A less persuasive argument [for the creation of ethnic and race studies programs at universities] is rooted in the psychologistic language of identity politics. The demand to see oneself in the text easily reduces to narcissistically anti-intellectual twaddle, as anyone who has encountered it as a professor is aware. However, despite movement opponents’ tut-tutting that is represents a new barbarianism, this demand is a direct outgrowth of two generations of mainstream race relations scholarship that frames discussion of racial stratification in individual and attitudinal terms–driven by a language of sensitivity and tolerance–rather than systemic terms of structured inequality…
The identity politics frame appeals also because it is a vehicle for a bourgeois militancy that doesn’t require critical intellectual engagement or, for example, rethinking one’s ambition to become a rich investment banker after graduation. Indeed, this frame fits nicely with a corporate multiculturalism by providing a diverse professional and middle management workforce with a shared set of thin, curriculum-based symbols of group “cultures,” an essentialist checklist enabling coworkers both to imagine their own uniqueness and to mediate interaction through common rituals of “respect.”…
For example, increasing minority faculty representation usually is held to serve several distinct purposes besides democratizing access to skilled positions in the academic workplace, which is nonetheless an adequate justification in its own right. Diversifying the character of the faculty can broaden the university’s intellectual horizons by bringing into its center perspectives and experiences drawn from or identifying with different populations; this applies to the discrete disciplines as well as the university community at large. Doing so is also thought to provide role models for minority students and to make the campus seem less alien to them. Because fellow “X”s are most likely to study the “X”, recruitment of minority faculty is a reasonable way to pursue expanding the curriculum in the desired areas.
There are instances where this logic breaks down, and some of those become anecdotal grist for anti-affirmative action or anti-p.c. horror tales of reverse discrimination and academic injustice. Occasionally, a superior non-“X” scholar who works on the “X” will lose out in a job search to an “X” competitor of lesser talent; sometimes the non-“X” loser’s work even better advances the larger progressive intellectual agenda of “X studies. Some such cases stem from racist bad faith; getting an “X” on the faculty roster and into the departmental photo substitutes for taking seriously the intellectual imperatives of “X” studies, skirts meeting the implicit challenge to think carefully about unfamiliar stuff and in new ways about familiar study…
A debate that presumes, on the one side, that hiring “X” faculty and strengthening “X” studies are identical, that the former exhausts the program of the latter, and, on the other, that concerns with expanding curriculum and refocusing the boundaries of scholarship discourses threaten to subvert the intersubjective basis of academic knowledge is wrong-headed and worse than unhelpful. It reproduces the most cartoonish op-ed page puffery, and it misses entirely what is at stake in the effort to secure spaces for what is sometimes derisively called oppression studies.”
Adolph Reed, Class Notes, 177-178