The Closing of the American Mind, Part Three

Race and the university

Sep 01, 2023

Cornell University students emerging from Willard Straight Hall, ending the takeover of the building, April 19, 1969

This is my third commentary on Allan Bloom’s seminal 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. I have maintained that Bloom was right in stressing the importance of liberal education in the construction of a democratic society, but that the canon of study must include the speeches and writings of the exceptional leaders of the people’s revolutions of the world during the last 100 years, and the intellectuals organically tied to them (“The Closing of the American Mind: Liberal education and the function of the university in a democracy,” August 29, 2023). And I have maintained that Bloom was right in rejecting the cynical belief in the relativity of truth, because of its nefarious consequences for democracy, but that he offered no developed solution to the problem. I maintain that the leaders of the people’s revolutions have shown in practice the solution, in that they have demonstrated the possibility of a worldwide consensus with respect to moral principles and fundamental historical facts, constructed on the basis of a dialogue across civilizations (“The Closing of the American Mind, Part Two: Seeking truth in the coming post-post-truth era,” August 30, 2023).

In today’s commentary, I discuss Bloom’s reflections in The Closing of the American Mind on the issue of race, which has become a theme of uncivil polemics since his unfortunate premature death in 1992 at the age of 62. I find Bloom’s comments on the theme, which many would label “conservative,” to be characterized by a certain level of common-sense intelligence.

The loss of national purpose

Bloom sees a sharp ideological difference in the African-American movement before and after 1965. In accordance with convention, he refers to the pre-1965 movement as the civil rights movement, and the post-1965 era as the black power movement. Bloom stresses that the civil rights leaders relied on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to accuse white society of acting in contradiction with its most sacred principles. With this frame of reference, the civil rights movement sought to pressure and influence the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government. In contrast, the black power movement viewed the Constitutional tradition as corrupt and as constructed in defense of slavery. It stressed black identity and power, not the universal rights of blacks as human beings.

Bloom maintains that the black separatist rejection of the American constitutional tradition was accompanied by other critiques of American constitutionalism from a Marxist orientated perspective as well as by defenders of the U.S. South. As a result, the consensus of the American political tradition—based on a narrative of unbroken progress toward freedom, equality, and increased democracy—was destroyed. The American political consensus had been unique in the Western world, Bloom notes, very different from Europe, where influential men included defenders of monarchy and aristocracy. However, the eclipse of the American democratic narrative was not accompanied by the rise of a unifying alternative perspective. The result was that the nation was left without direction or purpose. Parents no longer had, Bloom maintained, something to give their children in the way of a vision of the world.

In my view, Bloom overstates the role of a few books, which were not widely read, in undermining the American democratic narrative; and he understates the role of lived experience. When I entered the state university in 1965, my cohorts from non-elite public and Catholic high schools had internalized, nearly universally, the American democratic narrative. But in the late 1960s, events provoked a shocking realization that the narrative was untrue in its fundamentals. To understand the youth movement of the late 1960s, you have to appreciate the impact of the sudden realization that our teachers and parents had lied to us about who and what America was. First, there was the Vietnam War, which inspired some of us to study something of the history of Indochina, through which we learned that the government’s portrayal of the conflict—involving a democratic nation defending the world from the communist aggression—did not mention fundamental historical facts, such as the roots of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front in the struggle against French colonial domination, a struggled that originated in the 1890s. And the second event was the civil rights and black power movements, which challenged the widespread assumption that the American power elite was committed to step-by-step improvements in respect for black rights.

The turn in the black movement toward black power also was rooted in lived experiences. The major early proponents of black power had been civil rights workers in the South in the early 1960s, and they discovered that the federal government and white allies of the civil rights movement were unreliable allies, letting the movement down in critical moments, not wanting to offend the prevailing opinion in the white South at that time. These dynamics constituted the experiential basis for the turn to black separatism and black power.

Bloom is right, however, in observing that no alternative perspective emerged. Black and white youth were disconnected in ideology from older black and white intellectuals and leaders. They lacked the political maturity necessary for forging an alternative unifying narrative for the nation that would have wide appeal among the diverse sectors of the people. The nation fell into division and lack of purpose and meaning, beginning in the late 1960s and deepening with each passing decade, except for fleeting moments when an external enemy could be constructed.

On white attitudes

Bloom describes with accuracy and insight the prevailing practical egalitarianism of university students in the 1980s, who formed friendship relations among themselves without regard for religion, nationality, family status, or money. But, as he correctly observed, there was an important exception, namely, the relations between black and white students. “White and black students do not in general become real friends with one another. Here the gulf of difference proved unbridgeable. The forgetting of race in the university . . . has not occurred.” He further writes:

“The programmatic brotherhood of the sixties did not culminate in integration but veered off toward black separation. White students feel uncomfortable about this and do not like to talk about it. This is not the way things are supposed to be. It does not fit their prevailing view that human beings are all pretty much alike, and that friendship is another aspect of equal opportunity. They pretend not to notice the segregated tables in dining halls where no white student would comfortably sit down. This is only one of the more visible aspects of a prevailing segregation in the real life of universities—which includes separation in housing and in areas of study, particularly noticeable in the paucity of blacks in theoretical sciences and humanities. . .. There are exceptions, perfectly integrated black students, but they are rare and in a difficult position.”

Bloom maintains that the situation was not the fault of white students, who adjusted to a new era of tolerance with respect to religion and nationality, including Asian nationalities; adapted to a redefinition of women’s roles; and were eager to prove their liberal credentials with respect to race. White students by and large accepted affirmative action as a temporary measure, even though it went against the long-standing view that equal rights are color blind.

I am in agreement with what Bloom says about the comportment of white students. Indeed, their easy accommodation with a new attitude was remarkable, given the prevailing racial attitudes of the 1950s and the early 1960s. I also would say, however, that I perceived a certain superficiality to the adaptation of white students, in that nearly none of them undertook anything approaching a study of African-American history and literature, as a foundation for expanding their own horizons, which perhaps could have provided the basis for more meaningful interracial friendships. In my writing of that time, I referred to the phenomenon as a form of ethnocentrism or subtle racism, which I defined as clearly different from old-fashioned blatant racism. And I recognized that ethnocentrism is a universal human tendency, for in the normal course of affairs, individuals are not going to be driven to understand the history and culture of another ethnic group or nation. Mutual respect, even though based in superficiality, is the most that can be normally expected.

On black separatism

Bloom criticizes the black turn to racial separation. He noted that the black move toward racial consciousness occurred precisely at a time in which whites were abandoning their racial consciousness, and anthropologists would soon identify skin color as the least important of human differences, far less profound than differences in religion, culture, or gender. Moreover, Bloom maintains that, in spite of a professed interest in black culture, black students were fully participating in the common culture, with the same goals and tastes as everyone else, but doing so separately. Bloom maintained that there was no compelling political or cultural justification for separatism in that historic moment when the ideal of a common humanity was emerging in the nation and the world.

There is some truth in what Bloom is saying here, confirmed in my own experiences. In the early 1970s, I had been included in a black teaching and research center that was forging a profound and liberating colonial analysis of the modern world from a black perspective. But there was insufficient further development of scholarship of this kind during the 1970s and 1980s. Not enough attention was paid to the formulation of an African-American critique of American imperialism, which could have developed an American version of what had been occurring politically and intellectually in the nations of the Third World, implying a critique of the neocolonial world-system. The discourse of many black activists was characterized by a superficial, ethnocentric, and anti-racist rhetoric that had little appeal in some social sectors. The Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns, with their concepts of political empowerment through a Rainbow Coalition and a foreign policy of North-South cooperation, sought to correct this shortcoming, but the Jackson phenomenon could not be sustained as a long-term social movement.

However, it seems to me that Bloom is overly troubled by black separatism, not seeing that separatism in and of itself is not a problem, as Bloom himself briefly acknowledges when he writes that “it is the right of any part of the large community in a pluralistic society to separate itself.” I would say that the problem was that black leadership for the most part did not formulate a vision of a separate black community in a nation characterized by cultural pluralism, including indigenous nations, Latino communities, white ethnic groups, and white southerners, all with various levels of internal cultural and ideological integration. A cultural pluralism within a political and administrative unity and ideological consensus defined by the founding principles of the American Republic and the American Constitution, itself an evolving document through constitutional amendments. In the case of relatively large urban black communities, the notion of local community control, especially with respect to primary and secondary school education as well as the police and criminal justice institutions, could have been a central orientation of a project of black community development in the post-1965 era, when political and civil rights were for the most part respected in practice. This would have been consistent with the proposals of Malcolm X, who took as given the de facto residential segregation of the black community, as he called for black control of the economic, political, and social institutions of the black community.

On affirmative action

Bloom was deeply troubled by affirmative action and its supposed implication that black students were less qualified than other students. He writes that at Cornell University in 1967, where he was teaching, there were many more black students on campus, and to accomplish this, “standards of admission had silently and drastically been altered.” He writes that “Cornell now had a large number of students who were manifestly unqualified and unprepared, and therefore it faced an inevitable choice: fail most of them or pass them without their having learned.” The first option was impossible, and the second had long-term negative consequences.

This situation, Bloom reports, led to a black attack on the academic disciplines being taught in the universities. They were not teaching truth, it was alleged, but myths necessary to support the system of domination. Black students do not measure up academically, it was said, because they are being forced to imitate white culture. This was the justification, Bloom maintained, behind the practical solution: the establishment of black studies, where black students would have their own faculty and curriculum, institutionally a part of the university, but living in its shadows. Many blacks, Bloom implies, had limited access to studies that pertained to universal human knowledge.

Bloom maintains that affirmative action, therefore, has institutionalized a situation in which “the average black student’s achievements do not equal those of the average white student in the good universities, and everybody knows it.” The university degrees of black students are tainted; and employers view them with suspicion.

Black students, Bloom notes, hate the consequences of their preferential treatment. “They believed that everyone doubts their merit, their capacity for equal achievement. . .. Those who are good students fear that they are equated with those that are not, that their hard-won credentials are not credible.” He writes that “affirmative action (quotas), at least in universities, is the source of what I fear is a long-term deterioration of the relations between the races in America.”

This unfortunate situation, Bloom makes clear, “has been chosen by black leadership.” And in this he is correct. Affirmative action has been a persistent demand of black leaders for decades, justified on the grounds of compensation for past discrimination and on alleged persistent white racism. And this persistence in demanding affirmative action has occurred in spite of the fact that its benefits are mixed even for its beneficiaries, and in spite of the fact that its beneficiaries are not primarily lower-class blacks, who in general are those most in need of support.

In 1967, Cornell University confronted a situation of disproportionate levels of poverty in black society, as a legacy of decades of discrimination, with resulting lower levels of preparation for admission to elite universities. Cornell decided to address the situation through idealistic political action, ignoring the real possibilities inherent in actual conditions.

But a more mature political decision could have been taken by Cornell and by the nation in the late 1960s. Involving a long-term economic and political investment in the socioeconomic development of the black community, as indicated above, so that black children and youth would step-by-step acquire in proportionate numbers the credentials and capacities. Instead, Cornell tried to impose the solution before the conditions permitted it. It was an idealist error, overshooting the possibilities allowed by existing real conditions. Such idealist errors are common in social change movements, because of the desire of movement leaders to take decisive steps. But in mature social movements, the idealist errors are identified, and a new direction is initiated.

The interests of the black middle class

Alongside the immaturity of the movements for social change, there has been the added problem that middle-class blacks since 1965 have demonstrated limited interest in improving the socioeconomic level of the black poor or developing the black community in a manner that would expand opportunities for poor blacks. With less racial restrictions in housing in the late 1960s, many blacks moved out of the traditional racially segregated black community, establishing urban black middle-class enclaves, a phenomenon that the black sociologist William J. Wilson called the outmigration of the black middle class, with nefarious consequences for the poorest sections of the black community. Meanwhile, middle class blacks pushed for issues that were important for them, such as preferential treatment in education and employment and regulation of police conduct. In addition, according to some black conservatives, the black middle class has an interest in keeping the black poor in conditions of poverty, because employment in governmental and non-governmental organizations that provide limited services to the black poor is an important source of good-paying jobs for the black middle class.

In the three decades since Professor Bloom departed from this life, black activists have resorted to post-modern constructions, involving deliberate manipulations of empirical evidence and deliberate anti-empirical constructions of history, in order to preserve policies of preferential treatment for blacks, which are primarily of benefit to the black middle class, in a context shaped by increased middle class insecurity in the nation as a whole. The notions of “systemic racism” and “white privilege,” as well as the idea that the nation was established in 1619, are examples of post-modern constructions, integral to an ideology that defends the particular interests of the black middle class, without regard for the needs and interests of other social sectors of the nation, including the black lower class.

Wither the social movement and scholarship tied to it?

Writing twenty years after the conflict at Cornell, Bloom summarizes the curricular demands put forth by Cornell students in the 1969 rebellion. They included: ceasing the use of Western standards for judging the efficiency of African economic development; writing the history of the world and the United States in a form that includes structures of domination and exploitation; describing the government of Vietnam as nationalist rather that as an agent of the Soviet Union; and avoiding Cold War anti-communism. In general, support of elitist, sexist, and racist conceptions should be avoided in scholarly work, it was demanded. The main activity of the students in rebellion, Bloom reports, was the identification of heretics who violated the tenets of the student-proposed curricular reform, vilifying them, disrupting their classes, calling for their dismissal, and in some cases, physically threatening them.

I have long been in sympathy with the broad curricular reforms issued by the student rebellion. However, such reforms cannot be implemented by political decree; they can only be implemented through the development of scholarship that demonstrates the truth of the alternative worldview. When there is a paradigm shift, the alternative scholarship has to be developed, and professors and researchers immersed in it have to be formed and have to form themselves. This cannot be done overnight. And rather than uncivil attacks on perceived heretics, the rebels should have been committing themselves to a life-long mission of developing the alternative scholarship, continually struggling to move the university toward a step-by-step institutional support of the new paradigm.

The student rebels of the late 1960s, at Cornell and elsewhere, displayed immaturity in demanding instant changes through mob rule. And they subsequently proved themselves to be lacking in the commitment and discipline necessary for the long-term struggle. In the long term, they failed to develop an intellectual movement that would struggle to establish an institutional base for an alternative scholarship, which could have been a politically important critical voice when the nation’s power elite turned to neoliberalism in 1980, to neoconservatism and aggressive imperialism in 2001, and to unconventional wars against the vanguard nations constructing an alternative world order in 2014.

Knowledge, ideology, and real socialism in our times

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