The televised hearings presented a stark picture of white men occupying the seats of government. This visual image—of a group of white men judging a black man charged with sexual harassment by a black woman—had an impact.
The hearings underscored the racialized nature of politics. Would a
white man have been interrogated publicly, the way Thomas was, with references to the size of his penis? The hearings also attested to the male privilege which pervades both white government officials and the black middle class. Clarence Thomas was able to utilize masculinist imagery even in his claims that he was being treated in racist fashion. As the testimony of John Doggett made clear, masculinist and sexist values exist within the African American community. According to Doggett, Anita Hill suffered from sexual delusions, not sexual harassment. Similarly, Orlando Patterson claimed that Anita Hill was merely overreacting to a "down-home style of courting."[44]
The Thomas confirmation hearings were not politics as usual. At the start of the hearings, it looked as though Thomas's antiabortion "right to life of the child-in-the-womb stance" would be used to mount an attack against him by feminists and other civil rights groups.[45] Although a few eloquent critical reviews of Thomas's civil rights record were heard early on, the focus soon changed. Thomas's stance on abortion became secondary as attention shifted to charges of sexual harassment on the part of Thomas. And because it was a black woman bringing the charges, the issue of sexual harassment was brought forward as an issue for both women of color and white women. Sexual harassment can happen to any woman. The connections between racism and sexism could not be effectively severed because they were too enmeshed in the person of Anita Hill.[46]
Bush had played his race card with the nomination of Thomas, but it gained him very little.[47] Barely confirmed (by a 52-48 vote), Thomas won the battle, but it is not clear who won the war. Thomas is on the Court, but as an undistinguished black man whom many people believe to be guilty of sexual harassment of one form or another. Bush was responsible for the nomination, and he discredited both the appointment process and himself by wrongly politicizing the process.
The full effects of the hearings remain unclear in terms of the repackaging of the right-wing agenda. In some ways the hearings became more subversive than constitutive of this agenda. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah would have us believe that the whole Hill scenario was a plot by white liberals and their slick "special interest" lawyers to discredit Thomas.[48] Thomas also charged that it was "special interest" groups who were trying to ruin him. He continually spoke of "the people who concocted this" and "the people" who leaked the story to the press. The hearings were depicted by the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee as a result of the excesses of a liberal rights agenda.
But these charges were not totally successful. Instead, in some quar-
ters there was a revitalization of the liberal feminist agenda. Many women, outraged by the hearings, recommitted their energy to the electoral arena. They were determined to transform the nearly all-male club of the Senate. In this spirit, over 119 women ran for congressional seats in 1992, up from 78 women in 1990. There are now forty-seven women in the House, up from twenty-eight. Another 2,215 women sought state legislative seats in 1992, twice as many as in 1990. Four women won Senate seats. Carol Moseley Braun, the first African American woman elected to the Senate, campaigned in protest of Clarence Thomas's confirmation.[49]
For the white public, the hearings also became an unexpected window into the internal conflicts and intraracial differences in the black middle class. The confirmation hearings exposed their audience to the diversity within the black community, to the existence within its ranks of Reagan-Bush neoconservatism as well as a new black conservatism. It clarified for whites an important reality: "the black community" is no more homogeneous than "the white community" is.
Orlando Patterson called the hearings a "ritual of inclusion" and an affirmation of the achievements made by blacks. For him, it was clear that "the culture of slavery is dead."[50] Many affluent blacks in Los Angeles, however, do not completely agree with Patterson. They still fear the possibility of finding themselves on the ground being beaten by police officers as Rodney King did.[51] In other words, slavery per se may be dead, but the racialized culture it left behind is alive and well.
During the hearings, we saw African American women who supported Clarence Thomas and disavowed any connection to Anita Hill. We also saw a group of black women who formed a network called African American Women in Defense of Ourselves—just days after the hearings—and placed ads in newspapers throughout the country decrying the attacks on Hill. Racial and sexual politics were both connected and diversified in the hearings, allowing for the emergence of new possibilities for feminist politics.
The confirmation process cannot be summed up easily. The Senate Judiciary Committee members, uncomfortable with their own racialized patriarchal views, never asked Thomas the formidable questions. He was not queried concerning his attitudes toward black women or his choice of a white wife. No one pushed him to answer questions about his alleged addiction to pornographic films. He was never really pressed on his stance on abortion. And when he disclaimed his earlier ultraconservative positions on judicial interpretation, no one on the
committee decried his opportunism. The committee members' own discomfort with race and sex permeated the entire proceedings and covered over the very issues which needed to be explored. As a result, we have a justice—who happens to be black—who is one of the most conservative jurors ever to sit on the Court.
Thus far, Justice Thomas has distinguished himself as slightly to the right of Justice Scalia. In his first term, he agreed to the narrowing of the 1964 Voting Rights Act; affirmed a narrowed view of political asylum; consented to the weakening of labor unions; and further limited the rights of prisoners on death row, who are disproportionately black. In a lower court ruling, published after Thomas's confirmation, he stated that the federal government could not give preferential treatment to women in awarding broadcast licenses, even though it does so for blacks and other minority groups. His decision stated that the Federal Communications Commission's policy of giving preference to women was unconstitutional because it denied equal protection to men. He completely endorsed the rhetoric of reverse discrimination: preferential treatment of women violates equal treatment.[52] We have heard this before.
Race, Gender, and the Gulf War
The war in the Persian Gulf formed an important backdrop for this racialized gender politics. The Gulf War included more women—especially women of color—and more female reservists—many with young infants and children—than ever before. Fighting forces were disproportionately composed of people of color: over 24 percent of the troops serving in the Gulf were African Americans. Almost 30 percent of the army's soldiers called to fight the ground war were also African Americans. Thirty-five thousand of the United States troops in the Gulf were women. Fighting forces were described for the first time in United States military history as men and women. Women flew helicopters and were medics. Melissa Rathbun Nealy was captured as a prisoner of war. Some of the imagery of the Gulf War was new: women in khaki alongside men. Some of the imagery was old: little attention was paid to race.
The Gulf War unsettled notions about gender. Both the reality and imagery were significant in challenging established ideas; the war changed perceptions of the role of women in the military and expanded their actual combat duties. After the war, Congress repealed the law barring
women from flying combat planes. Women are now permitted but not required to perform combat roles as Navy or Air Force pilots.[53]
The unsettling of gender roles was in no sense linear or simple. Although women were seen on the television screen as forming an integral part of the United States fighting forces, they were also depicted by the media as being deeply troubled at the prospect of leaving their children to go to war. A few mothers of newborns even refused to go. Others, under extreme pressure, agreed to make intricate childcare arrangements for the duration of their tour of duty. These women left their children in the care of babysitters or husbands and headed for the Persian Gulf. One reservist had a twenty-one-month-old baby, and another a five-month-old baby who was still nursing. When the latter reservist tried to get an extension in order to wean her baby, she was told it was not possible.[54] Family and job appeared to be too much in conflict for many Americans as they watched the war unfold. Media messages were mixed, and the construction of family life appeared disarranged by the reality of the woman soldier. Her militaristic form of gender equality unsettled many of us.
The Gulf War brought particular attention to the large numbers of single parents in the military. There are approximately 55,000 single parents in the Armed Forces—37,000 men and 18,000 women. Of this number, there were roughly 16,000 single parents and 12,000 military couples with children who were on duty in the Gulf. Although it would have been possible to give these people exemptions, it was not done. Instead, the military said that family life would not exempt a person from military duty—whether man or woman. We saw sharply the meaning of sex equality in the military: men and women were treated as though they had the same familial responsibilities, even if the woman was still breast-feeding her infant.
In stark contrast to the United States women in khaki were the women of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in their veils and chadors. The Saudi woman, with face and body hidden, needed protection.[55] The United States military would protect her. News of a protest by Saudi women demanding the simple right to drive their own cars underscored the problematic status of these women.[56] United States military women appeared more than equal against this backdrop of Arab women. However, United States military women remain highly ghettoized in the lowest ranks of the military. They experience sexual harassment on a daily basis. Also, a danger here, as Cynthia Enloe cautions, is that a militarized world needs for women to find rewards in a militarized femininity.[57]
Amid this gender flux, what remains constant is the privileged status of white men and of a very few black men in the military. General Norman Schwarzkopf repeatedly invoked Saddam Hussein's Arab rhetoric and spoke of the Gulf War as the "mother of all wars." Alongside this vision of a masculinized mother stood military women in uniform. And alongside them stood Schwarzkopf's outdated vision of a military filled with men. When he addressed the troops in the Gulf, he often spoke as if they were all men. In one instance he acknowledged their looking forward to seeing their wives, children, and families—but not their husbands.[58] In another instance, speaking about his upcoming retirement, he pointed proudly to the "fine young men coming up behind me whom I've trained the right way. They're going to make generals and great leaders."[59] Women remain the foot soldiers.
What of racial equality in the military? First, one should note that for many Americans it was Schwarzkopf, not Colin Powell, who became the hero of Desert Storm. Powell, as an African American, could never become the same kind of hero. Instead, he was used to deflect American racism toward the Arab world, by evoking African Americans as part of the United States concept of self.[60]
Blacks make up a higher percentage of the military population than of the general population because they have had greater opportunity for advancement in the military than in civilian life.[61] This has been especially true of black women, who now make up approximately 33 percent of the women in the military.[62] When President Bush was asked to explain the overrepresentation of blacks in the Gulf War, he said it was simple: "The military of the United States is the greatest equal opportunity employer around."[63] The truth is that there is not much competition.
War and the Silencing of Dissent
The Gulf War was our first full-fledged television war. Although we had seen television reports on the Vietnam War, we could actually watch the Gulf War around the clock on CNN. However, although the constant coverage made it appear that we were getting more information about this war than about previous wars, we actually saw less and knew less about the Gulf War. News reporting was highly regulated and censored. There were strict new press restrictions for covering military operations. The information flow was managed through briefing rooms.[64]
There were Pentagon-approved correspondent pools, security reviews, and military escorts for all interviews.[65]
These new restrictions were justified by the Bush Administration largely on the basis of the Vietnam War. Too much news exposure had purportedly led to anti-Vietnam War sentiment. The Pentagon said it would not allow such an erosion of support to happen again, and it achieved its goal. In actuality, the greatest success of the Gulf War was the censoring of information and the silencing of dissent. The very idea of speaking out against the war was discredited by equating patriotism with a prowar stance, by fomenting an absolutist hatred of Saddam Hussein, and by curtailing war information.[66]
In part, Bush tried to make this war different from Vietnam (which we lost) and more like World War II (which we won). He used the imagery of World War II to call up the former associations of strength and virtue with the struggle against Nazism. Hussein was termed "a Hitler"; other countries intervening with us were called "the allies." This need to identify with our past rather than with our present or our future reflected to what degree the United States has become a country in decline. According to Doug Lummis and Mojtaba Sadria, we triumphed in the Gulf because we became what we used to be. Of course, neither Japan nor Germany identified with this World War II imagery. They did not want to be what they were during World War II; they preferred what they had become since 1945.[67]
Well-known New York Times editorialist Tom Wicker notes that the Bush administration was so successful in controlling information regarding the war that they "were able to tell the public just about what they wanted the public to know." As a result, most Americans did not know that the so-called smart bombs made up only 7 percent of all the United States explosives dropped on Iraq and Kuwait, or that 70 percent of the 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq and Kuwait in the forty-three days of the war missed their targets.[68] Anthony Lewis, also of the New York Times, describes earlier information control: "From August 2, 1991, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, to the first bombs falling on Baghdad, January 17, 1991, President Bush maneuvered the country toward war. Deception obscured the process then. Now we can see the steady, skillful march to war."[69] According to Everette Dennis, Executive Director of the Gannett Foundation Media Center in New York, this sanitized version of the war presented us with the illusion of news. The government's new censorship violated the first and fifth amendments. The yellow ribbons and American flags that decked the United
States landscape for months during the war came to represent a troubling patriotism, one which required a closing down of debate and of democratic dialogue.
In the end, over one hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers were killed in the Gulf War. Iraqi children continue to suffer terrible disease and hunger as a result of the war. The bombs and the oil spills created environmental havoc and numerous health hazards. Saddam Hussein remains in power.[70] In many ways, war continues for the Iraqis.
At first, the United States claimed victory. Bush claimed it as his finest moment. Then less was said on the war as questions persisted about Iraq and Hussein.[71] Questions have also persisted about censorship during the Gulf War. It is possible that recent attacks against "political correctness" reflect the broad impact of the Gulf War on political speech.
Political Correctness and the Right to Speak
Making full use of the postwar nationalistic fervor, President Bush, in a commencement speech at the University of Michigan, attacked what he considered to be an assault against free speech that was particularly forceful on college campuses. He said a new tyranny had replaced old prejudices with new ones and had declared "certain topics off limits." He spoke of this new censorship as responsible for crushing "diversity in the name of diversity."[72] In particular, Bush attacked the civil rights agenda as antithetical to free speech because people no longer feel free to speak out against it.
The right-wing term "political correctness"—which started out as an ironic term used by the Left to criticize its own purist strain[73] —is now being used to caricature people who support racial and sexual equality and the consequent diversity it demands, portraying them as intolerant. To connect the issue of civil rights to the issue of free speech is a smart move on the part of the right wing, because it appeals to most people's commitment to liberal individualist freedoms, especially the right to freedom of speech.
Similar charges have been made against the codes prohibiting "hate speech" which have been instituted at several universities, such as Stanford, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Massachusetts.[74] They have been seen by critics as infringements on free speech—which, in fact, they were meant to be, in any absolutist sense of the term. Much less has been said regarding the violence that led to the adoption of these prohibitions. At the University of Wisconsin, a series
of racist incidents occurred, including a fraternity-run "slave auction," before a code forbidding hate speech was put into place. At the University of Massachusetts, a white mob had chased and beaten several blacks on campus before there was discussion of such a code.
This kind of violence, which both reflects and instigates hate speech, is often not recognized for what it is.[75] And much of this violence goes unreported. The National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence reported racial incidents at 115 campuses in 1989. Clearly there is a problem here, and hate speech contributes to it.
The question of free speech is complicated because all speech is not equal in the first place, and all speech does not have the same effect. Some words have more power than others. So speech can hurt, can have real consequences, and can create complicated and dangerous terrain when it does. Because speech is dangerous, there can be no absolute freedom of speech, yet there is no sane way to limit speech arbitrarily in advance. As Stanley Fish, professor of English and law at Duke, said, "there is no safe place."[76] No code can create such a place. But it is on the basis of the political consequences of speech that one should rethink the hate speech codes, not on the basis of an abstract notion of speech, disconnected from its political effects.
These issues are opportunistically simplified in the charges against political correctness. Instead of really trying to open up discussion, the Bush administration used the issue of free speech as a smokescreen. The charge against political correctness was an attempt to close down free speech: to silence individuals who were critical of the Reagan/Bush agenda. It was an attempt to silence the discourse of racial diversity by attacking it as authoritarian in intent, as if those promoting diversity disallowed the freedom to speak or hear views against it. Such charges distort the dilemmas of a racialized and patriarchal liberal discourse which gives greater freedom to white men and to what they speak. The attack on the "politically correct"—those who support racial and sexual diversity—is really an attack on the significant changes made by the 1960s civil rights movements and the radically pluralist demands that have followed.
Members of the Bush administration—mainly white men—stated that they would "resist intimidation" from those claiming to be politically correct ("PC"). In other words, they would not allow themselves to be pushed into accepting a policy that incorporated greater racial and sexual equality. This attack on political correctness was extended beyond the challenge to affirmative action to ridicule the entire progressive agenda
of the last twenty-five years.[77] It has been used to allow people their racism, sexism, and homophobia. It equates all forms of intolerance. But to speak out against intolerance is not the same as being intolerant. And speaking out is not the same as silencing others. Much is lost if one does not recognize the difference between speaking on behalf of some people and speaking against all the others. Speech that likens feminists to pit bulls, jokes about dykes on bikes, T-shirts that say "Club faggots, not seals," and signs that say "Club the niggers" are forms of speech we cannot afford to protect.[78]
Equality discourse carries little of the clout that the right wing attributes to it. Yet at the heart of the charges against political correctness is the assumption that such discourse is used to exercise authoritarian power. Newsweek led the attack with an article in December 1990 about the "Thought Police." These police are said to be the "tenured radicals" inhabiting campuses throughout the country. The Atlantic Monthly gave further voice to these charges in March 1991 with the publication of excerpts of Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus .
A precursor to the "PC" debate was the best-seller by conservative political theorist Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Bloom argued that the university was failing democracy by becoming too democratic—that it was creating homogenized persons rather than truly distinct varieties. He argued that we have been left with a "drab diversity" fostered by a false egalitarianism, because we are not all created equal and the same. He argued that we need to have prejudices: they help us discriminate truth from falsity. The new relativism—challenging the classics and fostering diversity—leaves us undiscriminating and ignorant. In a phrase that is classic Bloom, "you don't replace something with nothing."[79]
D'Souza has extended these charges. He attacks the foundations of affirmative action as undermining individual achievement by exalting group membership. He calls this illiberal, because democracy is meant to nurture not equality but equal rights to opportunity, and opportunity recognizes individual merit, not subjugated groups. The underlying premise of group justice is "hostile to individual equity and excellence." Thus, affirmative action has led to a tyranny of minorities who are less qualified. D'Souza terms this a new racism: it is not that minorities are inferior, but that affirmative action treats them as though they were. The victim then becomes the victimizer.[80]
Part and parcel of this process, claims D'Souza, has been the dilution
of intellectual expertise in the name of cultural and ethnic diversity. Core curricula have been labeled as biased and have been replaced with non-Western classics, feminist literature, and revolutionary tracts of the Third World. There are now multicultural requirements in many of the major universities, which D'Souza describes as reflecting little more than ethnic cheerleading and primitive romanticism about the Third World.[81] He contends the changes have been "revolutionary." The search for "universal standards of judgment, which transcend particularities of race, gender, and culture, has given way to a politicized Afrocentricity."[82] He claims this revolution has been institutionalized by tenuring multicultural radicals as faculty, as deans and college presidents, and as heads of major academic organizations.
The facts do not bear out D'Souza's charges of an institutionalized revolution. Only 7 percent of all full professors at colleges and universities are people of color. Thirteen percent are women. Although women's studies courses are offered at a majority of schools, one can major in the subject at only about fifty of them.[83] In the early 1960s, ten top history departments had a total of 160 full professors, all of whom were men, and 128 assistant professors, 4 of whom were women. Ten years later, out of 274 full professors, 2 were women. Out of 317 assistant professors, 3 were women. By the mid-1980s, 11.7 percent of all full professors in the country were women, and 2.2 percent were black.[84] There has been change. But the change has hardly been revolutionary.
It is significant that even this limited amount of change should be so threatening to the white male domination of the academy—and of the work force more generally. These men's sense of the fragility of their power may in part reflect the changing demographics of the labor force and global economy and of family structure.
Because throughout the 1980s the academy was the one place that civil rights discourse still had saliency—though lessened political clout—the attack against political correctness was launched here. After neo-conservatives had dismantled much affirmative action law and stacked the courts, college campuses remained one of the last bastions of equality discourse. The charge of political correctness was the attempt to silence such discourse. It appeared more important than ever to do so now because some one-third of professors in the country, many of whom were tenured in the conservative 1950s, are nearing retirement age.[85]
Very few people would argue that there have not been some abuses of affirmative action. Bad decisions have sometimes been made on how to create equality while recognizing racial and sexual diversity. The wrong
person has sometimes been hired in the interest of multiculturalism. But these problems are not inherent to civil rights discourse. Such discourse instead is open and undetermined. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates argues that one need not be black to write a slave narrative; that we need not overspecialize difference; that people can and must stretch themselves in order to embrace common threads. This view is not a defense of a nondiversified faculty, but it is also not a narrowly determinist or essentialist definition of a diverse one.[86] To pluralize the curriculum is not to make a new center, as the term "Afrocentric" wrongly implies.[87] It is to create many centers, between which there will often be conflict. Conflict can breed openness. This hardly describes the closed-mindedness attributed to the "PC" camp.
Pertinent to this discussion is Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, which argues that the theories concerned with the origins of Western civilization are heavily influenced by racism and anti-Semitism. He challenges the Aryan model, arguing that Egyptian civilization came from Black Africa, that Egyptian culture was a black culture, and that Western civilization had its roots in Black Africa.[88] Bernal's analysis invites scrutiny. His argument invites discussion, as well as competing interpretation. There is no silencing intended here.
Although neoconservatives have termed political correctness the new McCarthyism of the Left, calling someone a sexist or a racist is in no way parallel to calling someone a Communist. People who were called Communists in the fifties lost their jobs. They were called before Congressional committees and queried by federal agents. They were hounded from one city to another. There is no similar punishment for homophobes or racists.[89]
The silencing of debate was initiated by the Bush administration, not faculty members on college campuses. The real "thought police" are those who oversaw the censorship of the Gulf War, insisted that racial guidelines were really quotas, and swore that Anita Hill was a pawn of liberal special-interest groups. They are also those who led the assault against reproductive rights, as we shall see in chapter 4.
The 1992 Election—
Misrepresentations of Racialized Gender
These events—the Thomas hearings, the Civil Rights Act of 1990–91, the Gulf War and its aftermath, the candidacy of David Duke, the Los
Angeles riots—were coded into the political psyche and the language of the 1992 presidential election. This coding allowed racialized imagery to be evoked without directly calling attention to it.
Another series of events that took place before the official start of the 1992 campaign also color-coded the parameters of the election. The angry incident between Bill Clinton and Sister Soljah, a rap singer, set the racial tone for Clinton's campaign.[90] Clinton criticized the rap performer for being divisive and hate-filled in her statements about the Los Angeles riots. Clinton's remarks were made at a meeting of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition and were therefore highly divisive. Jackson saw Clinton as using this moment to distance himself from old-style democratic racial loyalties. Clinton was making clear that he was not held hostage by Jackson or the race issue as old-style liberals have been.[91]
Clinton's election rhetoric on welfare reform also distanced him from old-style democratic politics. He proposed a work force program that allows no more than a two-year stint on welfare. Many white voters read this proposal as limiting the Democratic party's tendency to give hand-outs to blacks.
Although Jackson told Clinton that he should not take "the black vote" for granted, there was little alternative for black voters. Of course Bush and Clinton differed on racial equality issues, but there was less difference than many would have liked. Clinton supported the Civil Rights Act of 1990–91 more firmly than Bush, although he, like Bush, rejects the use of quotas. During his campaign, Clinton directed very little criticism at Bush's civil rights record. Neither racial nor sexual equality issues were given a priority.
One cannot discuss the 1992 election without some mention of Ross Perot's candidacy. And although the potential electoral disorder he created was initially exciting, most of his policy initiatives were much less so. Although he espoused black equality, he had serious misgivings about affirmative action programs. Most of his employees at higher levels of management were white men. When he addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) early on in the campaign, he called the audience "you people." He spoke in favor of the pro-choice position on abortion, but in terms of financial efficiency: abortions are cheaper than welfare payments for unwanted children. When asked about abortion rights as a guest on the Larry King show, he responded that he thought the American people needed to deal with the real issues rather than the nonessential ones that divide us. Another time, he said that the most important day in a woman's life is
the day she marries. After all, the purported reason he ended the first stage of his campaign was that Bush was planning to disrupt his daughter's wedding, and this would have been too devastating for him to bear.[92]
All in all, the 1992 presidential campaign covered over racial and gender issues while misrepresenting their interconnections. There were no Willie Hortons this time around because the heightened racism of the political context did not require such an explicit foil. Instead, all three candidates used the language of family values and coded it according to their stance on abortion and on women in the work force. Issues related to race were even more silenced. Affirmative action was not even discussed. The economy was said to be "the" issue.
Given this obfuscation, it is almost impossible to sort out the real political issues of the 1992 campaign. All the candidates spoke of a "new world order," of "economic issues" as if they were separate from "family values," of domestic policy as if it were completely separate from foreign policy, and of the "forgotten middle class," as though these political phrases accurately described the issues. They did not. The effectiveness of this political rhetoric was that it partially rang true. Anyone can read whatever they like into "sound-bite" rhetoric. The new world order is both new and very old. Domestic and foreign policy are no longer separate spheres. The economy and the family are interrelated realms. The middle class was forgotten in the past decade, but the fact that this middle class is also a "working class" was wiped off the map.
This duplicitous cacophony set the context for the swirling, contradictory messages regarding woman and her proper identity. On the one hand, we were told that this was "the year of the woman." More women ran for Senate than ever before—and one was "even" African American. Of the final four presidential and vice-presidential candidates, two had wives who were lawyers—one of whom actually practices. On the other hand, Barbara Bush, the quintessential loyal wife, actually addressed the convention. She presented herself in a homey, self-denigrating fashion and enjoyed record popularity. She used her paper-thin persona to bring in whatever pluralist vote existed for the Republicans. She became the party's umbrella.
Hillary Clinton was the other election icon. As her husband, Bill, pointed out, one would have thought Bush was running against her . And in some sense he was. Ms. Clinton was dangled by the Republicans as a radical feminist, an arch-critic of marriage and family, and a de-
fender of children's rights to sue parents.[93] Everyone, including Hillary, seemed to ignore the likelihood that if she had been a radical feminist, she would have run for the presidency herself. Instead, she had chosen to use her remarkable intelligence and skills to redefine the role of political wife. We need to remember that her early outspoken role in the campaign unfolded amid charges of her husband's infidelity. She was drawn into the Gennifer Flowers affair to speak for her husband's faithfulness. She tried to silence the rumors as only a wife can do. But one should not confuse her early active role in the campaign with a "co-presidency." We will return to Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton later.
Women's lives do not lend themselves to easy, homogeneous description, although election rhetoric attempted to do just that. The rhetoric trumpeted worn-out models that did not work for most women or their families. This did not stop the right wing of the Republican party from privileging the model of the traditional white patriarchal family, with a husband in the labor force and a wife at home.
The economy and its demand for families earning dual wages undercut the effectiveness of the racialized traditional family rhetoric. So did the vast number of poor, single-parent households, especially those headed by women. When the Republicans spoke of "family values," they dismissed the multiple realities of family life. It was a throwback to what they perceived as a better time: a stronger and more dynamic economy that allowed the traditional (middle-class and white) family structure to dominate. Even though family and a racialized economy are completely intertwined in this picture, they are treated as separate.
"Family values" became the Republicans' code words for antiabortion, antifeminist, anti-affirmative action, antihomosexual, anti-social welfare, antidrugs, and so on.[94] Those words elicited the vision of a traditional heterosexual family headed by a white male, which is supposedly orderly and free of drugs, of abuse, of AIDS, and so on.
The language of "family values" constructed the perfect postmodern moment in its elusiveness and the vagueness of its borders. As Barbara Bush purportedly said, family is whatever you say it is—although of course she thinks her kind is the best. The plural vision she alluded to is a false pluralism, because all other types of family are seen as inferior to the Bush-type family, the all-American family. Bush summed up this attitude when he said he wanted America to be like the Waltons, not the Simpsons. Interestingly, he did not choose to mention Bill Cosby's television family, the Huxtables.
The Republican theme was not families, but family "values." This
sleight of hand allowed them to ignore the structural realities of families and instead focus on imagery. The discussion of values was perfect for Bush's rhetoric, which focused on individual choice and responsibility and ignored the constraints on people's choices. Of course, many people, especially women, would still not choose the patriarchal family even if they were free from economic constraints and could do so. But I do think that most men, women, and children wish to be surrounded by love, to have an interesting and well-paying job, and to be free of the degradation that nurtures addictions. Family values rhetoric sidesteps all of these clarifications.
The rhetoric of "family values" and of "women's place" allowed Republicans to stake out old territory within the so-called new world order. The new order is no longer defined by an anti-Communism located in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. The new anti-Communism targets feminists, homosexuals, and people of color as egalitarians who want too much government. As Gary Wills has noted, the new enemy for born-again Republicans is inside our borders. This enemy is seen as pro-state (seeking more taxes, more civil rights legislation, more social services, etc.) and antifamily.[95]
Family values held center stage for most of the 1992 election, because this was the way the right wing of the Republican party chose to define the battle against liberal democratic politics—that is, against equality legislation for "blacks and women." This battle reflected a certain truth: family structures are at the core of society, and changes in these structures are changing the way we live. The traditional family is in as much trouble today as the savings and loans are—and the Republicans tried hard to bail it out.
The internationalization of the economy and the multicultural nature of the United States work force have resulted in real problems for traditional family life, which depended on good jobs for white men. There are now not enough good jobs for white men or for single parents, whatever their gender or race. Black men—except for Clarence Thomas and a few others—are largely unemployed. White families are looking more like families of color have looked for years, with married women in the labor force, single parenthood, teenage pregnancy, and so on. These family structures do not fit well with an international economy, which demands women's entry into a labor force that ghettoizes them in poor-paying jobs. And family and economy are coming more into conflict than ever before as the economy constricts. Single parents need a family wage, yet many of them cannot even find jobs.
So the discussion of family values was a cover-up of the real economic crises facing families and of the white male privilege once aligned with an industrial (rather than the current service) economy. Bush knew he was in trouble on the abortion issue and for pandering to the right wing of the party. So the Republican convention was orchestrated to show that Republicans were pro-women (whatever that means), even if antiabortion. Former Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin gave the nominating speech. Barbara and Marilyn represented the party's commitment to "family values" by speaking on behalf of George and Dan—although this was hardly the same as women speaking for themselves.
Barbara was spokeswoman for the old model of supportive wife, while Marilyn represented the new breed, a professional woman who defers to her wifely responsibilities. These women alluded to the security of the traditional model of the family: By their very presence, they appealed to voters to stay with the familiar, because change would be too hard. If voters were unable to trust Bush and Quayle on the economy and taxes, then perhaps we would trust them as family men (who happen to be white). Clinton was portrayed as an untrustworthy, unfaithful family man who was asking us to risk change. Bush and Quayle hoped that Clinton would remind us too much of what we deem scary in ourselves.
The family values rhetoric was also an attempt to repackage the Republican antiabortion stance in less strident terms. But this strategy does not appear to have worked. Instead, a gender gap developed which accounted for much of Clinton's lead. Although there had been a gender gap in 1984 and 1988, it seemed more likely that it would affect electoral results in 1992. And in fact there was a 13 percent increase in turnout among women from 1988 to 1992. Clinton received more than 50 percent of the votes of wage-earning women; 86 percent of the votes of black women (compared with 77 percent of the votes of black men); and 48 percent of the votes of women aged 18–29 (compared with 38 percent for men of the same age).[96]
Barbara Bush worked hard to see that a gender gap did not materialize. For more than a decade, when asked for her thoughts on abortion—and whether they differed from the president's view—she repeatedly refused to answer the question. She often commented that she was not going to let the press make it seem like she and George were in conflict over the issue.
Then, when her husband started to trail badly in the polls—and the Republican party platform took a rigid antiabortion stance, which was
unpopular with a majority of Republicans and of the American public—George needed Barbara to help him out. So Barbara said publicly that the abortion issue did not belong in the party platform. Then, the morning after she addressed the convention, she recanted her position. She revised her statement to read that she was neither pro-choice nor anti-choice, and that she had gotten in over her head with her statement regarding the platform. Barbara remained the dutiful wife.
All the political wives remained dutiful in "the year of the woman." They were allowed to speak because they spoke for their husbands. Barbara Bush did not have—and was not allowed—any other agenda. Hillary Clinton had a somewhat more complicated duty to perform. Since the election, she has expanded the constraints of her status as political wife. As head of the task force on health care, she wields enormous power. Yet her status is precarious; she has this power because she is the president's wife.
During the election, Marilyn Quayle offered herself as the flip side of Hillary Clinton. Educated and professional, she chose that her family should come first. (Actually, she works full-time on behalf of her husband.) She offered herself as the appropriate choice for women who do not want to be, as she put it, "liberated from their essential nature as women." There are so many obvious incongruities in this portrait that it is difficult to know what to say about it.[97]
Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore did not address the Democratic convention as Barbara and Marilyn did. In part, there was no need for them to do so because they did not have to make up for an antiabortion party plank. So they could just be wives. Hillary's fantastic legal record was irrelevant to this posture. The Democrats featured women officeholders without taking the risk of featuring any feminist wives.
Ann Richards opened the Democratic Convention with the statement "I am pro-choice and I vote." She did so to remind voters that the next president would choose the next Supreme Court justice, who will likely decide the abortion issue. Women candidates running for Senate were highlighted and did their best to remind us of the Thomas-Hill hearings. Race and gender issues were thrown together and left oblique. Neither party tried to clarify the meaning or significance of women's issues in their racialized meanings; neither party brought them center-stage. There was something very old about all this.