Williams, Patricia.
"Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC: Regrouping
in Singular Times." Harvard Law Review 104.2 (1990): 530-32.It is therefore telling to note the degree to which we as Americans celebrate simultaneously our unity as a nation and the Ellis Island tradition of our variety. In the drive to achieve the unity to which our national mythology aspires, we frequently suppress if not undo the richness of our diversity by reconceptualizing any manifestation of it as a kind of unAmerican disunity. I think we do this by consistently, if unconsciously, underestimating ourselves as a distinct national culture and even denying outright the possibility of our power as a consuming, assimilationist force. We tend to universalize the characteristics commonly, if romantically, attributed to middle-class America-individualism, self-interest, self-assertion-so that the very force of our desire to embrace one another becomes an impediment to the necessary recognition that "we" are not the world.
What is also troubling about this tendency is precisely the tendency to universalize individualism. In eliding singular and plural to create an abstract Uber-marketmensch, we diminish the notion of collectivity as a collection of various overlapping others in favor of a collective self-again, a plural singular-that is both condensed yet general, multiple yet monolithic, self-contained yet presumed representative.
Because the pluralism in our life and laws is so frequently unacknowledged and sometimes even suppressed, it is sometimes hard to see the extent to which we are constantly engaged in not merely discussions among equal individuals, but also complex power struggles of group against group. Recently, for example, I saw a television program in which commentators with important regionless male voices talked about the lack of educational opportunity for black children in inner-city schools. They cited statistics about dropout rates, drugs, crime, teacher apathy, lack of funding, inadequate facilities (particularly for math and science study), low expectations of civic officials and school administrators, and general conditions of hopelessness. At the end of this very depressing summary, the anchor turned to four young teenagers in the studio, all black, all excellent students in a special program designed to encourage inner-city black students with an interest in science. He asked: "We've just heard that black kids aren't very good in math and science; are you here to show us that that's a lie?" The students then proceeded to try to redeem themselves from the great group of the "not very good" by setting themselves apart as ambitious, dedicated, "different" in one sense, yet "just the same as" the majority of all other kids at the same time.
It was unbearable listening to these young people try to answer this question. It put them in an impossible double bind. On the one hand, the invisible norm was the "average" (achieving) white middle class ideal; although this was never articulated, this is what they had to prove themselves the same as. On the other hand, these were lower class kids who came from tough inner-city neighborhoods where very few of their friends could realistically entertain aspirations to become neurosurgeons or microbiologists. It was this community from which they were being cued to be different. Let me be clear: I am not faulting these young people's aspirations or goals. What concerns me is the way in which not just this commentator, but also society at large forces them and others like them to reconcile their successful status with a covert cultural standard. In a very insidious way, the commentator's question actually limited their alternatives, compromised their function as role models, and prompted explanations of their good fortune that tended to kill their sense of communal affiliation as the only way of permitting the truth of their individualism to remain intact. Although this sort of rhetoric is frequently wrapped in aspirations of racial neutrality, it in fact pits group against individual in a way that is not just racist but classist as well.