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Racing for Innocence

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.................................................................................ixIntroduction: Telling Stories About Race in an Era of Colorblindness............................11 Innocence and Injury: The Politics of Cultural Memory in Print News Media.....................192 Filming Racial Progress: The Transformation of White Male Innocence...........................423 Racing for Innocence: Stories of Disavowal and Exclusion......................................644 Stand by Your Man: Women Lawyers and Affirmative Action.......................................845 Small Talk: A Short Story.....................................................................118Commentary: Ambivalent Racism...................................................................131Conclusion: Still Racing for Innocence..........................................................137Appendix A: Reflections on Methodology..........................................................153Appendix B: Hollywood Films.....................................................................167Notes...........................................................................................169Bibliography....................................................................................205Index...........................................................................................227

Chapter One

The Politics of Cultural Memory in Print News Media

In the mid-1970s, Allan Bakke, a white applicant, was twice denied admission to the School of Medicine at the University of California, Davis, and subsequently filed a discrimination lawsuit on the basis of race. At the time, the School of Medicine had "set aside" 16 of its 100 slots for racial and ethnic minorities, and Bakke claimed that "less qualified minorities" were admitted over him. In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bakke's favor in a sharply divided decision. Five of the nine Justices found that the UC Davis School of Medicine had violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution by denying access to whites "solely because of their race." In the Court's ruling, the quota system was considered unconstitutional, because there was no history of discrimination at UC Davis that required a remedy; the School of Medicine, which was established in 1968, was only ten years old at the time.

The Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case was of enormous significance in bringing to national attention a number of terms and legal principles, such as "reverse discrimination," "racial quotas," and "strict scrutiny," which reverberated through other rulings and court decisions in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to its legal import, the Bakke decision also created a "new class of victims" in American culture. While the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs of the 1960s all gave greater public currency to narratives emphasizing the historical legacy of discrimination for people of color and white women, they also placed the onus of responsibility on the federal government for restoring civil rights to victims. In adopting the logic of this narrative by treating white men as victims and calling for relief (the Court ordered that Bakke, age 37, be admitted to the medical school), the Supreme Court case also introduced what I refer to throughout this chapter as "the innocent white male."

Innocence in this social and historical context means innocent of prejudice or racism. The rhetorical use of innocence appears several times in Justice Powell's opinion in reference to Allan Bakke. He writes, for example, "[T]here is a measure of inequity in forcing innocent persons in the respondent's position [Bakke] to bear the burdens of redressing grievances not of their making" (emphasis added). In other words, Powell maintains that it is unfair that Bakke, as a white man, should bear the "burdens" of a remedial policy, such as affirmative action, that aims to correct the legacy of historical discrimination against people of color because he, as an individual, is not complicit in that history. In this interpretation, Bakke is not guilty of racism, he is innocent.

For legal scholar Thomas Ross, the notion of white innocence, which he defines as "the insistence on the ... absence of responsibility of the contemporary white person," has a long history in legal reasoning. Because innocence is also linked to cultural notions of innocence and defilement as well as white and black, he maintains that the theme of white innocence in this legal rhetoric also draws its power from these metaphors. Put another way, "whiteness" evokes innocence and purity; conversely, "blackness" connotes guilt and defilement. Innocence, then, is not only an important element of legal rhetoric, but also a powerful ideological image in American culture. Indeed, stories of innocence have long been part of the mythology about America's heritage. In academic American studies, the theme of innocence is central to early historiography that depicts America as "Edenic," an exceptional nation unspoiled by European class hierarchies and aristocratic excess.

This chapter charts tropes of white male innocence from the late 1980s through the 1990s in the backlash against affirmative action by focusing is on print news media as a form of cultural memory. This form of collective remembering is important for several reasons. First, in bringing the issue to national attention, the press played an important role in shaping the meaning of affirmative action. As scholars have long recognized, the media is a powerful institution in framing how debates about social policy such as affirmative action are likely to be understood by the general public. This is not to say that people uncritically accept whatever they read in newspapers, but rather to underscore the role such sources play in providing stories that help the general public make sense of particular issues and the key players, arguments, and political stakes surrounding them. In doing so, the media "facilitates" people's understanding of affirmative action by supplying the language, such as special terminology, legal terms and concepts, and rhetoric, that revolve around the debate.

As this chapter demonstrates, journalistic conventions and practices helped to frame the trope of white male innocence. In "making news," journalists and their editors are expected to construct attention-grabbing headlines and lead paragraphs in their stories to garner readers' attention—a rhetorical practice that seldom reflects the complexity of positions on affirmative action—thereby guaranteeing profits for their news organizations. In addition, ethically, journalists are expected to write news stories based on the principle of "fair and balanced reporting," meaning that they are required to be objective by presenting two sides to any story.

As my close reading of these accounts shows, narratives of white male innocence in this medium became predominant in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Although other kinds of narratives about people of color and white women existed during this period, their numbers were far fewer. As media scholar Marita Sturken observes, cultural memories about historical events tell us...