MARK MIRSKY
False Gods
Have I been a victim of "political correctness" for a good twenty years
now? Like other sneaking diseases, it worked unnamed, undiagnosed,
through the body politic for many of those years. I learned of the term
only last November. It was in the wake of a conference on Celine.
Returning home to the C ity College campus with a new definition of
myself, I realized what had been going on for many years in the English
Department. Even dedicated liberals like my co ll eague Leonard Kriegel
had finally risen in a burst of frustration and complained about the same
old list of recommended books, the politically correct blending of
African-American protest poets from the sixties, Puerto Ricans , token
Chinese-Americans, et cetera.
That latest of politically correct terms, "African-American," stuck
awkwardly in my throat the first time I used it. Resentfully, I mastered it,
feeling that I was being orally abused by the rhetoricians of liberation. In
my life, I have already gone from "colored" to "negro" to "black," and
now a new word was being forced upon me, while I had to teach
Dubois's and Johnson's work apologetically, because they had not antic–
ipated that the old language which described the African-American
would be found wanting, even insulting. There was an agenda hidden in
the term with which I could sympathize - the idea of disappearing into
the American melting pot, leaving Africa behind , had been abandoned.
Yet although I share the sentiment of wanting to keep ethnic identity
alive, I have had no desire to be known as a Byclorussian-Jewish-trans–
European West Semitic American. I didn't want the title "American
Jew." I prefer to be an American and a Jew, to disappear at will into
either identity and to mix them up. Something vaguely laughable seemed
to hover over the German Jews' euphemism at the turn of the century,
"American Hebrews." I might almost have suspected the same of
"African-American," except that it was asserted in the very breath and by
those who warned that America was to embrace another dose of
"affirmative action," a term which meant that the faculty was to once
again suspend judgment and make choices on the basis of color and gen–
der. "Affirmative action" in hiring decisions meant that all our appoint–
ments of black faculty were suspect as acts of kindness rather than as acts
of impartiality. The demoralizing effects of this, both on several brilliant
black members of our English faculty and on many of the white faculty
cannot be calculated. I can no longer swallow the old chestnut, "If
there are two candidates, equally qualified... ." Human beings are
unique, like their fingerprints, and they are never "equally qualified." No
- we are back in the language of "separate but equal," which meant
