Gov. Chris Christie made a broad stroke for diversity on New Jersey’s Supreme Court on Monday, nominating one man who would be the first openly gay justice, and another who would be the first Asian and first immigrant to serve.
For the moment, I am going to skip over the fact that I'm pretty sure they meant a "bold strike for diversity." Perhaps the preposterousness of a statement linking Christie with progressivism (which will become clear soon enough) scrambled the language centers in their brains over at the NYT. Instead, I would like to focus on the odd structure of this article--an elaborated version of the story circulating at a variety of newspapers, blogs, and online magazines. The official story (pre-packaged, it seems, by the identical language of the news outlets) is that Governor Christie is heroically leading the charge to diversify the New Jersey Supreme Court. The fact that he was, in fact, responsible for the whitening of the Court is buried and camouflaged in the currently unchallenged story of triumph. So, too, is the fact that his actions are a clever, subversive response to Democrats in the State Senate who implored (be careful what you ask for) that Christie "appoint a racially diverse court that looks like the state of New Jersey." The fact that this "diversity" will actually have terrible consequences for the diverse is drowned out by the imperative to celebrate. While it is certainly possible Christie's "firsts" may pull their version of "Clarence Thomas's First Day" as envisioned by In Living Color, I don't intend to hold my breath.
Because the language of diversity and inclusion has taken over the language of justice, equality, and reparation in a weakened Democratic party, "liberals" have no response to Christie's move. It's diverse. It's inclusive. It's just that the gay/immigrant/multiracial symbolism covers a multitude of sins....
Posts will be fewer and farther between for another month or so as I venture into the job market incognegro. That's right: your friendly blackademic is applying primarily for jobs that are not marked "colored only." This is not an entirely conscious choice; this year, there are few positions in African-American Literature or History before 1865. And, though I have a chapter that deals with Cherokee audiences of Shakespeare, I am not a specialist in Native American history and culture.
However, there are Shakespeare, Early American Literature, and 18th Century British Literature positions galore. I have always wanted for the consideration of those forces that shape the distribution of property and pleasure (race, gender, and sexuality among them) to be central to academic study rather than peripheral and subordinate. We shall see if my applications--which speak to those areas but do not announce where I sit in them--are appealing.
Have we come a long way, baby? Would my being hired without announcing my blackness be a sign of postracial utopia? Or does the success of critical race approaches in the academy have unintended negative consequences? Often, minority scholars celebrate not having to study their own identity group as progress. But the more meaningful victory, I think, will be when such study is neither disallowed nor deemed mere partisan advocacy, a dead-end avenue that never opens onto the "big issues."
This thought brings me to the language of class, in its Marxist and populist incarnations--both of which have been reactivated by Occupy Wall Street and its galvanizing slogan, We are the 99%. Two caveats before I begin: first, I am tremendously supportive of the OWS protest. Their courage to be there and to stay give me hope that a new social contract might be negotiated. What I say below is an attempt to help provide a different way of looking at the old "identity politics is tearing our movement apart" conundrum. My second caveat relates to that: this is an early draft, a work in progress that I will continue to edit and revise.
