Williams, Patricia.
"Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC:
Regrouping
in Singular Times." Harvard Law Review 104.2 (1990):
545-546.The majority opinion in Metro Broadcasting marks an important step toward a recognition of multiculturalism and of the need to take active steps to nurture such diversity. If the holding in this case does not guarantee that minority owners will change programming in any constructive way, it does increase the likelihood. Although the dissenters implicitly insisted on a guarantee that there be some relation, a necessary connection, such a strict guarantee can never be gained without expense to the freedoms provided by the first amendment. Even diversity of employment at other levels than ownership is largely at the will and whimsy of those owners. If cultural diversity is, as even the dissenters acknowledge, an acceptable social goal, then alternative creative means for its encouragement must be employed. That relation is fostered by making more frequent and enhancing the opportunities for minority owners and producers, who are more likely to hire minority writers, sponsor programs designed to serve the needs and interests of minority communities, and, perhaps most importantly, bring multiculturalism to mainstream programming.
Beyond the limited context of broadcasting, what I hope will be enduring about this opinion is the respect it gives to these pronounced social recognitions of the desirability of diversity in all aspects of our economy and of multiculturalism in our lives. A (probably too) concrete illustration may indicate the reconceptualization of equality that is so urgently needed. Imagine a glass half full (or half empty) of blue marbles. Their very hard-edged, discrete, yet identical nature makes it possible for the community of blue marbles to say to one another with perfect consistency both "we are all the same" and, if a few roll away and are lost in a sidewalk grate, "that's just their experience, fate, choice, bad luck." If, on the other hand, one imagines a glass full of soap-bubbles, with shifting permeable boundaries, expanding and contracting in size like a living organism, then it is not possible for the collective bubbles to describe themselves as "all the same." Furthermore, if one of the bubbles bursts, it cannot be isolated as a singular phenomenon. It will be felt as a tremor, a realignment, a reclustering among all.
Marbles and soap-bubbles are my crude way of elucidating competing conceptions of how to guarantee what we call "equal opportunity." One conception envisions that all citizens are equal, with very little variation from life to life or from lifetime to lifetime; even when there is differentiation among some, the remainder are not implicated in any necessary way. The other conception holds that no one of us is the same and that although we can be grouped according to our similarities, difference and similarity are not exclusive categories but are instead continually evolving. Equal opportunity is not only about assuming the circumstances of hypothetically indistinguishable individuals, but also about accommodating the living, shifting fortunes of those who are very differently situated. What happens to one may be the repercussive history that repeats itself in the futures of us all.