Americans have always been more and at the same time less than
what we pretended. With the quickening approach of the twenty-first
century, greater numbers of us are giving testament to this inescapable
fact, challenging the cozy myths by which America has been ritually
defined. Who are we? Who are we becoming? Who and what have we
been? In the next century, can we even continue to speak (could
we ever?) of a collective "we"? For the longest, of
course, these questions had simple answers.
America was white. America was male. America was heterosexual.
America was Christian. America, above all, was a melting pot
into which diverse cultural communities gleefully descended to
achieve the social and ideological transformation necessary for
inclusion within the American Dream. That many of us -- marginalized
and oftentimes invisible Americans of African, Asian, Latino
and Native descent, as well as women and the working poor --
never quite melted and metamorphosized according to this traditional
prescription for social progress, hardly mattered. The great
distance between the Dream and our actual lives was not due to
any fault in the Dream: the defect was in us. The Dream thus
survived intact, its seductive power sustained by America's stubborn
refusal to look too closely at the hidden but terrible costs
of "the good life" and at who actually could -- much
less wanted to -- afford it.
The sixties, of course, spotlighted the complex oppressive regime
of thought, politics and culture which underlay the myth of America.
For the first time in U.S. history, the ideological fabric of
white heterosexual patriarchy was exposed for the life-constricting
straightjacket it had always been. Despite conservative attempts
during subsequent years at repair, the old social fabric has
been steadily unraveling. Thus we have arrived at this present
moment, wherein a nation historically averse to serious introspection
now exhibits -- in its politics and popular media as well as
its universities -- an almost obsessive reflexive preoccupation
with our national identity.
To be expected, much of the current debate is simply a re-hash
of old opinion -- an attempt to forcefully rebut and undercut
the de-centering politics of radical multiculturalism (i.e.,
the kind of multiculturalism where difference actually makes
a differ-ence). Bring back the melting pot. Restore "traditional
values." Re-institute prayer in schools. Preserve the primacy
of Western civilization (the only one that matters anyway). And
not least, protect that critical bedrock of American greatness,
"the American family": such pronouncements reveal an
intense, even pathological desire to perpetuate a thoroughly
obsolete myth of America, and through this, a repressively orthodox
system of sociocultural entitlement.
While the ideas of conservative/fundamentalist
America are hardly new, the typically strident pitch with which
such ideas are now being argued betrays how acutely anxious many
conservatives have come to feel, due to both real and anticipitated
loss of privilege and power. What is more, arch-conservative
rhetoric -- as should be evident to anyone watching our presidential
elections for the past quarter century -- has found a certain
public resonance. Difference, in the traditionalist outlook,
has been regressively equated with disunity; and disunity with
profound social chaos and collapse. Just as nature abhors a vacuum,
so, it seems, do many Americans with regard to the social-political
myths by which they organize and make sense of their lives. Even
a fundamentally flawed, repressive, inequitable social order
seems to many better than none at all. A clear imperative thus
confronts American progressives -- that intricate (and frequently
fragile) web of communities comprised of people of color, feminists,
gays and lesbians, the poor and working class, as well as ethnic
whites who value ethnicity, indeed all who have been systematically
disenfrancised and dehumanized under the once ascendant "traditional
values" of pre-Civil Rights America.
It's no longer enough, if it ever was,
to critique interlocking systems of oppression without offering
affirming alternatives of how society should and can reconstitute
itself. As we move into the inevitably more demanding multilingual,
multicultural environment -- both nationally and globally --
of the next century, our greatest task will be an inversion of
the commonly assumed equivalence between difference and disunity.
We must re-write this equation, demonstrating again and again
that unity does not require unanimity, that unity -- that is,
a sense of social cohesion, of community -- can and does derive
from the expression, comprehension, and active nurturing (and
not merely tolerance or fetishization) of difference.
This is the new standard of civilized life
that now demands our urgent labor, a new world order, if you
will, that subverts traditional conceptions of social order:
a standard which in effect subverts the meaning of the word "standard"
itself. For the new order must be comprised of multiple standards:
shifting, open-ended, dynamically transforming, so as to engender
ways of thinking and living that privilege no one set of cultural
differences over another, but affirm virtue in all.
This perspective forms the key inspiration
and overarching theme in STANDARDS. Page after page eloquently
testifies to the commitment of a new generation of America's
best and brightest to shaping a radically redefined vision of
our future, where old repressive dualisms of race, class, sexuality,
gender and nationality no longer reign -- a future in which not
merely some but all of us are free to explore and express our
richest humanity.
-- Marlon Riggs, 1995
MARLON T. RIGGS was a producer, director, and writer, who
graduated with honors from Harvard in 1978, and received the
MA from UC Berkeley, where he later taught Documentary Film in
the Graduate School of Journalism. His films include Tongues
Untied, the acclaimed account of Black gay male life; and
Ethnic Notions, for which he was awarded the Emmy. Mr.
Riggs' work has been published in the anthology Brother to
Brother, as well as in arts and literary magazines, including
High Performance, Black American Literature Forum,
and Art Journal. A media activist, he testified before
the U.S. Senate, and wrote extensively on the issue of censorship.
Mr. Riggs was also on the policy committee of the national PBS,
and served on various other panels, including the National Endowment
for the Arts. Marlon T. Riggs died of AIDS-related complications
in 1994. We remember him with deepest respect and admiration.
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