The 1990s are Back: Refighting the Culture Wars as Minister Farrakhan Visits Berkeley

The Republicans have rediscovered the Culture War narrative. Derrick Bell is smeared for his work to make Ivy League faculty more diverse. Minister Louis Farrakhan is back in the news for a recent speech at UC Berkeley which has been described as "controversial" and "anti-Semitic."

We are back in the 1990s again. Did the election of President Obama open a hole in the space time continuum, and the present is now collapsing into the past?

I hear so much of my own voice from years past here:

But members of UC Berkeley's Black Student Union said the overall message was inspiring.

"What I got out of it was how we as black students can take our education and utilize it to build the black community back up," said Stephan Montouth. "We're looking at the minister's statements in terms of how to empower the black community not all of the other controversial things that he may have said in the past."

There is a certain appeal to Farrakhan that goes beyond his commonsense message of black empowerment, self-sufficiency, and uplift. When you are one of few students of color on campus, are made to feel marginalized and peripheral (note: if black and brown students at UC Berkeley feel that way, I must wonder what their response would be to a far less "liberal" environment) his unapologetic strength is really compelling. To see someone with the nerve to talk back to white folks, in their own house, and on their dime, is intoxicating. When you are 19 years old, such performances are easily confused with real power.

We have a tendency to romanticize the past; to do so is very human. But, I would still dare to suggest that there was a cultural and political vibrancy about the late 1980s, and mid to late 1990s, that is absent today on college campuses (and in our culture more broadly). There were protests over campus diversity. At my alma mater, we staged walkouts and sit-ins over establishing a Black Studies program. There were death threats against students of color and the obligatory crisis of the week. My friends and I imagined ourselves in the racially pornographic movie Higher Learning--always under siege and existential threat. It was exhilarating.

In those years there was also the Million Man March; I would proudly wear my "The Juice is Loose" t-shirt (with kente cloth for extra provocation); UMOJA, the Black Student Organization, renamed its leadership positions after those in the Black Panthers. We rocked Carhartt hoodies and black Timberlands while listening to great hip hop, and would watch Farrakhan, Khalid Muhammad, Leonard Jeffries, and Dr. Frances Cress Welsing on The Donahue Show.

The hip hop generation (of which I am a proud member) was post civil rights. Temporally, we came after that moment. But we still reached back to the mythos of the glorious 1960s as a reference point. Generationally, we also were not "racism fatigued." Given Rodney King, the L.A. Riots, the racial tensions in and around New York, cultural and opinion leaders like Farrakhan, Spike Lee, Public Enemy, Jesse Jackson, and the new wave of black public intellectuals like Cornel West, Bell Hooks (and others), to be in college, and a person of color at this moment, meant that to some degree you had to be politically engaged.


Pity those black and brown students who opted out--they would be written off, disappeared in the minds of those who fashioned themselves more "radical." We had little use for free riders. I was also fond of telling such cast offs of their untouchable status directly to their faces.

The Facebook/Helicopter Parents/Obamakids generation, those who were born in the 1990s, are located in a bizarre post-racial moment, where the market and neoliberal policies have robbed them of the vocabulary to describe the type of hegemonic power they are suffering under. Moreover, they have so internalized the language and logic of "the market," that while this generation knows something is wrong, most do not know what to do about it. Ultimately, this generation is experiencing a deep crisis of political vision and meaning.

In the 21st century, race and white supremacy continue to shape life chances and opportunity structures. But, racist, neoconservative, "colorblind" politics have transformed those who identity these social realities into the new bigots. With the browning of America, the rise of the global superclass, and the destruction of the American working and middle classes, the struggle against racism appears to be increasingly irrelevant. Ironically, I would suggest that a race critical lens has never been more central and necessary to understanding the forces arrayed against the People and in service of Power.

Perhaps the invitation to Farrakhan, and being open to some of what he represents, signals a new political awakening on the part of some black and brown students. But then again, those who have the opportunity to indulge in a bit of "radical" politics while in college, are likely just as tempted to discard such political romances when they get a job, have a mortgage, and need to conform in order to move ahead in an increasingly perilous economy. When you are 19 it is okay to dream. The trick then becomes, how do you sustain such dreaming as an adult...and turn it into action?