Affirmative Inaction
If you're waiting for America to actually start LOVING you? Well, it might be a long wait.
It started, shamefully enough, with Joy Behar who, if you hadn’t known, hosts a show called “The View”. An idyll of early morning television designed very possibly by, and for, women of a certain age it, on occasion, manages to ride the news adjacency cycle and catch the eye and the ear of people who believe stand-up comedians (Behar herself, and Whoopi Goldberg) might have something worthwhile to say about the news.
In this instance it was a global takedown of where the smallest penises are, sponsored, I believe, by some condom company. Prefixed by a proviso, usually saved for now totally uncomfortable men, that size does not matter, they then launched into a chuckle-bound rundown of places where the tiny penises roam. The year this aired it was Germany and Japan and, well, who can remember the rest? Because right there, right in front of our very eyes and ears, were two thirds of the Axis Powers from World War 2. (We’ll get to Italy later.)
Which is worthy some consideration if you’ll allow yourself such a luxury. Because even casual observers will have noted that there was always something deeply sexual about Nazi ideology. Very likely the first time in history that Jewishness was understood as a biological “problem”, Nazi propaganda always underscored menacing Jews sporting what anthropologists would call “the copulatory gaze” or what Dean Martin had called “the woo look in your eye.”
Luring various elements of German womanhood with candy, cash and other blandishments, the thick-lipped, large-nosed Jews (as featured in posters and in caricature) were understood to be a blood menace. And unless you’re a virgin birther you understand as it was laid out: a very real sexual concern.
“Besides, what about the Italians? Where were they on the penis listing?” Italians were notably absent on the global penis list. Italians were also very bad fascists.
The Japanese? Well, they didn’t call it “The Rape of Nanking” because Tojo’s soldiers showed up with flowers. In six weeks in 1937, 40,000 to 300,000 people were killed by those non-flower bearing Japanese soldiers with, according to estimates, over 80,000 rapes. Japanese scholars downplay this and along with the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, claim that there were only 20,000 rapes. Only.
And lest it’d be guessed that this is just what happens over there, in 2017 white guys were gallivanting through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia screaming “Jews will not replace us.”
Which puts a little more skin on whatever just happened this week with the Supreme Court shutting down Affirmative Action. Initially American universities, in an attempt to keep out Jewish students and thereby preserve the “essential character” (read: white) of their universities considered structuring acceptances along the lines of the “total” student.
Where, previously, it was just about grades, Jews that excelled were fucking up the whole program. Very specifically, Jews were replacing the “us” that was laying claim to America back then. So adjustments were made.
Adjustments that had been in place for Black Americans for awhile. The extirpation of Blacks from public life in America, an essential feature of the antebellum South, has been an enduring curiosity. Until you start to think of how most Africans showed up to the United States, and here the chase can be cut for you: naked. They showed up naked.
They showed up naked from a country that appeared nowhere on Joy Behar’s list and yes, if you are guessing that I am talking about penis size, you have guessed correctly. Laugh all you like, this is something no one will be honest about but which can be tracked from miscegenation laws to the 1960’s flipout over swimming pools and who got to use them. Swimming pools also being places where very little clothing is typically worn.
The dark sexual panic that drove Nazi antisemitism and Japanese depredations in China, was aggressively in evidence in American race issues. Reckless eyeballing (the aforementioned copulatory gaze), The Birth of a Nation, the numbers of victims of lynching who were also castrated. It was all there. And yet…
It’s hard to convince those who have benefited from an un-level playing field that they don’t deserve to do so. Key word: deserve.
“You sound like Alex Jones!,” said a right-leaning detractor. “Besides, what about the Italians? Where were they on the penis listing?” Italians were notably absent on the global penis list. Italians were also very bad fascists. Mussolini himself had to be cajoled into embracing antisemitism and only after some horsetrading and the saving of his ass the first time, did he manage to accede to German requests for rounding up Jews.
“There’s something to this though.” The speaker was a professor from Brown University who we were interviewing during the existence of the benighted OZY. She didn’t laugh and signed off on an article that I had written where I laid this out and roped in North Korea, known also for being bellicose and sporting smallish penises, and Donald Trump, whose campaign kicked off with his assurances that his penis was not small.
Which brings us right back around to Affirmative Action. While the African American Ward Connerly was the first to lead this charge in the California university system his take was curious. He had gone on to say that he didn’t want there to be any questions about how and why Black students came to be on any campus throughout the UC system.
Which, curiously, never seemed to be a concern for legacy acceptances, athletic scholarship workarounds, and most recently in the Varsity Blues scandal. It’s hard to convince those who have benefited from an un-level playing field that they don’t deserve to do so. Key word: deserve.
It’s even harder to convince them that those that they deem undeserving would get anywhere near the same considerations. Of course when Proposition 209 was passed, ending Affirmative Action in the University of California system, the lowered enrollment of Latino and Black students was not necessarily met with an increase in white students. This is usually buried or conflated with Asian students, but to the amusement of onlookers, like me, at least, the white students who believed they’d now be getting in to Berkeley were “replaced” by smarter Asian students.
But in 2023, when all is performative and the rebarbative elements of America’s darkly sexual paranoia is on full display, the Supreme Court was doing its best to “even the playing field” or more precisely, leave the playing field status quo as it has been back in what Trent Lott had called “the good old days.”
Which is to say no one who is Black in 2023 had any real expectation that despite all of the signs that America loves Black culture — music, food, entertainment, art, fashion — that this would redound to any actual signs of real love.
“So…you’re interested in the University of Michigan?”
I had gone to meet the reps for my second choice of schools at a tony hotel in mid-Manhattan in 1979, pre-admission. I was ignored for the better part of my hour there. But ignored in the same way. A look at. A look away. And a happier engagement with someone else. I hesitate to say someone “white” so let’s just say someone not me.
He was looking down his nose at me. Not figuratively. Literally. And yes, people actually do this. I said I was interested.
“And what high school do you go to?”
“I go to Stuyvesant.”
Which fucked up the whole program. Stuyvesant is one of New York’s specialized high schools and most of my classmates, Black, white and otherwise, spent their post-high school times at the Ivy Leagues, many after registering perfect scores on the SAT. I didn’t score a perfect score but 1400 out of 1600 back then was close enough.
“Wait one second.” And I watched him hustle over to some other alums, older white guys in suits, and then the “love” bombing began. Began too late, I’d add.
See, I later got in to the University of Michigan, but skated right by it to my first choice, Stanford. Where in a twist to end all twists, and one which would surprise no one who has been paying attention, my first and last (and several in between) girlfriends there dumped me because their fathers had threatened to stop paying their tuition since they “weren’t getting out of Stanford what we were hoping you’d get”.
Hahahahahaha…ha…ha…sigh….Fear of a Black Planet, indeed.
So they killed Affirmative Action? How surprised are you…really?
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