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Citation: Social Justice Fall 1998, v.25, 3, 128(1)
Author: Platt, Anthony M.
Title: Entitled: confessions of a model meritocrat.(Crossing
Lines: Revisioning U.S. Race Relations) by Anthony
M. Platt
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 1998 Social Justice
"I.Q. + Effort = Merit"
(Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1958)
I
Old Man: Six in the evening - and already dark. It didn't used to be like
this. Not in the old days. Remember? It could be light at nine, or ten, or
even midnight.
Old Woman: You're absolutely right - what a memory.
(Eugene Ionesco, The Chairs, 1998)
It has become quite fashionable in academic circles in the United States to
evoke a nostalgia for the halcyon days of university life when standards were
imposed by a color- and gender-blind meritocracy, when students and faculty
were judged on what we do and how we perform on objective tests, not on who we
are or on attributes of our identifies. Others, while admitting that we never
really have had a fully realized meritocracy, argue that now is the time to
move forward toward a system of upward mobility based on individual ability,
hard work, and deserved rewards.
The development of affirmative action policies in the 1960s and 1970s is
typically identified as the moment when Reason was dethroned by Ideology.
"Affirmative action now institutionalizes the worst aspects of separatism,"
proclaimed Allan Bloom in his 1987 book that initiated a decade-long attack by
neoconservatives on liberal and radical efforts to break up the white old
boys' club in academia. "Affirmative action (quotas), at least in
universities," he continued, "is the source of what I fear is a long-term
deterioration of the relations between the races in America" (Bloom, 1987:
96-97). This view was echoed by a long list of neoconservative and neoliberal
intellectuals (Linda Chavez, Dinesh D'Souza, Nathan Glazer, Diane Ravitch,
Shelby Steele, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to name a few), whose ideas were
promoted by a largely sympathetic media under the guise of a campaign against
"political correctness" (Platt, 1996).
In the wake of this sustained period of ideological tilling of the cultural
ground, a policy offensive was successfully waged against affirmative action
in the courts, Congress, and state legislatures (Platt, 1997). As we approach
the close of the century, little remains of the vibrant government and legal
policies that, in Alice Walker's words, "called us to life" some 30 years ago.
Instead, the prevailing common sense argues that merit has been corrupted by a
system of entitlements that hands out privileges and advantages to people who
don't deserve them: unqualified graduate students and intellectuals who are
recruited into academia because "excellence," to use a favorite word of
meritocrats, has been sacrificed to "the ideology of equality." We need to
return to policies based on "enduring standards of merit and inferiority,"
write the authors of The Bell Curve, under which the spoils should go to those
who work hard, are ambitious, and stick to the rules of the game (Herrnstein
and Murray, 1994: 533, 534).
I could be the poster boy for these advocates of excellence. I'm a
baby-boomer who grew up in England's industrial north in the devastating
aftermath of World War II. I was raised by staunch meritocrats in a thoroughly
secular home where Religion was considered not so much an opiate of the masses
as a relic of the primitive past. At school we worshipped at the altar of
Positivism. My parents were prototypical post-World War I modernists, the New
Man and New Woman who never had any doubt that nature begins with a small "n."
Anything vaguely spiritual was regarded with suspicion as some kind of
atavistic magic. We were an Enlightenment family, reared on encyclopedias and
dictionaries: every mystery had an answer. While other kids were reading the
classics, I was encouraged to explore Bertrand Russell's treatise on The
Scientific Outlook. And when I was on the edge of puberty, my parents took me
on a trip to Oxford University so that I would have a goal into which I could
channel my raging hormones. Setting standards and reaching goals were very
important in my family: one of my dad's proudest accomplishments was being
acknowledged for his business acumen and "efficient and tightly controlled
beehive of activity" in Peters and Waterman's best-selling book of the early
1980s, In Search of Excellence (1984: 180).
In 1953, on the basis of successfully passing the "11 plus" test, I was
admitted to one of the best high schools in England - the Manchester Grammar
School (MGS), founded in the early 16th century - where I was on the school's
track and rugby teams, as well as captain of the chess team. This was the
important first rung of the climb into the meritocracy - a term that,
coincidentally, is synonymous with MGS because the school was the basis for
Michael Young's satirical novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy, published two
years before I graduated from high school. I kept climbing the rungs. From
1960 to 1963, I was an undergraduate at Oxford University, where I completed a
bachelor's degree in Jurisprudence. This in turn led to graduate studies in
criminology and sociology at University of California, Berkeley, where I
completed my doctorate in 1966. I began my academic career at the age of 24 at
the University of Chicago, where I was a research fellow in the Law School and
an instructor in social sciences. In 1968, I was hired as an assistant
professor in Berkeley's School of Criminology and my first book, The Child
Savers (University of Chicago Press), was published the following year. At 27
years old, I'd made it to the top. All that remained was staying there and
keeping my balance.
On the surface, my life and career up to this point appear to vindicate the
virtuous life of a model meritocrat - the first person ever in my family to go
to college, and the first-generation immigrant who found gold in California's
expanding system of higher education. My experience was seemingly the great
American success story: the result of hard work, determination, perseverance,
and a very large brain. On closer inspection, however, the Horatio Alger story
turns out to be more complex and contradictory. For starters, my grades in
both high school and college were very average. I didn't begin to do really
well until I knew what I wanted to study and enjoyed doing it in graduate
school. In a purely meritocratic system, I would have been separated out from
the creme de la creme long before I made it into Berkeley. Yet I kept getting
second and third chances because I was a beneficiary of affirmative action for
the over-privileged, which operates through a process of interlocking
entitlements involving class, citizenship, gender, and race. It was my "great
good fortune," to borrow from Margo Jefferson's (1998: B 2) observations about
Frank Sinatra, "to come of age in a time when the world still considered
whiteness and maleness the best and most natural of states." This was
especially so if they were located, as mine were during my formative years, in
a secure class position.
II
The world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white
and by that token, wonderful!
(W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater, 1920)
Class privilege worked for me in a number of ways, partly economic, partly
cultural. My parents subsidized all my education, including a private school
and a tutor for a couple of key years in order to get into the prestigious
MGS, my undergraduate years at Oxford, and my graduate studies at Berkeley. My
athletic ability in high school also helped to get me into Oxford when my
grades alone were far from impressive.
I also accumulated considerable cultural capital during my youth. My parents
exposed me to live, classical concerts and such world-class musicians as
Jean-Pierre Rampal, Pierre Fournier, and Arthur Rubinstein. They took me to
Shakespearean plays in Stratford - where I saw Michael Redgrave as Richard II,
Anthony Quayle as Falstaff, Charles Laughton as Lear, Peggy Ashcroft and Peter
O'Toole in The Taming of the Shrew, and Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in
Twelfth Night - and to avant garde plays in London, where I saw Alan Bates and
Donald Pleasance in the first run of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, Albert
Finney in Billy Liar, and Joan Littlewood's opening production of Oh What A
Lovely War. We even watched Lenny Bruce's disturbing spiel the night before he
was deported for violating England's obscenity laws. Ballet, art exhibitions,
museums, and vacations "on the Continent" long before the hoi polloi crossed
the Channel were also a routine part of my upbringing.
In return, I exposed my family to American jazz through the Norman Granz
productions that brought a dazzling array of talent to the outposts of
England's industrial North - Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Roy Eldridge,
Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie,
Gerry Mulligan, the MJQ, Miles Davis, and many more.
Through my star-struck Uncle Bertie, I also was introduced to touring
dignitaries, such as Lena Home and Nat King Cole, when they visited his cellar
restaurant, The Mokarlo, the first "coffee bar" in Manchester to serve exotic
cappuccinos. This exposure to the arts, high and low, broadened my knowledge
of the world and gave me training in the canon and its discontents. It also
taught me how to operate in different milieus and, more importantly, gave me a
class-based sense of self-assurance that allows elites to feel they have a
right to be in any public or private space. Although I was anxious about
heading west to California in 1963 at the age of 21, I had been trained how to
find my bearings in strange places.
When I applied to graduate schools in the States, they weren't interested in
my grades, thank God. I was admitted to Berkeley largely on the preferential
basis of appearing to be a white, educated, British gentleman. It was enough
that I had been a student at Oxford and that I had a solid name like Platt,
resonating with the breeding of the landed gentry and old school ties. What to
W.E.B. Du Bois (1920: 185) was "the arrogance of the Englishman amuck" - the
sense that "whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and amen" - was
very attractive to university administrators in the United States, who did
everything possible in the 1950s and 1960s to drain people like me out of
Europe's brain pool. I had no trouble getting my green card. I didn't have to
try to get into the country illegally or worry about finding work. On the
contrary, I received the red-carpet treatment in the form of the Johnson-Reed
Act (1924), which gave preferences to immigrants from Europe (until the 1965
Immigration Act supposedly abolished racially discriminatory quotas based on
national origins). At Berkeley I was welcomed with fellowships and teaching
and research assistantships that, together with my parents' subsidy, allowed
me not only to get through grad school very quickly, but also to be debt-free
when I completed my doctorate.
Class has always played a determining role in who goes to college in the
United States, in who gets into the top universities, and in how long it takes
to complete a degree. Even when the system of higher education was at the
height of its expansion and inclusiveness in the early 1970s, only one-quarter
of poor young people got a chance to go to college. "Whatever trends toward
democratization that emerged early in the post-World War II period, the impact
was modest, and public policies did not sustain the trend," observe Jake Ryan
and Charles Sackrey (1996: 32) in their study of working-class students. By
the 1990s, the restratification of higher education was evident. In 1979, a
student from the top quartile of family income earnings had a four times
greater chance of earning a B.A. degree by the age of 24 than did a student
from the lowest income quartile. In 1994, the economically elite students'
chances were 19 times better (Ibid.: 42). The increasing costs of higher
education - rising tuition, the failure of grant programs to keep pace with
inflation, and stagnant income for most working families - ensure that
students from middle- and upper-class backgrounds have more time and money to
help them prepare for and pass meritocratic standards, more resources to stay
in college, and easier access to the fast track (Chronicle of Higher
Education, 1996).
III
Be British.
(Last words attributed to the captain of the Titanic, addressing his
officers as the ship was going down.)
Ve British must stick together.
(My father, in parody)
Upon arriving in the United States, I didn't have to discover "a life in a
new language," to use Eva Hoffman's (1990) phrase. Nobody told me to "stop
talking that burwburwbuburugubu," as a New York teacher chastised Piri Thomas
for talking Puerto Rican Spanish to a friend in class. "You must speak
English," she told the New York-born writer, "you're in America now" (Cintron,
1995: 47). Nobody had to tame my "wild tongue," as they did Gloria Anzaldua's,
who had her knuckles rapped with a sharp ruler when she was caught by a
teacher speaking Spanish during recess in Texas. Unlike Chicano students at
Pan American University, I wasn't required to take two speech classes. "Their
purpose: to get rid of our accents," recalls Anzaldua (1987: 54).
I arrived with the Queen's English, which I was encouraged to maintain
carefully and keep well polished, like good silver. Any other language,
especially Spanish or any Asian language, would have been a liability. From
its earliest days as a nation, the United States was multilingual. Until World
War I, German was widely spoken in communities and schools; and the first
version of California's Constitution in 1849 required all official documents
to be written in both Spanish and English. But 20th-century nativism, racism,
and xenophobia resulted in "English only" campaigns that kept wild tongues in
check. It wasn't until I got my first job as an Assistant Professor at
Berkeley in 1968 that Congress passed the first Bilingual Education Act.
Moreover, it took a Supreme Court decision in 1974 (Lau v. Nichols) to mandate
the states to provide special help to students who did not speak English
(Bronner, 1998: 1, 6). Now, even these rights are being eroded by successful
attacks on bilingual education, such as the passage of Proposition 227 in
California in June 1998.
"Nobody gives you your identity, you have to reinvent yourself every day,"
observes a transplanted Polish-born writer confronting "the blessings and the
terrors of multiplicity" that await most immigrants to the United States
(Hoffman, 1990: 160). Yet there was a ready-made identity waiting for me to
slip into: the English gentleman. Not only has my accent been tolerated, it
has also always been an asset. To this day, 35 years after leaving my
homeland, I still get compliments on it, even though the locals treat me like
a Yank when ! return for visits to England. Yet here, my voice, despite its
shaky provenance, entitles me to being listened to seriously. Moreover, in a
highly competitive, middle-class world, every edge can make a difference.
All this is quite ironic given that my yeoman Anglo-Saxon roots are only one
generation deep. Both sets of my grandparents were Jews, born outside England,
one set in Poland, the other in Romania. My maternal grandmother spoke
Rumanian and Yiddish before she spoke English, and she never really learned to
write in English; and my paternal, Polish grandmother never got her tongue
around the English "v" - she liked to wear a "welwet hat with a well." My
parents were hardly British nationalists; they were commies in their youth and
brought me up with a healthy skepticism about national symbols. As a matter of
principle, I refused to stand for "God Save the Queen" when it was played in
theatres. Yet, once in the United States, without even trying I could easily
pass as the Brit of their dreams.
IV
I was trained from a very early age to work in a closed shop for members of
a guild. My fellow students in high school and college in England were all
white males. When I attended radical Berkeley for graduate school in 1963, all
my instructors - every full professor, every associate professor, every
assistant professor, every lecturer - were white men, as was the overwhelming
majority of fellow students. The occasional graduate student of color on
campus stood out, much like Zora Neale Hurston had as an undergraduate at
Barnard College in the 1920s, as "a dark rock surged upon . . . among the
thousand white persons" (1997: 1009). At my first job at the University of
Chicago's Law School in 1966, the faculty was still all white. It certainly
helped to cut down on the competition.
Being straight in academia was another taken-for-granted perk in the
prefeminist, pre-Stonewall early 1960s. I knew how dangerous it was to be
openly gay because my uncle had lived a double life as a gay man in a
respectable marriage, risking humiliation and much worse in the years before
homosexuality was decriminalized. When Martin Duberman went to teach in the
history department at Princeton in 1962, he and other gays at the university
were "locked away in painful isolation and fear, doing everything possible not
to declare themselves. Many of us cursed our fate," recalls Duberman (1992:
3), and "longed to be straight." About the same time, one of my graduate
colleagues in relatively tolerant Berkeley lived his life in a tightly shut
closet and paid a heavy psychological price for a sexuality lived in shadows
and self-denial. I, on the other hand, didn't have to publicly negotiate my
sexual identity because I arrived with a girlfriend and got married during
graduate school. The married couple, as did the women's auxiliary, still
played an important social role at the University of Chicago, where I was
hired for my first post-doctorate job in 1966. My experience was not unlike
Duberman's (1992: 1), who remembers attending a dinner party at Princeton
where "black tie was de rigeur, and following dinner the men literally retired
to the library for cigars, liqueur, and the kind of serious political talk at
which women were thought notoriously inept." Heterosexuality, particularly the
patriarchal brand, was definitely another asset in the fill.
While I was in graduate school at Berkeley, most African American scholars
were still excluded from the most privileged universities, with their superior
research facilities (Winston, 1971). It wasn't until 1942 that a major
university hired a full-time, tenure-track black professor (Platt, 1991: 66).
When Kenneth Clark received his doctorate in psychology from Columbia
University in 1942, he settled for a job at City College in New York because
the doors of more prestigious universities were closed to him. Moreover, his
equally distinguished wife, Mamie Phipps Clark, didn't even try for a career
in academia (Markowitz and Rosner, 1996). Well through the mid-1950s, most
black social scientists, like the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, could find
jobs only in black colleges (Platt, 1991: 66). "The number of Negro scholars
on the faculties of non-Negro American colleges and universities is still
pitifully small," wrote John Hope Franklin in 1972, the year that I was up for
tenure at Berkeley. "Whenever the door was opened," he concluded on the basis
of his own experience, "it was done grudgingly and the opening was so slight
that it was still almost impossible to enter" (Franklin, 1972: 71).
Well into the 1960s, African American scholars found themselves not only
outside academia's privileges, but also pressured to specialize in "Negro
studies," which in turn were generally regarded by the academic profession as
an inferior form of scholarship. "When his [sic] work is recognized it is
usually pointed to as the work of a Negro," observed Franklin. Unlike John
Hope Franklin and his African American colleagues, I did not have to "lick the
wounds that come from cruel isolation." I did not have to think twice about my
safety when visiting a research facility or worry that I would be humiliated
by rude bureaucrats or create a"panic and an emergency among the
administrators" of a state archive when they saw the color of my skin (Ibid.:
71-72; 75).
When I started teaching at Berkeley in 1968, elite universities were still
pretty much restricted to privileged Anglos. Native Americans were absent from
predominantly white colleges; the first tribal college, Navajo Community
College, was still a year away from its opening (Liska, 1996). It wasn't until
1971 that, for example, the writer-to-be Louise Erdrich was allowed to enter
Dartmouth College's hallowed halls as a member of the first class of women and
Native Americans (Garrod and Larimore, 1997: ix).
Besides the class, race, and gender preferences that I enjoyed in the early
days of my career, I was also lucky to enter academia in the 1960s during a
period of expansion, when job seekers had considerable power. I was offered
several jobs before I chose Berkeley in 1968. My cohort who benefited from
this expansion were overwhelmingly white men, albeit more radicalized than our
predecessors. The civil rights and women's movements didn't have a serious
impact on the composition of the university until the next decade. The first
large cohort of women and much smaller cohort of Black and Latino
intellectuals entered the university's job market in the 1970s after the
1960's expansion began to constrict. An even larger pool of mostly white women
entered in the 1980s, when the job market began to shrink and the university
began its process of restructuring, leaving the last hired in the most
vulnerable, proletarianized positions (Hunt, 1998; Platt, 1997).
V
Reason cannot accommodate the claims of any kind of power whatever, and
democratic society cannot accept any principle of achievement other than
merit.
(Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind)
In 1974, my successful career took a sharp dive when I was denied tenure at
Berkeley and found myself, together with many colleagues around the country,
blacklisted for my leftist politics and activism. Once you choose to bite the
hands that pull you up the ladder, it doesn't take long before you're back on
the ground, subject to the same hostility and prejudices that are reserved for
most poor and working people, most women, and most folks of color. Still, even
though I was suddenly a pariah to the Gatekeepers of Knowledge, my credentials
and pedigree were still good enough to get me a job in the California State
University system, where for the last 20 years I have been fortunate to be
able to teach future social workers how to demystify the privileges of power.
For a very short time in the 1960s and 1970s, the system of entitlements to
which I had been born was extended beyond the confines of the white, old boys'
club. The new recipients of affirmative action - women and men from
working-class, African American, Latino, Asian American, and American Indian
communities - were quickly attacked by New Right academics for their lack of
merit. By the early 1990s, it was common to read that "minority students" were
being encouraged to "aspire to victim status" (D'Souza, 1991: 242), that they
were "haunted" by a sense of inferiority (Bloom, 1987: 96), and that "much
harm" was being "done to minority self-esteem" (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994:
470).
Reflecting back upon my own experience, I don't think I was damaged by all
the entitlements that I received. I suffered no blows to my self-esteem; I
wasn't transformed into a dependent, coupon-clipping parasite; I never felt
that I got something for nothing or that I didn't deserve to be side by side
with the big boys. On the contrary, I took advantage of my privileges, second
chances, and luck to work hard, to develop my creative abilities, and to
fulfill my social responsibilities. The only problem with the entitlements
that I received is how selectively and discriminatorily they were distributed.
The concept of "meritocracy" to which many policymakers now wish to return was
in fact a system of unequal opportunity - affirmative action, preferences,
nepotism, and class, race, and gender biases for white men from middle- and
upper-class backgrounds. Until we live in a society in which everybody from
the moment of birth enjoys the same resources and opportunities, and everybody
functions without the wounds and scars of classism, racism, sexism, and
homophobia, there can be no meritocracy.
REFERENCES
Anzaldua, Gloria
1987 "How to Tame a Wild Tongue." Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books: 53-64.
Bloom, Alan
1987 The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Bronner, Ethan
1998 "Bilingual Education Is Facing Its Demise in California Vote." New York
Times (May 30): 1, 6.
Chronicle of Higher Education
1996 "The Widening Gap in Higher Education." Chronicle of Higher Education
(June 14).
Cintron, Humberto
1995 "An Interview with Piri Thomas." Forkroads (Fall).
D'Souza, Dinesh
1991 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York:
The Free Press.
Du Bois, W.E.B.
1920 Darkwater. Reprinted in David R. Roediger (ed.), Black on White: Black
Writers on What It Means to Be White. New York: Schocken Books, 1998.
Duberman, Martin
1992 Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey. New York: Penguin Books.
Franklin, John Hope
1972 "The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar." Herbert Hill (ed.), Soon,
One Morning: New Writings by American Negroes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Garrod, Andrew and Colleen Larimore (eds.),
1997 First Person, First Peoples: Native American College Graduates Tell
Their Life Stories. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Herrnstein, Richard J. and Charles Murray
1994 The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New
York: The Free Press.
Hoffman, Eva
1990 Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. New York: Penguin Books.
Hunt, Lynn
1998 "Has the Battle Been Won? The Feminization of History." Perspectives
(American Historical Association Newsletter) (May): 13-17.
Hurston, Zora Neale
1997 "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928). Reprinted in Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay (eds.), The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
New York: W.W. Norton.
Ionesco, Eugene
1998 The Chairs. Translated by Martin Crimp. London: Faber & Faber.
Jefferson, Margo
1998 "Sinatra, Not a Myth, but a Man, and One Among Many." New York Times
(June 1).
Liska, Allan
1996 "Native Americans in Higher Education." Joyce Tang and Earl Smith
(eds.), Women and Minorities in American Professions. Albany: State University
of New York Press.
Markowitz, Gerald and David Rosner
1996 Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark's Northside Center.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Peters, Thomas J. and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
1984 In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies. New
York: Warner Books.
Platt, Anthony M.
1997 "End Game: The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action in Higher
Education." Social Justice 24,2.
1996 "'Living With Inequality': Race and the Changing Discourse of
Victimization in the United States." Comparative Law Review 29,4.
1991 E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press.
Ryan, Jake and Charles Sackrey
1996 Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class. Lanham,
Maryland: University Press of America.
Tang, Joyce and Earl Smith (eds.)
1996 Women and Minorities in American Professions. Albany: State University
of New York Press.
Walker, Alice
1967 "The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?" The American Scholar
(Autumn).
Winston, Michael
1971 'Through the Back Door: Academic Racism and the Negro Scholar in
Historical Perspective." Daedalus 100 (Summer).
Young, Michael
1958 The Rise of the Meritocracy. London: Thames and Hudson.
ANTHONY M. PLATT is a member of the Social Justice Editorial Board and
Professor of Social Work at California State University, Sacramento, CA
95819-6090. Thanks to CSUS for supporting the research for this article.
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