March 23, 2004
Waiting for Menchu
Not for the first
time, a reported campus hate crime has
turned out to be a hoax, this time at Claremont. A part-time instructor
reported that her car had been vandalized and hate slogans scrawled on it, sparking
campus-wide efforts to confront racism at Claremont. It now appears likely that
the instructor did it herself.
Ah-hah!, say many
academic life and campus identity politics. This just proves that hate crimes
on campus are exaggerated and the culture of victimization has run rampant.
Nothing to see here, move along, say those
who remain deeply concerned about questions of racism and discrimination within
This exchange reminds
me in many ways of the debate over the fabrications of Rigoberta Menchu. For
many of the combatants, that affair became a battle first and only briefly about
Menchu herself and Guatemala, and more potently about the ulterior motives of
her defenders or her critics. For the critics, it was evidence of the conscious,
premeditated and instrumental lies of the academic left; for the defenders,
it was evidence of the lurking malevolence of a conspiratorial right and the
need to maintain solidarity in the face of this threat.
There were more
than a few people who also threaded the needle in between in some manner, most
prominently David Stoll, who revealed Menchus prevarications. What struck
me most powerfully was that Menchus real story, had it been written in
her autobiography, would still have been interesting and valid and important
and reasonable testimony to the struggles of Guatemalans under military rule.
The question for me was, Why did she, with assistance from interlocutors,
refashion herself into the most abject and maximally oppressed subject that
she could? The answer to that question, the fault of that untruth, lies
not so much in Menchu but in her intended audience.
Here I think the
academic left, that portion of it most invested in identity politics (which
is not the whole or necessarily even the majority of the academic left), takes
it on the chin. Menchu is what some of them most wanted, a speaking subaltern.
You build a syllabus
and go looking: is there any text, any material, that will let you say, This
is what illiterate peasant women in this place think. This is what ordinary
migrant laborers in 1940s South Africa thought. This is what serfs in medieval
Central Europe thought. This is what slaves in classical Greece thought.
You know those people existed and presume they had thoughts, feelings, sentiments.
You want those thoughts written in teachable, usable, knowable form.
You want what people
in my field call the African voice. If you dont have it in
the syllabus, in your talk, in your paper, in your book, somebodys going
to get up in the audience and say, Where is the authentic African voice?
and mutter dire imprecations when you say, I dont have it. I cant
find it. It doesnt exist. You may quote or mention or study an African,
or many, but if theyre middle-class, or Westernized, or literate,
or working for the colonial state, somebodys going to tell you thats
not enough. The light of old anthropological quests for the pure untouched native
is going to shine through the tissue paper of more contemporary theory. You
may move into more troubled waters if you say, as you ought, I dont
need it and there isnt any such thing. Theres just Africans and
Europeans and anybody else: everything that anyone has ever written or had written
down about them is grist for my mill. A thousand voices, no Voice.
Some people wanted
Rigoberta Menchu. They wanted La Maxima Autentica, the most subalterny subaltern
ever. They bought her book, taught her book, willed her into being. She fit.
I dont blame Menchu for giving an audience its desire, and I dont
really blame the audience for that desire either. Its not the highly conscious,
totally instrumental, connivingly ideological scheme that some on the right
made it out to be. Its a needy hypothesis gone deep into the intellectual
preconscious, a torment over knowledge unknowable. Somewhere there probably
is a peasant woman who lived Menchus fictional life, more or less. We
dont have her book, her words, and probably if we did or could, theyd
be more morally complex, more empirically ambivalent, more reflecting the lived
contours of an actuality (suffering included) than the searingly unambiguous
jaccuse that some visions of the world require.
This is all similar
to when someone fabricates a hate crime on a campus, or exaggerates the modestly
offensive stupidity of a drunken student into the raving malevolence of Bull
Connor. There is an overdetermination here, an always-already knowledge, a neediness.
Of course some people are going to fabricate such crimes, following the logic
of a moral panic, a deep prior narrative, a chronicle of a deed foretold. Everyone
knows such crimes existand of course (this is important) they
do. But they are presumed to exist more than they exist, they are needed
to exist more than they exist, because our received narratives of racial and
sexual injustice tell us that institutional and cultural racism is the iceberg
below the sea, an iceberg signaled by the visible tip of extraordinary hate
crimes. Crime has an intentionality that is tangible, a concretization: from
it we infer the concrete intentionality of what is hidden from view.
So campuses mobilize
at every blackface, at every act of minor vandalism, at every hostile word or
mysterious epithet. The sign is given!
But no one knows
how to deal with subtle, pervasive forms of discrimination, and thats
partly because the discourses we have available to us about fighting discrimination
hold that it is equally bad regardless of its form or nature, that the harm
suffered by being misrepresented, slighted, overlooked, denigrated, condescended
to is one part of a seamless and unitary phenomenon that includes being lynched
and put in the back of the bus. And they are connected. They are part of a connected
history, but they are not the same. History contains continuity and rupture
The gleeful critics
of campus politics roll their eyes at this equivalence and take it as evidence
of the triviality of the academic left. I agree with conservative critics that
its a mistake to stress the continuities between the brutalities of Jim
Crow and the subtleties of unconscious stereotype and subtle exclusion in present
practice, but this is not to say that the latter is non-harmful, or just something
to shrug off. One thing I learned by being a white man living in a black country
is that it is an incredible psychic drain day after day to know that you are
marked as a stranger, as socially different, by mere fact of your physiognomy.
It exacts a real toll on you, and every subtle thing that people do to remind
you of it, without any malice, digs the psychic claws deeper and deeper.
This innocent wounding,
this cumulative stigma, is the core of the problem. Many look for, expect or
anticipate hate crimes on campus as the visible signs of a pervasive malevolence,
an illegitimate system of holding power, as an indication of a willfulness and
agency that is the illegitimate and contestable cause of the sense of alienation
and unease that some students, some faculty, some people have within white-majority
campuses. Those crimes come less often than predicted, and when they come, they
mostly dont seem to be the acts of Simon Legrees spiritual descendents,
deliberate acts rich in the intentionality of power, but accidents and oversights,
misspeech and crudity. Some see in these incidents the secret of racial conspiracy
revealed, rather like Eddie Murphys brilliant sketch on Saturday Night
Live where disguised as a white man, his character finds that white people
give each other free money and privilege once racial minorities are out of sight.
They overdeterminedly read a synecdoche, a single moment that contains a hidden
whole. And when the right number and type of crimes do not come, some make them
come, certain that even if the incident is false, the deeper truth is not.
Rigoberta Menchus real story is still interesting and powerful: a woman with some education, some status, some resources, some agency, in confrontation with a state and a social order, witness to terror and suffering. Its ambiguities are what could teach us, not its stridency. If we want to confront racial alienation on campuses, we will equally have to embrace its ambiguities, its subtleties, and recognize that it cannot be easily marched against, confronted, protested, forbidden by statute or code, expelled. It is in us, it is us, and the world has changed in the time we have all come into being and found ourselves where we do. It is not dogs and firehoses now, but small words and the pain of a thousand pinpricks. Until that is fully understood, there will be occasions where stressed, needy people tired of waiting for Godot try to summon into being the spirit whose ubiquity they have too busily prophesized.