12.9/The Interpretive Lens/The Intellectual Frame

Writing Against the Tribe, 1989–2001

The Pattern

The exchange was the period’s most literal instance of a pattern that ran, in less official form, through a dozen other careers across the same twelve years. In the interval between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the towers, a recognizable intellectual career took shape in New York publishing: a writer who carried the demographic markers of a specific constituency — Black, female, Latino, gay, Jewish — published a book or an essay arguing against what that constituency’s authoritative spokespeople expected the writer to say, and did it, almost always, in the constituency’s own venues first. The argument ran inside the tribe before it ran anywhere else: in Commentary, in the Village Voice, in The New Republic, in Harper’s, in the pages the writer’s antagonists also read and sometimes edited. The pattern held across constituencies that agreed on nothing else, and it produced, by the middle 1990s, a cohort of thirty-odd figures whose books were commercial events, whose television bookings were reliable, and whose oldest friendships were over.

The price was specific, and it was almost never the price an outside observer would have predicted. These writers were not expelled from elite institutions. Thomas Sowell held his Hoover Institution fellowship throughout; Glenn Loury held Harvard and then Boston University; Stephen Carter never left Yale Law School; Camille Paglia kept her post at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. What was withdrawn was the home community: the respectful review in Ebony or Ms. or The Nation, the invitation, the mentor’s phone call, the presumption of good faith. The charge came in a fixed vocabulary — “Uncle Tom,” “race traitor,” “self-hating,” “anti-feminist,” “assimilationist” — and it was documented in the biographical record of every figure in the cohort.² The antagonist in these careers was rarely a hostile institution. It was a former mentor, a community elder, a denominational magazine, an estranged friend. The fight ran inside the family, and the family enforced its own penalties.

The Geography of the Argument

The heterodox books had a physical geography, and its center was Manhattan. The dominant trade home was the Free Press under Erwin Glikes, the Belgian-born publisher who ran the imprint from 1983 and built its list into the principal mainstream-house address for arguments the writer’s own tribe did not want made: Allan Bloom, Robert Bork, Francis Fukuyama, Dinesh D’Souza, David Horowitz, Charles Murray. Glikes was valued by his authors for a specific restraint — several of them, Sowell and Bruce Bawer among them, refused conservative-movement labels outright, and Glikes, unlike the movement houses in Washington, did not flatten their books into deliverables. When Simon & Schuster acquired the imprint in 1994, Glikes did not gel with the new regime; he left for another job and died of a heart attack that year, at fifty-six, and the trade press treated his death as the close of an era of mainstream-house heterodoxy publishing.³

Around the Free Press stood the magazines. Commentary, at 165 East 56th Street, was under Norman Podhoretz until 1995, then Neal Kozodoy — the intramural Jewish venue that had gone over to neoconservatism a generation earlier and now ran the Black and feminist heterodox alongside its own. The New Republic installed Andrew Sullivan as editor in 1991, at twenty-eight the youngest in the magazine’s history, and for five years the center-liberal weekly was edited by an openly gay, HIV-positive Catholic conservative. Harper’s under Lewis Lapham ran Shelby Steele as a contributing editor and published the Richard Rodriguez essays that drew organized protest. The Village Voice on Cooper Square had housed Stanley Crouch as a staff writer through 1988 and turned hostile to him thereafter. The Hoover Institution at Stanford held the West Coast salaries. And against all of these stood the tribe-of-origin press that refused or attacked: Ebony and Essence rarely reviewed Sowell, Steele, Carter, or Loury sympathetically; Ms. declined to engage the equity-feminist argument on its merits; The Nation was consistently hostile to Sullivan, Bawer, Katie Roiphe, and Crouch alike.

The Black Heterodox

The oldest figure in the cohort was Thomas Sowell, born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930, raised by a great-aunt in Harlem, a Stuyvesant dropout, a Marine Corps photographer in the Korean War, a Harvard graduate by night classes and transfer, a University of Chicago economics doctorate under Milton Friedman, a former Marxist, and from 1977 a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His 1990s production ran at industrial pace — Preferential Policies (1990), Race and Culture (Basic Books, 1994), The Vision of the Anointed (Basic Books, 1995), Migrations and Cultures (1996), Conquests and Cultures (1998) — plus a twice-weekly syndicated column carried in more than 150 papers. His argument was constant across all of it: group economic outcomes were driven by culture and human capital, not by ongoing white racism; affirmative action damaged its intended beneficiaries; and a self-congratulating class of intellectuals — “the anointed” — proposed untested social schemes whose failures they refused to count. The most-cited Black economist of his generation was, through the same years, largely excluded from anthologies of African-American thought and rarely engaged by the Black scholarly mainstream as a peer. He responded to the exclusion by ignoring it.

Shelby Steele arrived at the argument from the opposite biography: son of a Black truck-driver father and a white social-worker mother who had met as founding members of CORE, a college civil-rights activist, an English professor at San Jose State. The Content of Our Character (St. Martin’s Press, 1990) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction; its thesis was that a symbiosis of white guilt and Black grievance produced “racial bargaining,” in which Black leaders traded absolution to white liberals for policies that conferred status on a professional class while leaving the underclass where it was. The same year his PBS Frontline documentary on the Bensonhurst killing — the event itself is chronicled elsewhere in this archive — won an Emmy. He was routinely savaged in Ebony and Essence, and widely accused of supplying cover to white readers who had never opened him. In 1994 he joined Sowell at Hoover.

Glenn Loury’s case was the cohort’s most complete arc, because he broke twice. The first Black tenured economist at Harvard (1982), a mathematical prodigy who had introduced the concept of social capital in his 1976 dissertation, Loury spent the 1980s as an outspoken Reagan-era voice; during the Thomas confirmation hearings of October 1991 he prayed with the nominee over the telephone. Then, in the mid-1990s, he split with the right itself — and the split ran through the same publishing geography that had made him. When Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve appeared in 1994, conservative magazines including Commentary refused to publish Loury’s sharply critical review of it; the magazine fight over the book’s science, chronicled elsewhere in this archive, was a separate theater — what mattered here was that the tribe’s flagship declined the tribe member’s dissent.⁴ The following year Dinesh D’Souza published The End of Racism (1995), and Loury resigned from the American Enterprise Institute over it. His essay collection One by One from the Inside Out (Free Press, 1995) appeared the same year. The cost was the same shunning he had absorbed from the other direction a decade earlier: at a Harvard appearance in the late 1990s, Norman Podhoretz told him to his face, “You are no longer one of us.”⁵

Stephen Carter at Yale wrote the lawyerly version. Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (Basic Books, 1991) described its author as a beneficiary of the policy he wanted narrowed, documented the “best Black” stigma, and refused what Carter called the presumption that biology implied ideology — that there was one correct Black viewpoint a Black writer was obliged to hold. Because he declined conservative branding, his cost ran lower than Loury’s or Steele’s; he was attacked as a sellout all the same.

Stanley Crouch was the cohort’s most theatrical member. A former Black Power poet and avant-garde drummer mentored by Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison toward Murray’s “Omni-American” position — the argument, standing since The Omni-Americans (1970), that American culture was inescapably hybrid and Black culture was its center — Crouch had conducted his break with Amiri Baraka as a published exchange in the Village Voice in 1979 and kept the feud alive for two decades. His essay collections — Notes of a Hanging Judge (Oxford, 1990), The All-American Skin Game (Pantheon, 1995), Always in Pursuit (Pantheon, 1998) — prosecuted the case that the Civil Rights Movement was a noble cause gone loco, that Toni Morrison’s fiction was “perforated by ideology,” and that the blues tradition, not sociology, was the true repository of American moral intelligence.⁶ He won a Whiting Award in 1991 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993. When Robert Boynton profiled him in The New Yorker in 1995, Baraka told the reporter Crouch was “a backwards, asinine person” and hung up the phone; bell hooks said, “He has seen that it pays off when you kiss the ass of white supremacy.”⁷

The youngest entrant arrived through linguistics. When the Oakland school board’s resolution set off the Ebonics fight, John McWhorter, a Berkeley linguist born in 1965, stood with the professional consensus that Black English was a rich, rule-governed dialect while attacking the resolution’s framing as harmful pedagogy — a position that put him, for one strange interval, on the same side as Jesse Jackson, the New York Times editorial page, and the Secretary of Education. His The Word on the Street (1998) was the linguist’s intervention; Losing the Race (Free Press, 2000), which diagnosed three “cults” of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism, became a New York Times bestseller. His cost ran unexpectedly low; he reported receiving more love mail than hate from Black readers.⁸

The political wing of the cohort paid in public. Ward Connerly, a Sacramento businessman appointed to the University of California Board of Regents in 1993, drove the July 1995 Regents vote ending racial preferences in UC admissions and chaired the 1996 campaign for Proposition 209, which ended state affirmative action with 54.5 percent of the vote; he was picketed by Jesse Jackson at the Regents meeting and called a race traitor at NAACP gatherings.⁹ Clarence Thomas, confirmed to the Supreme Court on October 15, 1991, absorbed the charge at its most concentrated: at the 1995 NAACP convention he was reportedly called a “pimp” and a “traitor.”¹⁰ And the white outlier who mapped the same terrain from the left, Jim Sleeper of New York Newsday, published The Closest of Strangers (Norton, 1990), arguing that New York’s racial politics had degenerated into a mutually parasitic pact between Black nationalists and white liberals who refused to make moral demands on the Black political class — and found himself shut out of the Nation–Voice axis and courted by The New Republic.

The Heterodox Feminists

The feminist wing of the cohort announced itself in 1990, when Yale University Press published Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, a seven-hundred-page work of Frazerian-Freudian cultural history by a professor in her early forties at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia named Camille Paglia. The manuscript had been rejected by seven publishers and five agents across the 1980s; Paglia called it her “prison book.”¹¹ Its thesis — that Western culture was an eternally renegotiated tension between Apollonian order and Dionysian, chthonic nature, and that contemporary feminism had misread sex and biology by trying to legislate the chthonic away — made her, within two years, the most visible feminist apostate in America: feted on television, pilloried in the feminist scholarly press, picketed at the University of Washington in September 1992.¹² The Women’s Review of Books called the book “crackpot extremism”; feminist professors at one Connecticut college were reported comparing it to Mein Kampf; Gloria Steinem said of her, “Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying they’re not anti-Semitic”; Naomi Wolf, in The New Republic, called her “the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters.”¹³ Her wars with the antipornography feminists, chronicled elsewhere in this archive, were the loudest front; her position in this cohort was structural — an out lesbian from an Italian Catholic factory-town family, an academic who had held no elite post, writing against the movement that should have owned her.

The generational version arrived in 1993. Katie Roiphe — daughter of the feminist novelist Anne Roiphe, raised on the Upper East Side, Harvard, then Princeton — published The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus (Little, Brown), arguing that the campus rape-crisis movement was running on inflated statistics and a confessional theater that infantilized the women it claimed to protect. The New York Times Magazine ran the excerpt as a cover story on June 13, 1993, under the title “Date Rape’s Other Victim”; Wendy Kaminer’s admiring page-one review in the Sunday Book Review made the book a national event; Katha Pollitt’s counterblast in The New Yorker called it “a careless and irresponsible performance, poorly argued and full of misrepresentations.”¹⁴ The book’s deepest structure was visible in its byline: a daughter writing against her mother’s second-wave milieu in her mother’s preferred venues.

Christina Hoff Sommers supplied the documentary artillery. Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (Simon & Schuster, 1994) distinguished “equity feminism” — the classical-liberal tradition of equal rights and equal access — from “gender feminism,” the academic-activist consensus, and then audited the movement’s statistics one by one: the claim that 150,000 American women died annually of anorexia (the defensible figure ran in the low hundreds), the Super Bowl domestic-violence legend, the classroom-bias data. A philosophy professor at Clark University, she had presented the argument to an American Philosophical Association session where attendees hissed and stomped; her own account of the aftermath was exact: “I lost a friend. I was excommunicated from a church I didn’t know existed.”¹⁵

The rest of the cohort filled in the registers. Wendy Kaminer’s I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional (Addison-Wesley, 1992) made the liberal case against recovery-culture victimology. Naomi Wolf, whose The Beauty Myth (1991) had been orthodox enough to be praised by Steinem and Friedan, crossed partway in Fire with Fire (Random House, 1993), calling for a move from “victim feminism” to “power feminism” — and was received with hostility in Ms. and the Voice for it. Rene Denfeld’s The New Victorians (Warner, 1995) argued that the movement’s emphasis on sexual danger and female purity had put women back on a Victorian pedestal. Daphne Patai, from inside the UMass-Amherst Women’s Studies program she had served since the 1970s, published Professing Feminism (1994) on the field’s hostility to dissent, at serious cost from her own colleagues. And in December 1995 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese — founding director of Emory’s Institute for Women’s Studies, author of Feminism Without Illusions (1991) and “Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life” (Doubleday, 1996) — was received into the Catholic Church, the field’s most dramatic single defection, driven, she wrote, partly by revulsion at “the pride and self-centeredness I witnessed in the secular academy.”¹⁶

The Latino Heterodox

The Latino wing had two principal figures and one book each at its center. Richard Rodriguez — Mexican-American, Catholic, gay, a Sacramento grocer’s son whose first language was Spanish — had refused an academic career in 1976 rather than accept posts he believed were minority hires, and had made the refusal the subject of Hunger of Memory (David R. Godine, 1982), the period’s founding anti-bilingual-education text. Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (Viking, 1992) was a Pulitzer finalist; his PBS video essays won a Peabody in 1997. He was branded pocho and coconut — brown outside, white inside — by the Chicano academic establishment, and when a chapter on the death of a friend from AIDS ran in Harper’s, a gay-and-lesbian group organized a protest and wrote demanding to know why he was not proud, why he was “so dark, so morbid, so sad.”¹⁷ Linda Chavez, a former AFT staffer and Reagan-era Civil Rights Commission staff director, published Out of the Barrio (Basic Books, 1991), arguing that Hispanic Americans were a classically upwardly mobile immigrant group miscast in an entitlement paradigm imported from Black politics; she founded the Center for Equal Opportunity in 1995 and was described in the opposition press, with the cohort’s usual economy, as self-hating. The 1996 fight over Proposition 209 forced both, along with Connerly, into public position — the most visible Latino heterodox theater of the period.

The Gay Heterodox

The gay heterodoxy formed inside the AIDS emergency, which made its intramural fights the bitterest of the cohort’s. Bruce Bawer’s A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (Poseidon, 1993), a New York Times Notable Book, argued that a silent majority of American gays lived recognizably middle-American lives misrepresented by the urban subculture and the religious right alike. Andrew Sullivan had opened the argument earlier and from higher ground: his “Here Comes the Groom: A (Conservative) Case for Gay Marriage” ran in The New Republic on August 28, 1989 — the first major American argument for gay marriage — and Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality (Knopf, 1995), written by a man who had learned of his own HIV diagnosis in 1993, built the full case: end public-sphere discrimination, repeal the military ban, legalize civil marriage, and abandon both the liberationist and the closet positions as incoherent.¹⁸ Gabriel Rotello, the first openly gay op-ed columnist at a major American daily, pressed the ecological argument in Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (Dutton, 1997) — that the epidemic’s course through gay male populations followed from the densely networked sexual culture of the 1970s, and that survival would require behavioral change, not only condoms — and was effectively boycotted from significant gay venues for it.

The period’s defining public display came in June 1994, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stonewall, when Bawer and Sullivan appeared on Charlie Rose opposite Tony Kushner and Donna Minkowitz. Minkowitz’s answer to Bawer’s title was delivered on air: “We don’t want a place at the table! We want to turn the table over!”¹⁹ The exchange compressed the whole intramural war into two sentences on public television. Bawer’s Stonewall 25 lecture at the New York Public Library ran, abridged, as a New Republic cover story. The charge sheet against him ran back years — he had panned Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems, and Ginsberg had replied, “Is Bruce homophobic?”, the assumption being that no gay man could quarrel with Ginsberg’s poetry in good faith.²⁰

The Old Breakers and the Five Moves

Behind the 1990s cohort stood an older generation for whom the break was already autobiography. Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, closed the decade with Ex-Friends (Free Press, 1999), whose subtitle named the casualties — Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, Norman Mailer — a whole intellectual formation catalogued as ruptured friendships. David Horowitz’s Radical Son (Free Press, 1997) told the New Left version: a red-diaper Queens childhood, the Ramparts editorship, and the 1974 murder of his friend Betty Van Patter by associates of the Black Panthers as the hinge on which a life turned right. Christopher Lasch, who died in 1994 with The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (Norton, 1995) completed in his final weeks, wrote the version that never joined the right at all: the true threat to American democracy came not from a populist mob but from a deracinated professional-managerial elite that had abandoned place and obligation. And Eugene Genovese, the Marxist historian of slavery, delivered Harvard’s Massey Lectures as The Southern Tradition (Harvard, 1994) and followed his wife Fox-Genovese into the Catholic Church — the couple’s late-career community dramatically smaller and more conservative than their peak community had been.

Across all the tribes, the published arguments reduced to roughly five recurring moves. The empirical move — Sowell, Sommers, McWhorter, Loury — claimed the tribe’s spokespeople used bad statistics. The aesthetic move — Crouch, Paglia, Bawer on Ginsberg — claimed the tribe sacrificed artistic standards to political loyalty. The responsibility move — Steele, Roiphe, Kaminer, Denfeld — claimed the tribe’s narrative of grievance damaged its own members. The individualist move — Carter, Rodriguez, Chavez, Sullivan — claimed the tribe denied its members the right to be more than one thing. And the tragic-conservative move — Lasch, the Genoveses — claimed the left had lost a constrained, tragic sense of life it once owned. The books kept coming until the decade ended.