“We can only make diversity real through a pointed interrogation of America’s past, warts and all,” said Dr. Manning Marable in Memorial Chapel Tuesday night.
Marable’s energetic address, which capped off the first day of classes, dealt with making multiculturalism work in both educational and everyday settings. He advocated the examination and reconstruction of America’s memory about itself.
“Many Americans now believe the myth that American democratic society has always been a so-called melting pot,” he said. “This view is not only historically inaccurate, it also fails to address [that] what constitutes diversity, ethnically or racially, has changed dramatically throughout the course of American history.”
Marable, who is the founding director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University, said that conflicting narratives complicate a multicultural American understanding.
“The master narrative, the story America likes to tell about itself, versus the subaltern narratives, the story the black, brown, and poor folk tell about America, creates different perceptions of the same historical reality,” he said.
Marable illustrated the racial perception divide by pointing to places considered American historical “hallowed ground.” While the site of JFK’s assassination is considered hallowed ground, he said, the assassination site of Malcolm X is not.
“Hallowed ground can be something very different to the white mainstream majority,” he said.
Marable criticized the 21st-century adoption of diversity as a “multicultural mantra” spoken by many but understood by few.
“Offices of student life and student activity groups throughout the United States now routinely fund thousands of celebrations promoting diversity,” he said. “Administrators in the private sector now routinely talk about ‘managing diversity.’ Yet there is crucial difference between the recognition of difference and the acknowledgement that the reality of difference has produced unequal outcomes…for citizens within the same U.S. society.”
In his writing, Marable has termed this surface endorsement of diversity as “corporate multiculturalism.”
“What’s corporate multiculturalism?” he asked. “Celebrate everybody, criticize no one. The Mickey D’s of multiculturalism, Big Mac multiculturalism. ‘Diversity is our greatest strength’ became the corporate mantra.”
Marable offered hope for the future, detailing his experiences during the black freedom struggle of the 1960s to show how action on the part of the oppressed can create results.
“As negroes boldly asserted themselves as never before, millions of white Americans were pressured to reexamine their racial attitudes,” he said. “Over time, most white Americans began to modify their language…[and] their treatment of blacks in the routines of daily life.”
He explained how the civil rights movement led to exponential increases in the enrollment rates of students of color in high schools and colleges from the 1970s on.
“In 1960, there were barely 200,000 African Americans enrolled in college,” he said. “By 1975, 666,000 African Americans between the ages of 18-24 were enrolled in college, one out of every five blacks in that age group.”
Marable said that affirmative action programs played a vital role in increasing student of color matriculation, but students of color have suffered since such programs came under attack in the 1990s.
“There was a dedicated conservative effort, by conservatives, to literally turn this force of civil rights upside down,” he said. “Their objective was, in effect, to rewrite America’s public memory about politics of difference. Dr. Martin Luther King’s image, even his words from his mouth, were cynically manipulated to attack affirmative action.”
Marable also faulted Democrats who had long defended affirmative action for waffling under the conservative onslaught, as well as President Bill Clinton.
“Clinton’s abject failure to frame the issue of affirmative action around issues of U.S. racial history, and the systematic exclusion of black Americans from access to opportunity […] would prove disastrous,” he said.
In a lively question and answer segment following his speech, Marable offered responses to criticism of diversity here at “Diversity University.”
One audience member asked how students of color should cope with the use of racial epithets in the classroom, racist graffiti, and the nagging perception that they are at Wesleyan because of their skin color, not their minds.
“I wish we had the commitment [to diversity] at Columbia that Wesleyan has—we don’t, and I’m not saying this to make you feel better,” he said. “The dilemma you have is that despite a commitment to minority faculty and need blind admissions…you’re still in the United States, you’re still gonna get racial epithets, you’re still gonna get faculty with backwards views. If I spent my life being angry about this crap, I would never get anything done.”
Those in attendance appreciated Marable’s knowledge and candor.
“He was the first truly historical figure I have ever heard speak,” said Maya Odim ’10. “It sounds completely cliché, but I feel like going out there and organizing a revolution.”
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