JUST INSIDE THE DOOR
Jordan, June
JUST INSIDE THE DOOR June Jordan Justice at Risk Just about every time anybody talks about affirmative action or multi-cutural education, the presentation seems simple: White Western authorities...
...Board of Regents reconsidered its July 1995 decision against affirmative action...
...Yes...
...Black folks are not responsible...
...So now the question put to white AmerJune Jordan, the poet, is professor of African-American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley...
...As would-be productive people, we rise and fall according to the outcome of these twin objectives underlying corporate management: the elimination of labor and the enlargement of profit...
...But it didn't take much and it didn't take long before "affirmative action" became the so-called pivotal issue, nationwide, White people everywhere agreed to interviews on the subject...
...In that multiplication, our simplicity of purpose becomes obscure...
...documents the following about U.C.Berkeley during its ten-year adherence to affirmative action: 19S4 entering freshmen, mostly white (61 percent), presented an average S.A.T...
...Affirmative action offers a moral alternative to national fratricide...
...And an enormously important clarification about "Special Admissions" appeared in a sidebar to that Times report: For the school year 1994-1995, only 3 percent of the entering freshmen came in through "Special Admissions" policy considerations such as economic disadvantages, rural background, musical abilities, physical disabilities, and race...
...And, as a matter of fact, once you redefined things like that, a whole lot of black and Latino and Asian Americans didn't think "racial preference" was really "fair", either...
...White Western hegemony is "fair...
...Women are not responsible...
...Gradually, I acquired a perspective consistent with what I learned...
...Senate, and92 percent of the Forbes Fabulous 400...
...Thirty years later and we live in a country eager to imprison, detain, deport, de-fund anyone who is neither "white" nor native English-speaking...
...Politicians like California's Governor Pete Wilson and his devoted appointee, U.C...
...They agreed to this extraordinary second deliberation because their July decree provoked unanimous public denunciation and disclaimers from the then-president of the U.C...
...system, all nine chancellors, all faculty senates, and all student governments...
...97 percent of all entering freshmen came from the top one-eighth of their class...
...On January 19...
...When President Johnson announced this affirmative resolve, his ambitions seemed minimal, and righteous, to everyone convinced that equality is an undebatable humane value appropriate to a democratic state...
...We will have to embrace what mv friend Peter Sellars invokes as "history as creative process...
...icans changed to, "What do you think about job and college-admission policies that give preference to some racial groups over others...
...Affirmative action emerged as a belated national policy some thirty years ago...
...None of us is responsible for the awesome difficulties of this moment, but we have become the new American majority that will or will not survive these uncertainties and the divisive, scapegoating manipulations of the hateful among us...
...In this context, affirmative action would not and did not seem necessarily threatening to the average white American: As long as you're eating well, you do not mind sharing your food with strangers...
...But regardless of the power any of us does or does not possess, we must subject ourselves to just such scrutiny...
...And we may fee...
...Regents' ruling against affirmative action, I became my own kind of maniac, obsessively trying to fact-check, trying to better understand, this suddenly pivotal, this publicly welcomed "wedge" issue...
...it is too soon to begin an examination of our own moral conduct...
...As the director of admissions at U.C.-Berkeley, Bob Laird, explained to me, for the school year 1994-1995...
...At U.C.-Berkeley, the most heterogeneous student population in the world attends a public institution of learning that, according to the "1995 National Research Council Report on Quality of Ph.D...
...Yes...
...Back then a white majority population in the United States appeared to be assured...
...adhering to affirmative-action criteria...
...Our studies will have to evolve into revolutionary, interactive confrontation with whatever we may discover...
...The obvious, straightforward case for affirmative action and multicultural studies confronts such reckless ongoing misrepresentation and attack that we who support it find ourselves having to multiply our battle positions in response...
...Some people will never know anything except dependency upon those who despise them, those who create and impose conditions that enforce despicable dependency...
...June 4, 1995...
...Any reliable population forecast for California and for the entire United States arrives at the same conclusion: a non-white majority within the lifespan of our children...
...Congress, four-fifths of the tenured university faculty, nine-tenths of the U.S...
...And...
...I look at this craziness and I try to return to a simplicity of perspective again...
...Board of Regents voted to support its own decision against affirmative action...
...And so, in order to avoid figurative and literal extinction, and in order to provide for self-respecting knowledge, and social mobility based upon such knowledge, we who have been denied and denigrated now undertake to ascertain our own beauty and honor and courage and historical accomplishment according to our own images of the truth of our distinctive human being...
...All of this seems simple...
...1994 entering freshmen (14 percent Hispanic, 6 percent black, 32 percent white and 39 percent Asian) presented a significantly higher average S.A.T...
...Given a social predicament that plainly derived from American slavery, and American hatred of men and women of African descent...
...Obviously, white Western curricular, educational, economic, and political hegemony does not translate into "racial preference...
...In July of last year, the U.C...
...because we can never get off the battlefield, we may not always acknowledge the complexities we encounter in our reach for new information...
...Affirmative action is what's left of our blood-stained aspirations toward universal civil rights...
...President Lyndon Baines Johnson resolved in 1965 to "create equality in fact" for a people that "has been hobbled by chains...
...On January 19...
...Craziness...
...National media potentates borrowed from Connerly, and "racial preference" quickly eclipsed "affirmative action...
...Soon our national press exploded with outcries from "angry white men" and a mini-cascade of first-person white student reports from universities overtaken by unqualified barbarians, politically correct thought police, and apologetic, but terrified, would-be employers who had truly wanted to hire the best white man for the job...
...Regent Ward Connerly, become famous, and infamous...
...Heavyweight Presidential prospect Colin Powell, a black man, actually got points for his "brave" refusal to condemn "affirmative action" categorically...
...Some people will never know anything besides the pain of physical poverty and psychological self-loathing...
...With the U.C...
...score of 1225 and a higher average GPA of 3.84...
...White Americans didn't think "racial preference" was really "fair...
...the U.C...
...Regents voted to end affirmative action throughout the University of California system of public education...
...1996...
...Internationalized and monopolized, our economy has become a game without rules...
...With thirty-five of our thirty-six Berkeley programs placing in the top ten, as The New York Times of September 13, 1995, exclaimed, "No other university even comes close...
...But public discussion of affirmative action and multicultural studies has been warped by all kinds of media machinations, as political ambitions and lies and panic and your elementary white-supremacy-race-hatred erupt...
...And I suppose that everyone opposed to "racial preference" breathed easier as the prospect of preserving a mostly white Western curriculum for mostly white Western students who would later lead or join a mostly white labor force brightened a little bit...
...These are the dynamics inducing uncontrollable, frightening change today...
...Back then, an economy either pursuing new modes of production, capital accumulation and profit, or else an econd expanding upon proven routes to the velopment of wealth appeared to hem finitely open...
...score of 1155 and an average GPA (grade point average) of 3.62...
...there is the truth of our entitlement to self-respecting education about our distinctive human being, whether we derive from a Czechoslovakian, a Filipino, or a Nigerian heritage...
...But I cannot make that return...
...Gay and lesbian and bisexual Americans are not responsible...
...Meanwhile and actually: Although white men, angry or otherwise, constitute 44 percent of the labor force, white men continue to occupy 95 percent of all senior management positions plus 80 percent of the U.S...
...Undocumented immigrants are not responsible...
...Do you think that's fair...
...Simultaneous to this changing face if our electorate is our changing, our unr<|-ognizable, our apparently running-aw^, economy...
...whether or not our national media experts once more identify affirmative action as the pivotal "wedge" issue nationwide, all the lives, all the values, all the intended justice bespoken by that attempt at more equal, more democratic representation in the curriculum, in the classroom, and at the workplace—all remain at risk...
...Board of Regents is composed of governor-appointees like Ward Connerlv, whose professional background can be more than adequately summarized as real-estate development...
...but could not...
...Nevertheless, the white population of America is generally in decline while peoples of Spanish-speaking origins and Asian origins double or triple or quadruple their numbers...
...This double-whammy, this model of loaded public inquiry, produced great excitement and front-page news: Gosh, no...
...But we need to morally assess the content of our studies of our many selves, even as we affirm our disparate identities...
...or we will merelv become more fluently backwards, more perfectly stuck in what the past can tell us about the past, good and evil, alike...
...there is the truth of white Western domination...
...Emerging demographic and economic structures herald the end of white American majority privilege and, also, the end of employment security for all levels of our national labor force...
...In contrast to this legitimate educational community, the LLC...
...JUST INSIDE THE DOOR June Jordan Justice at Risk Just about every time anybody talks about affirmative action or multi-cutural education, the presentation seems simple: White Western authorities on beauty and honor and courage and historical accomplishment have denied and denigrated whatever and whoever does not fit into their white Western imagery...
...Education in the United States," ranks number one...
...And Wilson tries to run toward the White House propelled by the poisonous uproar against affirmative action that he and his cohorts have conspired to ignite in the first place...
...1996...
...An earlier Times article...
...the U.C...
...Some people who have been systemi-cally excluded by white Western tradition will never know anything beyond hourly work at a minimum wage...
...And so...
...These are the reasons for our pervasive uncertainty and flux...
Vol. 60 • April 1996 • No. 4
