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.
Marlon T. Riggs,
1995, from his Introduction to STANDARDS
