Piecework

One of the most obvious is also the most disheartening: Almost a hundred years after the last great immigration wave changed the face of American society, vast numbers of Americans — including, sadly, the best-educated — are again being taught to identify themselves with the qualifying adjectives of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender. The idea of the melting pot is dismissed as cultural genocide, replaced by a social worker’s version of predestination. American identities, state the clerics of the new dogma, are not shaped by will, choice, reason, intelligence, and desire but by membership in groups. They are not individuals but components of categories, those slots and pigeonholes beloved of sociologists, pollsters, and the U.S. Census Bureau. And such categories, they believe, are destiny.

The ferocious logic of the adjective insists that the individual take sides. To refuse is to betray the larger group, your own flesh and blood. In America now, it is always Us against Them and Them against Us. And to display its anger, its innocence, its righteousness, our side must be in conflict with their side. It’s not enough to be an American; you must despise, attack, diminish, and empty the guts of those millions of other Americans who are not like you. Every grave must be pried open by scholarship, every smashed bone waved in triumph like a relic, every ancient crime posted on the schoolhouse door.

The result is a society in apparently permanent, teeming, nerve-fraying conflict: blacks against whites; straights against gays, gays against priests, priests against abortionists; sun people against ice people; citizens against immigrants; Latinos against Anglos; people who work against those who don’t; town against gown; blacks against Jews; the orthodox against the reformers; cops against bad guys, lawyers against cops, Crips against Bloods. Good guys and bad guys. Oppressors and oppressed. White hats and black hats. And vicif* versa. Us against Them. Them against Us. And get outta my fuckin’ face.

But there are additional confusions. All the victimized ethnic categories contain men. And the feminist rhetoric of the Endgame insists that men are themselves a group of oppressors — brutal, insensitive, selfish, murderous. Catharine MacKinnon and others use the word men in the same generalized, blurry way that women is used. This astonishingly broad category — men — is defined all too easily by people who believe that the same state of victimhood is endured by the Wellesley graduate and the woman grinding corn in the hills of Chiapas, by Billie Holiday and Katharine Graham, by Jean Harris and Use Koch. The existentialist philosophers of my youth insisted that existence preceded essence, that you were born and then you forged your identity; the philosophers of gender and ethnicity insist that essence precedes existence.

The ideologues of gender don’t care much about making distinctions among men or women. Common sense and experience tell us that among the earth’s billions, there must be some women who are happy and free and others who are brutal and evil. Common sense and intelligence tell us there are millions of black Americans who are not trapped in lives of welfare, violence, illegitimacy. But common sense is in disrepute. The examination of healthy lives is too often dismissed as sentimentality or “anecdotal” gossip, unverifiable under the cold-eyed scrutiny of such exact sciences as sociology or anthropology. The Endgamers of race and gender will limit their investigations to their own kind, the victims. They will define the group by its pathologies and defeats, not its triumphs. Like all believers, they begin with the truth and find evidence to support it. They adhere to a faith, abstract and rigid, full of iron certainties, free of the century’s only useful lesson: doubt.

But doubt is unsettling. And the overriding educational goal these days is to make students — in particular, minority students — feel better about themselves. Unless they feel better, the argument goes, unless they acquire greater “self-esteem,” they can’t learn. The need to think better, with greater subtlety and lucidity, is seldom mentioned. And of course nobody — black, white, or Latino; middle-class or poor — should be forced to work very hard. Not at school. Not after school. Kids need time to watch television. They need time to hang out. They need time to work on their images.