Mr. Hackney's Opus: Listening to a "National Conversation," Courtesy of the Clinton Administration
LABASH, MATT
Mr. Hackney's Opus: Listening to a "National Conversation," Courtesy of the Clinton Administration By Matt Labash When National Endowment for the Humanities president Sheldon Hackney launched his...
...Though Hackney concedes conservatives were outgunned by about a 6-to-1 margin, "there was still a wide range of Left," he told me...
...Second, the school sought punitive measures against a Jewish student who called a group of black students "water buffaloes"-a translation from Hebrew that had no racial connotations...
...But which is the right salad...
...The reading lists that emerged from the meetings have a blind-spin-through-the-card-catalog feel, ranging from Madison to Cr?vecoeur to Lani Guinier to bell hooks (the arch-feminist critic who insists on lower-casing her name...
...Never mind that a good many of the participants aren't laymen at all, but professional victimologists associated with places like the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change-overly conscientious people who find it useful to fritter away public dollars to justify their research and thus grow ever more conscientious...
...How do you grow blacks...
...Mexicans are Americans because they live on the continent of South America, so if you really want to throw a monkey wrench into what is an American, deal with that...
...This, after her candid disclosure that she chose to live in the neighborhood because it "had great diversity...
...wife...
...That can be arranged...
...God forbid, in Hackney's world, that even a minute lapse without an act of self-expression...
...Another project director claimed he was fortunate enough to hear a woman remark as she left, "This is how I want my tax dollars spent...
...Citizen Pam experienced "a major paradigm shift" when Mahoney explained his matrimonial orientation...
...With the project thus framed in blatherskite that could test the abdominal lining of even the most grizzled war correspondent, the media elite began its drubbing...
...Before the days are gone...
...Meanwhile he enforced a strident p.c...
...I love him...
...Bringing people together, he says, "is nice, but I could do that without spending a dime...
...But because each state has a humanities council, and because the percentage of the endowment's budget that goes to the state humanities councils remains the same, a formal initiative by Hackney is not necessary to continue the Conversation if people desire it...
...During his tenure as president of the University of Pennsylvania, he prided himself on being a rabid guardian of free expression, decrying the Helms amendment and supporting Andres "Piss Christ" Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and all the maverick artists who, through their brave work, pushed the bounds of rectal elasticity...
...We love that our street has Mexicans...
...I don't think you need to formalize it...
...And then it struck, right there in a Hackney piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education...
...Cheerleader: "I see some definite intersection here...
...At one table, a Kiwanis club retiree grilled three Latino high-schoolers attending for extra credit, asking each, "Are you in a gang...
...In a March 1994 meeting in Chicago, 21 scholars were invited to plot the reading materials and parameters of the Conversation...
...Consider this exchange during one of the L.A...
...I could listen to him better...
...the rest of the diverse group ranged from liberal academic Henry Louis Gates, Jr...
...Jazz...
...And then they surveyed their work...
...Another trippy, pony-tailed Ph.D...
...Her answer: "That's a good question...
...The teacher and an Occidental College student concurred that all these kids and adjoining neighborhoods were victims of negative media stereotypes...
...he said...
...An Ames, Iowa, panelist thought it useful to think of America as a "tossed salad," while another described it as "a stew, sitting on the stove for a long time, and some of the little parts you don't know what they are anymore, but some of the things stay in as chunks...
...It's not like I look at him and see a white guy, but it's great...
...winter...
...Indeed, it appears most people are receptive to receiving free money from Hackney...
...As the macrame-haired teacher strained to draw her school route, the cheerleader-loving teacher asked, "Do you want me to draw for you...
...Citizen #4, Dave, had a recipe for finding Hackney-like commonality: "Instead of saying Asian-American,' maybe American-Asian' is a better description...
...doesn't account for the cultural persistence of pre-American identities" and "'mosaic' or 'quilt' imply 'sharp and permanent boundaries between groups.'" One of the Conversations was titled "Educational Melting Pot or Salad Bowl...
...This truth became self-evident after examining the Tucson writing project at the University of Arizona (funded by a $30,000 NEH grant), of which Hackney had no recollection...
...and the semantic career of objects as they are placed in different contexts is itself fertile ground for museum study...
...He's 6'4" and very dark...
...Chairs should be comfortable...
...This seemed like the kind of breakthrough Hackney had anticipated...
...Because as Hackney said in November, the Conversation "is at flood tide now, so I invite you to launch your own deep-draft vessel, either with or without flotation devices...
...Funding publication of such a project yields all the negatives of an undergrad creative writing program (bad prose, self-indulgent prose, vomit-inducing prose) while negating the only positive: making sure it stays within the confines of a university campus...
...You turned out all right, so did Juan and Miguel and everybody here...
...And after you've had it, what do you do with it...
...You can't do that to black people talking about you domesticate them as if they were animals...
...Host Larry Mantle: "Perhaps 'United Statesians' would be a better term...
...The teacher moaned that they never picked up on positive images at her rough-and-tumble school: "In December we had a poetry reading, and there wasn't one camera there...
...Another bubble-headed teacher from a better school district chimed in: "Our cheerleaders were on TV the other day," to visible flinching from her table-mates...
...Jazz...
...Here's a passage from the pilot program from which the grant was received: "I am committed to our special family...
...to liberal academic Amy Gutmann to radical academic Ronald Takaki...
...Of course, one must make allowances for human frailty and shortcomings...
...Conversations I heard-"The Multicultural Debate: Language and Labels" and "Shades of Law: Liberty and Justice for All"-the consensus is this: Everybody's getting the shaft...
...He bemoaned the "blue code of silence" under "the state of siege" to "ensure and perpetuate the domination" of blacks, many of whom are not imprisoned but "in captivity...
...Hackney told me he has no recollection of this, saying he hadn't read him until after the program commenced, but perhaps Habermas arouses some of Hackney's more aggressive collectivist verbalizings: "We think of ourselves as a practical and self-reliant people, but we have been host to more utopian experiments in communal living than any other nation on earth...
...For self-expression is what it's all about...
...Based on two L.A...
...After all, he said, those holding the Conversations in localities across the nation have nearcomplete autonomy once NEH's grant money is in hand...
...With this shaky legacy, it's small wonder that Hackney's idea for a National Conversation took fire from both the Left, who contended he was harking back to troglodytic, patriotic flim-flam, and the Right, who weren't exactly eager to join hands and lift voices in "The Circle Game," with Hackney serving as the nation's multicultural facilitator...
...That's why he's provided these opinion forums for "the layman," as he never ceases to remind us...
...One of the Conversation's few congressional critics, Ralph Regula of Ohio, hopes that won't happen...
...If one is struck by a sort of pre-teen sheen permeating the Conversation, like a remedial civics class, it gets even more elementary...
...Asked why the discussions were never made public, Hackney told me that privacy ensured participants "could have a much freer conversation...
...This was two years ago...
...He thought it would be apple pie," a former NEH staffer says, "but it was PR...
...Such are the pitfalls of freewheeling discussion...
...This was just one of many justifications he offered for the Conversation in a speech last November...
...But as Hackney has said, we're not here to be provided answers or to achieve consensus...
...And between now and then...
...Howe gave his prescription for the interactive museum of the future: "We have to get away from the idea of something behind glass-some way where we can make a comment that I can spray-paint on that glass or write on a chalkboard, or something where we can create some kind of dialogue between the users, rather than the users and the exhibitor...
...To talk...
...There are so many: taco, Jello, pasta, three-bean...
...This new kind of kissing was quickly becoming second nature...
...And then they mapped, drawing crayon lines to their most visited spots: friends' homes, Thai restaurants, hardware stores (this was the Kiwanis guy...
...This was a testament to his acute instincts, considering he'd just met the youths minutes before...
...speech code that led to a rare Boner Trifecta...
...She had first viewed him with skepticism but now realized: "No, he made an intimate commitment with this cultural diversity...
...And when black students removed 14,000 copies of the Daily Penn-sylvanian in protest of a conservative columnist, free expressionist Hackney's initial response was: "Two important university values, diversity and open expression, seem to be in conflict...
...This is surprising, since ordinarily the endowment's meetings are required to be open by federal sunshine laws...
...If they turn on the TV and see negative stereotypes, that's all they think they can be...
...Last year when Hackney testified before a congressional committee, he threw down the gauntlet, saying: "We are a quiet agency, one might even say unglamorous, but we take comfort in the Biblical promise, 'By their fruits ye shall know them.'" Here then, are Hackney's fruits...
...That's why we hang out in the parks and do drugs...
...Hackney has stressed that this is a nonpartisan, or perhaps pan-partisan, effort...
...This was a crying shame, since it strikes at the very essence of his notion of a collective identity: a collaborative writing project whereby the author has to incorporate thoughts of other group members and spit them out in their own unique narrative...
...What it does is just perpetuate those who are in power to stay in power," Howe postulated, "while giving the impression that we're including more people...
...There have now been 1,540 conversations in 224 cities in 41 states...
...Hackney told me so himself: "People want to feel that they're being heard...
...And here's an offering from a college-bound flower after having her first sexual experience with her boyfriend, "a gifted artist and a pot smoker": "I went to kiss my mother goodnight and she remarked about my flushed cheeks...
...Many of the project directors I spoke with, when asked about Hackney's concept, said, "I was skeptical at first, but...
...Karenga also took over the "Shades of Law" Conversation...
...And it's not for elites, as the condescending suggestions in NEH's starter kit for local organizers prove: "Consider the size and temperature (not too hot or too cold) of the room...
...Hackney knows what to do with it: He'll write a report sometime in the fall, and is almost certain it will be published...
...But even with this garbled objective aside, the Conversation is often lacking even as intelligent discourse "enlightened by the humanities...
...Macrame (snidely): "No, I have a feeling you don't know the area...
...I asked moderator Alaka Wali if problems with the exhibit weren't actually aesthetic more than race-based...
...This caused South Pasadena police chief Thomas Mahoney to get his Irish up, at least until he let it be known he had an Asian-American (American-Asian...
...Put a question to anyone expressing actual diversity of opinion and you're likely to get responses as nebulous as Hackney's...
...And about her daughter's black boyfriend, Sandra was rhapsodic: "Ricky's a great guy...
...Serving simple refreshments is a good way to put participants in a relaxed and sharing frame of mind...
...more a selective libertarian...
...In Hackney's Conversation this is the coming together of people to exacerbate our differences, celebrate our slights, rail against perceived injustices-all of which should help us harness the ephemeral quality of collective identity, moving us forward as a cohesive unit...
...First, the Multicultural Debate...
...I know he's black...
...Then it was off to a conference room for the fabled Conversation...
...There are other reports of similar successes in the NEH propaganda, such as this testimonial from a retired West Virginia school teacher: "I left so revitalized by the sincerity, frankness and respect among participants that I wish I were 20 years younger...
...Success...
...I managed to reverse the impulse in time to make it a mother-daughter peck but wondered whether she had noticed the unusual duration and strength of my embrace...
...Conversationeers will collude in fits of metaphoria...
...This year, the NEH's budget has been cut to $110 million, a 36 percent reduction...
...Odds are the American Library Association may want to give it another go, since the first Conversation grant to this estimable group cost taxpayers $383,000...
...University of Chicago professor Terri Strauss, in her opening salvo, bludgeoned us in impenetrable academese about a "crisis of representation" in this "commodified culture" because as "mainstream experts collect, study, classify, interpret, and exhibit others, their work being consciously or unconsciously an act of dominance...
...Fred Hoxie, head of the Newberry Library's centers on Indian history (playing the part of the bumbling apologetic white guy in the manner of Tom Willis on The Jeffersons), christened the night a success before it even began: "This meeting is a rare event in modern life, and that is a civic gathering without a pre-set ideological agenda...
...those of us in attendance sidled after hours up a darkened stairway and around Tyrannosaur skeletons to observe an "Indians Before Columbus" display...
...Hackney called for "a conversation in which all voices are heard," grappling "seriously with the meaning of American pluralism" as we "look in the National Mirror" to reflect on how people are included-or, as he put it in drama-queen dialect, "How wide the circle of we...
...Message: Exhibiting the fleshing tools of the Arapaho should be done in consultation with them or in their "voice"-as much as anyone knows what that sounds like, since there aren't too many of them kicking down the door of the Field Museum during story time...
...the act of collection performs a semantic shift...
...Originally to be funded in the "high six figures," the largely unmonitored Conversation has by now cost $4.9 million in grants to applicants throughout the country, plus a little-noted $10,000 stipend to each of the 56 state and territorial humanities councils above what they already draw in NEH funding...
...Reuben, with his goatee, hoop earring, and too-cool-for-the-room grimace, shrugged, "No...
...student and self-described Wiccan (a witch) said the museum wasn't a total loss...
...His plan was to fund town-hall meetings across the country to discuss multiculturalism and national identity and civic virtue...
...Which is not to suggest Hackney's a Marxist...
...The harbor is big enough for many ships...
...Metaphors are an integral part of Hackney's American identity...
...But when I asked Hackney why he'd allowed a noted bomb-thrower like Karenga to intrude on his Conversation, in violation of Conversation Kit ground rules 2 and 3 ("All participants will show respect for the views expressed by others" and "Speakers will be brief, no one will monopolize the conversation"), he convincingly pled ignorance about the entire project...
...It's impossible to know what went on, because NEH has not turned over the tapes of these meetings to interested journalists...
...We perused Arapaho and Crow fleshing tools, saw a Cheyenne biography of a warrior, were informed that "we learned to smoke and chew from the Indians," and saw displays on tubular effigy pipes, Southern Death Cults, and all manner of accoutrements from birthing gear to burial smocks...
...I want to see my race portrayed equally, because my children are going to suffer...
...To share in the experience together...
...Thus the fruits of the National Conversation: pedantic multicultural blasts from rancid academics, ethnocentric turf-spraying all over your Sunday suit, and a $6 million quest for the appropriate American metaphor...
...The result...
...panels: Citizen: "When you say American' because we are North American, there are also South Americans...
...One elementary-school teacher in a phlegm-colored V-neck, thick glasses, and macrame hair piped in: "Gang members are regular people, it's not like they're from another planet...
...We have to break down the myths," he told us...
...Playing the stock Hackney character of the graceless "I'm-white-but-all-right" boot-licker was Citizen #1, the aforementioned Sandra, who went into overcompensation mode: "But we love our black friends...
...This caught the attention of "expert" panelist Maulana Karenga (best known for inventing Kwanzaa and doing time for torturing a young woman, respectively), who pounced in his Cosby-meets-Yoda gurgle...
...But hey, you don't have to go bad," said the Kiwanis guy...
...In a radio studio packed with 31 or so citizen panelists, who were then analyzed by expert panelists, one citizen named Sandra said, "I hate to be called a girl or lady...
...On the Left, the Nation's Katha Pollitt wrote, "If we're all so bewildered about our national values, what is it we will learn from sharing our ignorance in library basements...
...Not salad...
...Why, she even dances at B.B...
...There was the example of one conciliatory citizen trying to draw a distinction between independent West Indian blacks and American or "home-grown" blacks taught self-hatred by a white dominant majority...
...I don't see, but I feel...
...Macrame: "Gee, we're so close to each other...
...James Q. Wilson and two other neocons were the only non-leftists...
...Craig Howe, the bolo-tied director of the D'Arcy McNicholas Center for the History of the American Indian, said that even attempts to incorporate inclu-siveness in museum exhibits were just transparent...
...But if other grantees apply and say we really like what you guys are doing, like the American Library Association," says NEH spokesman Jim Turner, "we may well determine the projects they ran were so successful that, hey, let's do it again...
...With only one more official grant cycle left for the National Conversation (in March), Hackney's formal initiative will officially end...
...These are the kinds of conversations Hackney believes America should be having in church basements and neighborhood bars-except instead of everybody being Methodists or Cubs fans, participants would come from diverse backgrounds, however homogeneous their opinions...
...He's given great thought to the subject, since "the melting pot...
...And how, for the love of Mary, are you supposed to bring the Amazon to Chicago for a living, breathing exhibit...
...On the Right, George Will said subsidizing diversity talk was "akin to subsidizing crabgrass: the problem is a surplus not a shortage...
...That puts a crimp in the inarguably productive functions of the National Endowment for the Humanities, tasks like historical and newspaper preservation and the collection of presidential papers...
...Amazing how that skepticism unanimously receded after the grant checks had been cashed...
...Also included is neo-Marxist philosopher J?rgen Habermas, whom (we learn from Comint magazine's Lawrence Jarvik) Hackney cited as a primary influence on the Conversation during a gathering on Martha's Vineyard...
...Citizen #2, Maria, laid bare the duality of her Mexican heritage as "the rape of the European father of my Indian mother...
...And so are my friends...
...Without thinking, I practically flung my arms around her neck in preparation for a passionate kiss...
...But in fairness to Hackney, most of his early detractors were teeing off on his promotional literature and grant lists...
...Even the New York Times and Washington Post took their shots, with the latter's Jonathan Yardley suggesting a cost-effective alternative: Read Invisible Man, then pass it around your block...
...And it's not the only one...
...That kind of language imprisons and degrades...
...He also assured us that Africans were the first builders in this country and that they were here before Columbus because the Indians had presented gold-tipped spears from Africa...
...Hackney's Opus: Listening to a "National Conversation," Courtesy of the Clinton Administration By Matt Labash When National Endowment for the Humanities president Sheldon Hackney launched his new initiative, "A National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity," he was throttled like a red-headed pi?ata...
...Can you imagine somebody saying 'home-grown white folks...
...With the same stultifying effects as one of your better antihistamines, the speech had the gentleman behind me sawing logs into my microrecorder before she could reach her only discernible point, which was: "We could spend a whole evening picking apart this exhibit, but the most important criticism is that there is no First Voice...
...But because the MacArthur Foundation picked up the tab for the planning stage, NEH was able to skirt the federal requirement...
...Why of course-with its indigenous non-hierarchical structure, born as a disdained expression of a marginalized group, jazz was the answer all along...
...Take the Occidental College Conversation, where participants from mixed Caucasian and low-income Latino neighborhoods outside Los Angeles sat in groups at round tables covered with construction paper maps and 64-pack Crayolas...
...King's joint, attends Native American fairs, and eats at Mexican restaurants because "there are so many things that are more fun than whitebread culture, which is actually pretty dull...
...Citizen #3, Belle, complained that entertainment power brokers "are white males...
...It seems instead to illuminate the oxymoronic cross-purpose of exploring our collective identity as individuals...
...Tolerance is part of the package, and although it is virtuous to love all God's children, two things are certain: a) You wouldn't want any of these children operating on you, and b) any epiphany harvested from contact with said children should probably be discarded immediately...
...At the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History's $40,000 Conversation on the subject "Who represents whom...
...He'd often go upstairs to the Pawnee Earth Lodge when nobody was around so "the stars could scream at me through the hole...
...If there was one lesson to be gleaned from this Conversation, it's that Caucasians yearning to relate can be painfully awkward...
...Though Hackney for the most part denies culpability in the series of incidents (he told me he was simply enforcing the school's constitution), and though he later hardened his line against the destruction of the school paper, a former newspaper staffer says, "He told me that 'stealing papers was an act of free speech in the great liberal tradition' on several occasions...
...First, Penn decided to punish a Jewish professor who had the audacity to point out to black students that both he and they were descended from slaves...
...Could this be the same Conversation Hackney described in November as having "the integrity and currency that draws people along across the tiger pits of discord and suspicion...
...In all my Eurobliviousness, I walked through the rather straightforward and benign exhibit with a musty academic group of ortho-soled gawkers in too-tight ski sweaters and student-union widewales worn in the unkempt manner one perfects from rolling out of dorm bunks, past the shower, and straight into American Studies class...
...They had yet to hear the Conversations firsthand...
...Hackney once toyed with "salad" as a metaphor because he said the flavors "bleed over" and because, according to him, the phrase e pluribus unum, comes from a Virgil poem about salad...
...Someone should have told that to the panelists, like Chicago State University's Murry DePillars, a Yaphet Kotto lookalike who harped on having documented evidence that Aristotle and Herodotus studied in Africa...
Vol. 1 • February 1996 • No. 23
