Perry Glasser recalls the “Identity Wars” of the 1990s, when being a white male college professor put you at risk of be labeled an “oppressor.”
It was 1993, and I’d copped the only comfy armchair in the overheated faculty lounge. Framed in an oblong patch of sunlight that tumbled through a large window, I was dozing at the side of the room when my on-the-job nap was blown up by the Identity Wars.
The Identity Wars did not feature mortar attacks, but for many careers they were similarly devastating.
That day, we’d just returned from lunch to the annual pre-semester afternoon teaching workshop. Our Dean had the weird notion that our customers, who paid $40,000 per year for tuition, room, and board, were entitled to more than lectures prepared during the Korean War. I was expecting the usual chatter about effective questions, lesson plans, the delicate psyches of undergraduates, or using nearby Boston as a teaching resource.
♦♦♦
I was drowsy as a well-fed cat when our guest speaker singled me out as a member of an oppressor group—heterosexual white
males. An Hispanic woman who was a local community activist, she assured us that she meant nothing personal by singling me out, but I was a handy example of everything that was wrong with education.
She knew this from the basic information we’d put 3×5 index cards that morning: name, place of birth, and whatever subject we taught. She had read the cards while we’d dined on cold cuts and macaroni salad, egg salad, deviled ham salad, tuna salad, or just salad-salad. My name jumped out.
Oppressor.
We needed to throw my career on the scrapheap.
It was nothing personal. She was smiling.
I waited for the punch line.
It never came.
♦♦♦
In the 1990s, identity politics raged like prairie fire across American campuses. Everyone knew that white heterosexual males started wars, abused women and children, and were responsible for the sorry-ass state of western civilization—especially in the United States, that patriarchal, imperialist nation whose history of blood and current policies were nothing less than a design to preserve that white, heterosexual male hegemony.
“Sex” and “rape” were synonyms, according to cutting edge thinkers like Andrea Dworkin. The American standard of living was achieved through the sweat of exploited people, and the fact that legal and illegal migrants were risking their lives and spending their pitiable fortunes to get here on foot or by leaky boat was merely evidence of how white men had impoverished and corrupted the rest of the world.
Identity warriors fought with techniques mastered in prior decades by civil rights marchers, peace activists, and 1970s first wave feminists. Screw equality—the new cause, identity, would rectify historical injustice by re-allocating resources.
Reparations had to be made. Someone was going to pay, dammit.
For a mere $500, our guest speaker had consented to three hours of elevating our consciousness. She demanded that our courses be rethought to reflect diversity, and that, to deliver true diversity, we needed more teachers from marginalized groups. Everyone knew that students learned better from people who looked and sounded like themselves. The old style reliance on credentials—degrees, subject mastery, or life experience—was outmoded.
In the 1990s, the accomplished need not apply; the ambitious and wise positioned themselves as victims. Better to be a member of a marginalized group than cultivate a record of good work.
And everyone knew exactly who these marginalized groups were.
My colleagues nodded affirmation like bobble-head dolls. We taught at a micro-college, practically a summer camp for rich kids who earned degrees while hanging out, smoking quality dope, practicing promiscuity, and working through character disorders too complex for traditional schools.
For the kid who’d fall through the cracks at Big Name U., this ticket was worth every dime. But it also made our campus feel like an intellectual backwater. Enter the local community organizer, confronting us with the Great Issue of the Day. We were, however briefly, riding the waves in the mainstream. Yippee!
I had the good luck to be the creative writing professor, meaning that I spent my life at a seminar table with eager, admiring, eccentric, often funny and funky kids of indeterminate sexuality. (Any college professor who tells you that the job is arduous needs to be invited to occupy an office cube promptly at 8:30 am in June, July, and August.)
So, it wasn’t hard to understand why our local community activist was making a case for a new kind of education. If that education required new faculty job opportunities for less-than-qualified teachers, well, that was the price of correcting historical injustice. All we needed to do was persuade those dinosaurs like Glasser to get out of the way.
♦♦♦
At first, I was civil. This might be fun.
I asked how—given that I was a second-generation immigrant—my ancestors could be culpable for historical injustices that went back a hundred years?
Not the point, my inquisitor replied. “It is how you are perceived, and perception is the reality.” My colleagues nodded again. Here was wisdom. It had to be smart—it sounded like a Zen koan. Perception vs. Reality. Oh, wow, man! Profound.
Was our guest lecture aware, I asked, that I am a Jew? Did she know that the ashes of my daughter’s mother’s family had flown up the flues of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen? How, exactly, had those men, women, and children been oppressors?
“Jews are oppressors in many neighborhoods today,” she replied. “Try to stick to the present. The here-and-now is what matters.”
“But you’re making the historical case for reparations. Who gets to slice the pie and decide who has been marginalized and who was oppressed?”
She shook her head sadly. “You just don’t get it,” she said.
♦♦♦
That’s when I knew this wasn’t going to be fun. There it was: the toxic phrase that ended all debate. You just don’t get it. I was a blockhead, clinging to logic when the moment called for swift action. Anything I might say was suspect.
But I wasn’t yet done. Maybe it was the yellowish mayo in the tuna salad.
If we need to hire marginalized groups, I wanted to know, how should we determine what groups were underrepresented? Was the plan to query current faculty about who was gay? How many gays on staff would suffice?
Come to think of it, how many homosexual contacts qualified an individual to be, at least, bisexual? Does an incident at Cub Scout Camp count? Speaking of race, is a being a Jew a matter of race or religious practice?
There was some nervous laughter—there goes Glassbrain again.
“Men like you just refuse to get it. Students need to see people like themselves in positions of authority.”
Men like me? Did that index card mention I had spent the first decade of my teaching career in an inner city, all-girls public high school in New York, where I taught “marginalized” young women to read and write?
Her smile wobbled. “All New York white male ethnics are racists. Everyone knows that. You need to confront your inner racism and admit it. It will make you a better teacher.”
My inner racism? She not only spoke for whole communities, she read minds, too. And all for a few hundred bucks.
I wondered aloud if we could ask my former students if they agreed, especially the ones who were now doctors and lawyers and executives, the ones who’d stayed in school because their oppressor teacher made their education possible.
I was standing. I don’t remember getting up.
The Dean was mindful of my blood pressure problems. She suggested we all take a break. While the faculty crowded around a coffee urn and glommed stale pastry, I found someplace to splash my face in cold water.
I didn’t return to the faculty lounge that day.
September in New England makes for grand walking. The air was crisp; the leaves were just beginning to turn. I took in lungs full of clean air.
I may have won that skirmish, I think, but the Identity Wars are still fought with shrill vehemence. It has spread from campuses to high schools and boardrooms. Why judge a man as an individual when assigning him the attitudes of a broad, faceless group obviates inconvenient, messy exceptions?
Everyone knows that’s easier.
—Perry Glasser
—Perry Glasser is also a contributor to The Good Men Project: Real Stories from the Front Lines of Modern Manhood.
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About Perry Glasser
Vocalyze
As someone who went to school during the 90’s, this brings back a lot of memories. The whole PC identity wars of the time was just one of those regrettable things from the time that Gen X’er’s who lived through it all look back on with a certain degree of embarrassment. Right up there with the Macarena and Hootie and the Blowfish… And I say this a heterosexual male of Asian descent, so I suppose I’m 1 for 3 in the “Who’s More Oppressed” scoreboard.
My High School AND College were overrun with fully-paid up members of the PC cult, who went out of their way to tell us why we were oppressed or oppressors, sometimes in the same sentence. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses, but considerably more obnoxious. Especially the Womyns Studies Crowd…those you crossed the street to avoid, especially if you were guilty of being born with the Tools Of Oppression between your legs… (no joke, I actually heard someone refer to the male genitalia this way at a protest….)
Of course, looking back, I can only shake my head and laugh. The follies of youth….
Let me begin by saying that understanding Andrea Dworkin’s writing as sex = rape requires some serious misinterpretation and misreading and the rest of this article feels to me like a serious of misunderstandings fueled by defensiveness. Social justice and “identity politics” movements are not about making people in positions of privilege feel guilty. Are White men in the US benefiting from a system of oppression that reinforces socio-economic stratification? Yes. Are those benefits asked for? No. Do we still have a responsibility to do something about it? Absolutely. Working for justice is everyone’s responsibility and one of the major steps that we need to take in working towards a more socially just world is acknowledging the unearned and unasked for advantages that we often receive over others. I would strongly encourage Perry Glasser to take a calm breath and consider the overall message rather than jumping into defensiveness.
Great response. This essay sounds like a lot of self-defensiveness. I think there’s a level of uncomfortable honesty that we all need to confront to break through the PC politics and leave way for honest communication about reparations and solutions to these problems.
So the white man needs to be cut down a notch or three with the sword of justice. Yeah, defensiveness is way out of line then if that’s what you meant.
Perry, I think the facilitator of your workshop sounds like she may not have been the best person for the job. That kind of thing happens in every profession, as you know. Try this article. It’s actually by a white guy.
http://www.timwise.org/2010/07/reading-racism-right-to-left-reflections-on-a-powerful-word-and-its-applications/
I have to agree with Cliff – Mr. Glasser seems to have WAY oversimplified the arguments, the materials, and the concepts of identity politics. As someone who studied A LOT of that literature as a gender studies major at a major university in the mid-west I am quite familiar with the writings of many of the most prominent theorists from the past 40 years (even 70 years if you take into the Frankfurt School) – I am guessing Mr. Glasser may be less so since the only person he actually references is Dworkin and that is a bit of easy pickens given her strong provocative and rhetorical writing style. Some people definitely went too far with the whole “oppressor/oppressed” language and the confrontational approach – I sat through many of those discussions as the ONLY white heterosexual male in the room (similar to Mr. Glass.) I am far from someone who drank the kool aid but I also got a lot of insight and personal awareness from the discourse and the inquiry. Individuals who ignore the fact the we are all a part of a vast matrix of systems (Foucault) are pretending that the individual alone and focusing on that is all we need to do. That is a major part of the argument – many people benefit whether they want to or try to just as many are marginalized whether they try to or want to be. We need to be aware of that. Just as those who believe that all we are is passive victims of systems with no individual agency (Baudrillard and some of the other postmodernists) are forgetting the power of human agency and our ability to make a difference as individuals and groups. In the end I am a humanist and I believe in the power of the human being to triumph over any of life’s tragedies and injustices.
My guess is that Mr. Glasser was looking for a bunch of high fives from the readers of this online magazine but we are much more diverse than that. Thank god.
This was not an essay about Andrea Dworkin, but a memoir. What happened, happened. No argument or set of arguments is being made–no high fives being sought–no program or policy being suggested.
Dworkin wrote extensively; she was also known for assisting Canada with drafting anti-pornography laws.
“Only when manhood is dead – and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it – only then will we know what it is to be free.” — Andrea Dworkin
“Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.” — Andrea Dworkin
“Know thyself, if you are lucky enough to have a self that hasn’t been destroyed by rape in its many forms; and then, know the bastard on top of you.” –Andrea Dworkin
Sorry Prof. Glasser, but taking a few of her quotes out of context does not help your argument. Was Andrea Dworkin anti-pornography? Yes. Does that mean that she thinks that sex is the same thing as rape every single time? Heck no. You acknowledge that she wrote extensively and then you conveniently ignore the vast majority of her work. She carefully and meticulously analyzes the social context within which sex happens in our society and weighs the impact that context has on issues of power and consent. You aren’t doing anyone any good by misrepresenting her work.
As a male gay rights activist in Minneapolis during the 80′s and 90′s, I spent a good amount of time talking with straight and lesbian women about the indignities and inequities they endured in a male dominated society. This was not in an academic setting, this was just talking with friends and coworkers and other members of self help groups. These were always calm, rational discussions. I never felt stigmatized because of my gender. Never felt like I was being labeled the oppressor.
Then I went to a speech given by Andrea Dworkin. Within 10 minutes I realized that to her, I was just another privileged white male who must be castrated in order to be of any redeemable value. I was in a WTF daze from that point on.. didn’t really hear the rest of what she said.
Doesn’t really matter if she actually had a good message in that speech. If she could not deliver it without alienating the men who came to learn, then the message was wasted. Whenever I hear or see her name now, I instinctively want to shield my balls with my hands!
Perhaps the facilitator in Perry Glasser’s experience copied Andrea’s style of delivery.. shock and awe.
I would think that, as an academic, you might consider reading more into the “Identity Wars” before painting such an unforgiving portrait of them. Cliff and Dan seem to be more than capable of pointing you in the right direction. Additionally, I doubt all of your colleagues were as drone-like as you make them out to be. I understand that the nature of memoir writing lends itself towards some exaggeration for the sake of the story, but it is my opinion that you’re doing your readers a disservice by oversimplifying the whole movement. Other than that, however, it was a cool story, bro.