From California to Michigan: Race,Rationality, and NeoliberalGovernmentalityBradley Jones & Roopali Mukherjee

In this essay, we examine recent developments in battles over race- and gender-based

affirmative action across a 10-year period from the California Civil Rights Initiative

(1996) to the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (2006). While affirmative action policies

have historically been contested within a paradigm of redistribution, our analysis of the

Michigan case suggests a new strategic emphasis on disputing the legitimacy of the state’s

recognition of social difference. Drawing on the work of critical race and critical rhetoric

scholars, as well as social theory on citizenship in the post-soul moment, we argue that a

neoliberal understanding of difference and neoliberalism’s appropriations of multi-

culturalism have allowed the anti-affirmative action movement in Michigan to avoid

racist appeals completely by invoking the neoliberal myth of free, entrepreneurial

individuals against a meddling, inefficient, authoritarian state. Further, we find that

these shifts have permitted assaults on the positive consideration of gender*a strategy

that was not possible when debates were centered over competing claims of racism.

Finally, we argue that these strategic adjustments since California have enabled the anti-

affirmative action movement to discursively align itself with contemporary neoliberal

assaults on a range of social and cultural rights.

Keywords: Neoliberalism; Affirmative Action; Race/Gender; Policy Discourse; State

In November 2006, voters in the state of Michigan elected to ban consideration of

gender and ethnicity in hiring, government contracts, and admissions to state

Bradley Jones is a PhD candidate in the Communication Studies Department at the University of Michigan, Ann

Arbor. Brad would like to thank the Howard R. Marsh Endowment for providing funding for this project.

Thanks are also given to Jessamon Jones, Roopali Mukherjee, and anonymous reviewers for their valuable

feedback. Roopali Mukherjee is associate professor of Media Studies at the City University of New York/Queens

College. She thanks Brad for proposing the idea for this essay to her and for working tirelessly through the

revisions. Thanks are also due to Jonathan Buschbaum and Rick Maxwell who were patient listeners through the

process. Correspondence to: Roopali Mukherjee, Department of Media Studies, G Building, Queens College,

65�30 Kissena Blvd, Flushing, NY 11367, USA. E-mail: profmukherjee@earthlink.net

ISSN 1479-1420 (print)/ISSN 1479-4233 (online) # 2010 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/14791420.2010.523431

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

Vol. 7, No. 4, December 2010, pp. 401�422

institutions of higher education. Since 2003, supporters of the Michigan Civil Rights

Initiative (MCRI) had waged a controversial campaign to amend the state

constitution to ‘‘prohibit the University of Michigan and other state universities,

the state, and all other state entities from discriminating or granting preferential

treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.’’ Led by Ward

Connerly, regent of the University of California and former chairman of the

California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), together with Jennifer Gratz, lead plaintiff

in the 2003 Supreme Court case of Gratz v. Bollinger, the MCRI stands as one in a

series of copycat proposals geared toward revoking affirmative action policies that

emerged after the passage of the CCRI in 1996.1

Recurring debates over affirmative action offer us insights into both the abiding

significance of race and gender in American life as well as a remarkable swell of shifts

and transformations that have taken shape in racial and gendered discourses over the

past decade. Since the 1970s, we have witnessed the slow march of strategic reversals in

public discourse on programs such as affirmative action. As they have taken hold in

the current post-civil rights epoch, or as many now term it, the ‘‘post-soul’’ era, these

reversals have produced a notable turn in the history of social justice in the United

States: where, 40 years ago, affirmative action had emerged as a necessary fix for

structural inequalities and ingrained habits of racism and sexism, these programs*having spawned a ‘‘toxic system of quotas, preferences, and set-asides’’ held in place by

the ‘‘absolutely stupid race regime we have in America’’*now survived, in public

policy and popular consciousness alike, as ‘‘mutant progeny’’ of the 1960s. In this

essay, we compare strategic rhetoric in affirmative action debates across the 10-year

period separating the CCRI and the MCRI, from 1996 to 2006, as a means of

examining the shifting terrain of struggles over racial justice in the post-soul era.

Drawing on Jodi Melamed’s discussion of ‘‘neoliberal multiculturalism,’’2 we argue

that a neoliberal conception of difference*where difference is depoliticized, relegated

to the private sphere, and thus divorced from relationships of power*was deployed

in affirmative action debates in Michigan to announce the end of race and gender

discrimination as well as to discredit a progressive state-sponsored multiculturalism.

For Melamed, neoliberalism’s co-opting of multiculturalism ‘‘codes the wealth,

mobility, and political power of neoliberalism’s beneficiaries to be the just desserts of

‘multicultural world citizens,’ while representing those neoliberalism dispossesses to

be handicapped by their own monoculturalism.’’3 Thus, ‘‘neoliberal multicultural-

ism’’ presents neoliberalism as a socially progressive politics by articulating a

colorblind, cosmopolitan, post-race subject, while characterizing as ‘‘backwards’’ or

‘‘racist’’ those who invoke racial claims.4 We expand on this work by recalling that

neoliberalism’s flexibility permits it to be deployed to depoliticize other categories of

social difference as well. Neoliberalism’s rejection of the social*its appearance as

culture-less, value-less, and above and/or outside ‘‘politics’’*enables it to discur-

sively bring together diverse reactionary movements against a more inclusive and just

conception of citizenship.

Affirmative action, we argue, is properly seen as a ‘‘normalizing technology of state

control’’ made possible by the classifying and categorizing of the population that is

402 B. Jones & R. Mukherjee

characteristic of the ‘‘governmentalized state.’’5 In this light, the neoliberal impulse to

depoliticize social difference has contributed to a contemporary crisis in the

legitimacy of the state to manage inequalities structured along lines of race and

gender. Affirmative action is a particularly interesting case for examining neoliberal

challenges to state-sponsored multiculturalism because it denotes both a politics of

recognition oriented toward transformation of the ‘‘cultural criteria that manifest

civil competence’’6 (i.e., the diversity rationale) as well as a politics of redistribution.

In other words, affirmative action policies are doubly intolerable in the neoliberal

imagination because they require recognition of social difference in the political

realm, and, moreover, because they insist that such difference should direct state

efforts in the redistribution of resources and opportunities.

What we find in our analysis of the Michigan debates is that there has been a notable

shift in terms of the grounds on which a progressive multicultural vision of citizenship

is presently being contested. While affirmative action policies since the Supreme

Court’s Bakke decision in 1978 have largely been disputed within a paradigm of

redistribution, we find that the stakes have shifted in Michigan to an emphasis on

disputes over the legitimacy of racial and gendered recognition by the state. In her

analysis of CCRI rhetoric,7 Roopali Mukherjee noted that anti-affirmative action

arguments were focused on a perceived violation of the mythic meritocracy whereby

undeserving black culprits (i.e., ‘‘quota addicts,’’ and ‘‘welfare queens’’) received state-

allocated preferences at the expense of more qualified white victims of ‘‘reverse

discrimination.’’8 At stake in the CCRI was determining what criteria could legitimately

be considered in the allocation of public resources. Thus, CCRI debates centered on

arguments over deservedness, those who could be counted as ‘‘truly needy,’’ and what

constituted a level playing field. In Michigan, we find a new, less overtly racial strategy,

whereby the state’s recognition of difference itself is called into question. That is to say,

we find a pronounced shift in which racialized antagonisms and disputes over fairness

and equal treatment are replaced by a seemingly anti-racist narrative, pitting a

neoliberal, multicultural, race-blind nation against an interventionist, race-conscious,

‘‘social engineering’’ state. This changing terrain of assaults on affirmative action

reveals ongoing shifts in the post-soul era in the logics of contemporary racial politics

and the present power of neoliberal discourse to legitimize and unite diverse

movements against citizenship. Furthermore, it points to new adjustments in the

rationalities and techniques for the management of racial subjects.

In this essay, we reveal recent developments in strategic neoliberal deployments

through an analysis of rhetoric in ongoing struggles over affirmative action. Drawing

on the work of critical race and critical rhetoric scholars, as well as social theory on

citizenship in the post-soul moment, we critically examine the relationship between

neoliberalism and difference in order to better understand how assaults on racial

justice have seemed to avoid racist appeals completely by invoking the neoliberal

myth of free, entrepreneurial individuals struggling against a meddling, inefficient,

authoritarian state. That is to say, in the period separating the CCRI and the MCRI,

we argue, racial politics have evolved, strategically aligning with broader neoliberal

movements and discourses advocating for the privatization of race and other forms

From California to Michigan 403

of difference, less state intervention, and adherence to market logics in the governing

of the social. This shift has permitted the incorporation of gender arguments*a

strategy that was not possible a decade ago when debates were centered over

competing claims of racism. Moreover, we find such shifts have enabled the anti-

affirmative action movement to discursively align itself with contemporary assaults

on a range of social and cultural rights.

A Brief History of the MCRI

The MCRI, labeled the ‘‘son of 209,’’9 grew out of two Supreme Court cases

contesting the consideration of race in admissions decisions at the University of

Michigan. Jennifer Gratz, a white woman who became the lead plaintiff in Gratz v.

Bollinger, argued that the university’s consideration of race in undergraduate

admissions procedures violated her right to equal protection under the Fourteenth

Amendment. The court upheld the constitutionality of the consideration of race in

admissions procedures, but ruled in a 6�3 decision that the point system used by the

university in undergraduate admissions did not meet the ‘‘strict scrutiny’’ standard,

‘‘which requires that these mechanisms be ‘narrowly tailored’ to achieve the ‘interest

in education diversity that the respondents claim justify their program.’’’10

In a second lawsuit brought against the University of Michigan, Grutter v. Bollinger,

lead plaintiff Barbara Grutter, also a white woman, contested the use of affirmative

action policies in admissions to the Michigan Law School. The court voted 5�4 in

support of the Law School’s admissions procedures, regarded as a ‘‘highly-

individualized, holistic review of each applicant’s file.’’11 The Michigan decisions

clarified that ‘‘remedying past discrimination was not the only permissible

justification for race-based governmental action,’’ and, moreover, that the Law

School had a ‘‘compelling interest in attaining a diverse student body.’’12

For opponents of affirmative action, these decisions represented a setback,

reestablishing the constitutionality of the Supreme Court’s diversity rationale.13

Organizing for the MCRI began promptly in 2003, headed by executive director

Jennifer Gratz and funded by Connerly’s American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI).

After a failed attempt to get the initiative on the ballot in 2004, MCRI supporters

renewed their efforts in 2006. Throughout 2005 and early 2006, a series of heated and

highly visible debates circulated in the press in Michigan, including disputes over

proposed ballot language,14 allegations of deceptive tactics deployed by MCRI

petitioners to gather the required number of signatures, and charges that opposi-

tional groups engaged in ‘‘obstructionist tactics’’ aimed at circumventing the

democratic process.15 After several failed attempts to get the State Board of

Canvassers to approve the initiative, MCRI advocates filed a brief with the Michigan

Court of Appeals, which ended in the inclusion of the measure on the ballot in 2006.

In November 2006, the electorate in Michigan voted overwhelmingly in support of

the initiative, turning out 58% in support of and 42% against the measure.

Since 2006, the ACRI has organized similar campaigns in Arizona, Colorado,

Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. By November 2008, Connerly had succeeded in

404 B. Jones & R. Mukherjee

getting anti-affirmative action measures on the ballot in Nebraska and Colorado. In

Nebraska, Initiative 424, the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative, won by a 58 to 42

percent margin.16 Meanwhile, in a first show of popular resistance, voters in

Colorado turned out against Amendment 46, the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative,

defeating the measure by a narrow margin of roughly 33,000 votes.17

In the aftermath of the 2008 elections, political commentaries juxtaposed the

historic election of Barack Obama, the first African American to win the US

presidency with ballot victories, against affirmative action and the nationwide crush

of state-level initiatives against gay marriage.18 Complicating the epistemic ironies of

the moment, since 2008, neoliberal hegemonies had also suffered a series of

legitimation crises as breaking news covered a widening circle of collapse in US

financial markets and growing numbers of corporate and state elites began to

acknowledge the need for regulation over capital. Thus, the current moment reveals

remarkable paradoxes within neoliberal myths of free, entrepreneurial individuals,

dominant ethics of adherence to market logics in the governance of the social, and

evolving cultural mythologies of a ‘‘post-racial’’ America. Critical analysis of the

MCRI campaign, focusing on shifts in strategic rhetoric across the 10-year period

separating the CCRI and the MCRI, we argue, illuminates the terms of these

paradoxes, as well as offers us a concrete case to map crucial shifts within the logics of

citizenship, social welfare, and the racial state at the present moment.

Below we examine strategic adjustments that have emerged in anti-affirmative

action rhetoric in the time between the passing of the CCRI in 1996 and the success

of the MCRI in 2006. We maintain that policy debates are a critical communicative

process through which knowledge of the social is produced and contested.

Affirmative action debates in particular are revealing of what is at stake within

competing claims to ‘‘truths’’ in matters of racial and gendered social justice.

Following the work of critical rhetoric scholars, we examine shifting emphases in

strategic rhetoric on affirmative action as a means of engaging in a ‘‘purposeful post-

structural critical rhetoric’’ devoted to deconstructing the assumptions of dominant

civic discourses.19 We argue that in order to understand recent shifts and emphases in

debates over racialized justice, we must examine the new possibilities and enclosures

enabled by ongoing discursive formations of neoliberalism, neoliberal appropriations

of multiculturalism (or, more broadly, the depoliticization of difference), and,

equally, their abiding paradoxes.

Neoliberalism, Multiculturalism, and ‘‘New Racisms’’

David Harvey locates the neoliberal turn in the US in the period of transition from a

Fordist mode of production coupled with a Keynesian regime of state economic

regulation*a formation which accounted for a degree of economic stability and

social rights during the post-war period*to a post-Fordist regime emerging out of

the economic crisis of the early 1970s, characterized by the uneven development of

new ‘‘flexible’’ modes of capital accumulation and labor control.20 Nikolas Rose and

Peter Miller offer a parallel historical account of the neoliberal turn by pointing to the

From California to Michigan 405

rise of a new rationality for the governing and administering of all aspects of life that

emerged through the introduction of fiscal discipline as a means of reining in what

were seen as the excesses of the welfare state.21 As neoliberalism achieved political

voice through the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher administrations, it

encouraged economic deregulation, the increased mobility of workers and capital,

the undermining of organized labor and national sovereignty, the privatization of

social provision, and the dismantling of the welfare state through racialized

discourses of dependency and the valorization of the work ethic, individualism,

and personal responsibility.22

While neoliberal rhetoric has argued for free markets and smaller government, in

reality, the political project of neoliberalism has required a powerful state to regulate in

favor of corporate interests, to provide corporate welfare and absorb market risk, and

to intervene in order to suppress organizing and solidarity in the name of social rights,

labor rights, anti-imperialism, and the protection of the environment.23 Neoliberal-

ism, described as an ideationally-embedded rationality of ‘‘market fundamentalism,’’24

has involved the tendency to marketize everything (i.e., social and political capital)

and to frame all aspects of life in terms of incentive management and the ‘‘rational

entrepreneur.’’ Neoliberalism’s disdain for the social and for life itself has been

legitimated or obscured by the commonsense of citizenship as a relationship of

contractual exchange,25 new ethopolitical regimes of responsible and charitable

communities,26 the humanitarian- and citizenship-advocating work of non-govern-

mental organizations (NGOs), gestures of ‘‘compassionate’’ capitalism, as well as the

persistent belief that unregulated markets and unfettered capital accumulation are key

to and sufficient for social provision.

Recently, critical race scholars have focused on understanding the overlaps and

reinforcing logics of neoliberalism, multiculturalism, and ‘‘new racisms.’’27 For

example, Mukherjee has described how the language of liberalism, which legitimated

state intervention in the form of race conscious affirmative action policies during the

civil rights era, was co-opted by neoliberals in the 1990s in order to promote a

regressive race politics centered on the mythology of a multicultural (read as

‘‘colorblind’’ or ‘‘post-race’’) meritocracy, and to mount attacks on the legitimacy of

the welfare state.28 Similarly, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has argued that an important

aspect of ‘‘new racisms’’ is the emergence of a decontextualized abstract liberalism

that rejects the persistence of structural racism.29 Likewise, whiteness scholars,

particularly concerned with how the category of whiteness is constructed and

strategically deployed, as well as the ways in which it adapts to challenges to its

hegemony, have examined how whiteness makes use of colorblindness and the

language of multiculturalism in order to retain its invisibility and universality.30

Drawing on this work, we argue that we can better understand the shifting logics of

‘‘new racisms’’ through analysis of the ways in which a neoliberal conception of

difference has come to shape strategic deployments of multiculturalism. Under the

rule of neoliberalism, multiculturalism has emerged as a key terrain on which

struggles over competing versions of social justice are being waged. We define

multiculturalism as a politics of the Left advocating for recognition of social

406 B. Jones & R. Mukherjee

difference (including recognition of the particularity of whiteness) and rights to

cultural self-determination as a precondition for full democratic participation and

expression.31 As Katharyne Mitchell observes, a rich conception of multicultural

politics involves not just cultural inclusion or passive tolerance of cultural difference,

rather it actively transforms citizenship, reworking ‘‘for everyone the embodied

cultural criteria that manifest civil competence.’’32 That is to say, ‘‘diverse ways of

being in the world are recognized as legitimate, and the qualities of ‘out-group’

members are not stigmatized or relegated to the private sphere, but rather

reconstitute the notion of civil competence within the public sphere.’’33 It is

multiculturalism’s insistence on the public nature of culture and its inclusion of

cultural rights as essential to liberal democratic citizenship that puts it at odds with

neoliberal conceptions of citizenship.

A central feature of neoliberal discourse is its rejection of the social for an emphasis

on the autonomous individual*a belief succinctly reflected by Thatcher’s claim that

‘‘there is no such thing as society.’’ This extraction of the individual from the social

has manifested in the depoliticization and privatization of difference; that is, the

transformation of social identifications and solidarities that were once the domain of

the political to the private realm of consumption34*a process similar to what Wendy

Brown has termed the ‘‘culturalization’’ of politics.35 For Henry Giroux, race under

the rule of neoliberalism is reduced to a ‘‘privatized discourse that erases any trace of

racial injustice by denying the very notion of the social and the operations of power

through which racial politics are organized and legitimated.’’36 Likewise, David Theo

Goldberg has argued that the privatization of race signals not the end of racism, but

rather its structural transformation. Specifically, neoliberal racism involves both ‘‘the

protection of racially driven exclusions in the private sphere where they are set off-

limits to state intervention,’’ as well as the reworking of racial logics and techniques to

more silently and invisibly mark ‘‘those who threaten the fiscal well-being . . . or the

social security of the nation.’’37

It is in this context that the particular formation of neoliberal multiculturalism

emerges. As Melamed has observed, in the post-civil rights era, as neoliberalism

emerged as the dominant political rationality for the administering of all aspects of

life, culture came to be decoupled from its former racial referent.38 In this view, racial

reference transcends phenotype, and culture becomes a matter of individual choice,

enabling distinctions between ‘‘good’’ racial subjects who consume culture in private

and ‘‘pathological’’ racial subjects for whom culture provides a common ground for

an oppositional politics. This historical distancing of race from culture has worked to

undermine a progressive multiculturalism by bracketing the question of power,

legitimating a whole host of claims to inclusion and equal representation (i.e.,

religious fundamentalists, race supremacists), as well as new claims to margin-

alization (i.e., white male claims to ‘‘reverse discrimination’’). It is this neoliberal

conception of difference, isolated from relationships of power, and its concomitant

multiplication of claims of victimization (perceived on the political Right as

devolving into trivial disputes over ‘‘political correctness’’) in part, which has

undermined the legitimacy of the recognition of cultural difference in the public

From California to Michigan 407

sphere. Furthermore, it is this neoliberal understanding of difference in the post-soul

moment that has contributed to charges that the political Left has embraced culture

and identity politics at the expense of a politics of redistribution.39

These efforts to privatize the social and to articulate autonomous, privately

culture-consuming, liberal subjects has led to skepticism about the continuing

significance of race, enabling neoliberalism to assert a colorblind vision of social

integration. For critical race scholars, this neoliberal vision of colorblindness remains

untenable as long as inequalities in opportunity and outcome continue to be

distributed along racial lines. Furthermore, race scholars working in the area of

whiteness studies have made it clear that the rhetoric of colorblindness is not race

neutral. For Giroux, neoliberal colorblindness ‘‘deletes the relationship between racial

differences and power, and in doing so reinforces whiteness as the arbiter of value for

judging difference against a normative notion of homogeneity.’’40

In their analysis of Connerly’s failed Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI) campaign in

California in 2003, Lisa Flores, Dreama Moon, and Thomas Nakayama have noted

that whiteness is able to retain its ‘‘invisibility and racial neutrality’’ by appropriating

a neoliberal conception of multiculturalism as colorblindness.41 On the other hand,

the flexibility of whiteness also permits it to be deployed as a visible racial category

(as in white claims to ‘‘reverse discrimination’’). While we agree that whiteness as a

site of victimization ‘‘provides the cultural and political glue that holds together a

wide variety of reactionary racial politics,’’42 we argue that in Michigan, whiteness

adopts universality as the invisible racial reference for strategic deployments of

neoliberalism and neoliberal multiculturalism.

For Melamed, the success of the colorblind narrative enables the neoliberal

deployment of multiculturalism as signifying American or Western cosmopolitanism.

In this formulation, neoliberal multiculturalism emerges as ‘‘a form of official anti-

racism, now often reduced to a nonracialism, which hinders thinking about or acting

against the biopolitics of global capitalism.’’43 Thus neoliberalism’s appropriating of

multiculturalism obscures recognition of the racialized social structure of globalization,

allowing it to legitimate itself as a progressive global politics.44 Neoliberal multi-

culturalism, then, has the potential to be deployed internally to racially mark,

pathologize, and discipline culture-bearing individuals (regardless of phenotype), as

well as externally as a means of legitimating military interventions against ‘‘rogue’’ states.

The privatization of social difference has led to renewed attacks on the legitimacy

of the state’s ordering and classifying of the population according to race and gender.

Through deployments of neoliberal multiculturalism, policies such as affirmative

action that recognize social difference as a means of expanding cultural citizenship

and of redistributing resources more equitably, are viewed as the work of an activist

state acting on behalf of narrow, ‘‘monocultural’’ interests, rather than the general

interests of a multicultural, colorblind nation. Similarly, Flores, Moon, and

Nakayama attributed the RPI’s electoral failure in California in 2003 to a tactical

argument recognizing that health risks differ according to race. In other words,

opponents argued passage of the RPI would prohibit the recognition of racial

difference in the gathering of health information.45 The authors took small comfort

408 B. Jones & R. Mukherjee

in the fact that this tactic likely worked because it too depoliticized race, making race

‘‘available and significant to all people, not just people of color,’’ rather than

suggesting a new way of thinking about social difference.46

Understanding the failure of the RPI in this light illuminates the discursive logics

by which state-sponsored multiculturalism is presently on the retreat. Evidence of

this can be seen not just in ongoing movements at the state-level against affirmative

action, but also in post-9/11 resurgences of national particularisms and assimilation-

ism (i.e., pressures to curb immigration and tighten borders, the English-only

movement), as well as the backlash against movements for recognition and equal

rights to cultural expression*ranging from movements to preserve the hetero-

normativity of marriage to popular frustrations emerging from the view of the state

as defender of special interests and ‘‘political correctness’’ (as highlighted in the

recent Muslim foot bath controversy at the University of Michigan, Dearborn).

In the remainder of this essay, drawing on speech transcripts, press releases, essays,

bulletins, news articles, editorials, interviews, and private letters posted at the official

website of the MCRI throughout 2005 and 2006, we critically examine how neoliberal

rationalities are deployed and function in the context of the affirmative action

debates in Michigan to mask the racism underlying these appeals*what Melamed

refers to as a ‘‘deracialized racial reference’’47 or alternatively, what Goldberg describes

as ‘‘racisms without racism’’48*as well as to discredit a progressive multicultural

politics. These new strategic deployments of neoliberalism and appropriations of

multiculturalism, we argue, are crucial to understanding rhetorical developments that

have occurred in the period between the CCRI in 1996 and the MCRI in 2006 and

illustrate precisely the manner by which reactionary racial politics in the post-soul era

have seemed to avoid racisms altogether. Our hope is that this analysis will provide

insight into the shifting terrain of racial justice in the post-soul era as well as

highlight what is at stake in these debates for an oppositional politics.

Repositioning Enemies and Allies

Mukherjee’s analysis of rhetorical and discursive strategies in the CCRI debates a

decade earlier revealed two seemingly contradictory strategies emphasized by

supporters of that initiative. On the one hand, the California case revealed a strategic

emphasis on individual rights and responsibilities, and, in particular, the ‘‘burdens

that race- and gender-conscious policies placed on individuals.’’ On the other hand,

CCRI supporters implicitly pursued a strategy very much concerned with group

politics that emphasized racial rather than gendered difference as a means of marking

out lines of solidarity, rhetorically positioning ‘‘enemies’’ and ‘‘allies’’ of the

initiative.49 While white women could have equally been identified as the culprits

behind the perceived problem of ‘‘reverse discrimination,’’ the recognition of gender

difference was muted in favor of an emphasis on racial difference.50

Whiteness was deployed strategically in California to reference both particularity

and universality. On the one hand, neoliberal values, including imagined ideals of the

work ethic, self-reliance, and individual responsibility, were invoked to invisibly

From California to Michigan 409

reference ‘‘whiteness’’ as a normative category in opposition to presumably

unqualified and undeserving black recipients of ‘‘preferential treatment.’’ On the

other hand, claims of ‘‘reverse discrimination’’ in the CCRI worked alternatively to

render whiteness visible as a category of racial victimization.51

We argue that there has been a shift from California to Michigan, in which

reference to a ‘‘racialized enemy within,’’ the so-called ‘‘quota addicts’’ and ‘‘welfare

queens,’’ as well as white charges of ‘‘reverse discrimination’’ have largely been

abandoned. These strategies that emphasized race, competing claims to victimization,

and arguments over the distribution of resources have been replaced by a neoliberal

strategy that seeks instead to depoliticize and de-emphasize racial difference. The new

narrative in Michigan represents a redrawing of lines of solidarity, positioning a

neoliberal, multicultural, and cosmopolitan (read as ‘‘colorblind’’ or ‘‘post-race’’)

nation against a regressive, race-obsessed, interventionist state.

Disputing the legitimacy of a politics of recognition, by such logics, all citizens,

regardless of race or gender, are victims of the racial state’s classifications and

exceptions to the rule of neoliberalism that these governmental interventions imply.

While social difference is relegated to the realm of private choice and consumption,

race remains available to be deployed implicitly. That is to say, all citizens, regardless

of race, are free to choose either to live according to a pathological (coded as racial)

culture marked by self-interest and a false sense of victimization and entitlement or

to inhabit a normative, neoliberal, post-race, national culture, exhibited by hard

work, self-discipline, risk management, optimizing for the market, and resistance to

state intervention in all forms.52 While neoliberal multiculturalism is deployed to

signal the threat that the social engineering state ‘‘hijacked by special interests’’ poses

to the cosmopolitan, meritocratic nation, these logics also work to discredit a

progressive multicultural politics that seeks to recognize difference as a means of

expanding citizenship and working toward a more inclusive and egalitarian

conception of social justice.

MCRI advocates argued that state practices of recognizing race and gender only

worked to weaken national solidarity by instilling a sense of victimization and fueling

group antagonisms. For example, an MCRI press release explained how ending race-

based preferences would outlaw proposals that created divisions within and between

ethnic and racial groups. One example, the press release explained, involved a

proposal ‘‘based on a report that blames inner-city African American poverty on

Mexican, Asian and Arabic immigrants stealing resources and jobs from blacks.’’ The

proposal called for the creation of an area in Detroit called ‘‘African Town,’’ and the

founding of a taxpayer-funded corporation that would lend ‘‘money only to blacks

and only in the African Town area.’’53

Rather than suggesting that race-conscious policies produced white victims of

reverse discrimination, the strategy here was to hail all racial and ethnic minorities as

potential victims of new economic forms of segregation by the state. The African

Town proposal served as an instance of violence perpetrated by the state under the

guise of care, one of many racialized state mechanisms that created new, artificial

social divisions and reproduced a group sense of inadequacy, competition, and

410 B. Jones & R. Mukherjee

dependency. Emblematic of the malaise within liberal state programs, the cordoning

off of particular areas of the city into artificially delineated African Towns created

new spaces of exception to neoliberalism, new modes of state violence that added to

the economic burdens of taxpayers who would be left to foot the bill for policies that

violated neoliberal rationalities, and which deviated from values of equal economic

rights and self-sufficiency.

A second proposal, highlighted in MCRI press releases, based on a study that

found that ‘‘two-thirds of Harvard’s ‘African American’ student body hails directly

from immigration,’’ urged ‘‘divid[ing] African Americans further into two

categories*giving race-based preferences only to ‘authentically-American’ blacks

that had an ancestry dating back to slavery and taking those preferences away from

blacks [who had] immigrated recently and even [those who were] second-generation

immigrants.’’54 These examples enabled MCRI proponents to finger-point to policy

makers as ‘‘social engineers,’’ arbitrarily granting preferential treatment, and creating

divisions on the basis of race and ethnicity. These policies, rather than addressing

persisting biases, were positioned as creating and reinforcing social divisions,

encouraging divisive identity politics, and balkanized cultural warfare that ultimately

led to a fractured nation.

MCRI press releases suggested consistently that racial categories took on

significance precisely because of the state’s practice of classifying and ordering its

citizens in terms of race. Racial categorizing was imagined not as a way of directing

positive interventions and redressing inequalities structured along racial lines, but

instead as legitimating racisms themselves, reproducing the stigma of dependency,

encouraging divisive identity politics, and discouraging self-governing according to

neoliberal logics. These arguments reflect the preoccupation with disputing a politics

of recognition, and thus, they contribute to the neoliberal project of depoliticizing

and privatizing racial and gendered social identities, and of interpellating autono-

mous, self-disciplining national subjects.

Contesting the state’s practice of racial categorizing, MCRI advocates made a series

of ‘‘post-racial’’ arguments, suggesting that, increasingly, racial distinctions were

meaningless since unprecedented levels of biracialism and multiracialism had

produced Americans who could not identify solely with one race or another. Thus,

Connerly asked:

Why should the government be classifying and counting its citizens according totheir skin color? We all know the answer: because that is how public goodies aredistributed. If the government must continue counting by race, then, at the veryleast, acknowledge that growing segment of America that identifies with no specificrace but with several. As long as the race boxes remain, the president should issuean Executive Order allowing Americans who are ‘‘multiracial’’ the option ofchecking a ‘‘multiracial’’ box. Currently, the Office of Management and Budgetexpressly forbids that option. A better course of action, of course, would be toeliminate government classification based on race altogether by the 2010 Census.55

The logic of the post-racial argument here is to announce the end of the

significance of race in order to depoliticize racial difference and to justify a colorblind

From California to Michigan 411

worldview and politics. Aligning itself with discourses of the melting pot and the

‘‘new face of America,’’ distinctions between black and white are imagined as

increasingly less clear, concrete, or consequential.56 As Goldberg has argued, ‘‘the

challenge to the project of racial purity in the celebration of mixed-race identities is at

best ambiguous, (re)fixing the premises of the racializing project in place as it

challenges that project’s very terms of articulation.’’57 While it effaces material

inequalities that remain structured along color lines, imagining the nation as a

pastiche of hybrid identities would seem to challenge the duality of black and white*and the significance of race itself*and thus, the rationality and legitimacy of

affirmative action policies. However, Connerly’s ‘‘multiracial box,’’ which must be

defined in terms of what it is not*neither ‘‘white’’ nor ‘‘black’’*works paradoxically

to reaffirm the black/white binary. Furthermore, as has been noted, the proposal to

end racial categorization altogether would, paradoxically, require evermore vigilant

state monitoring of race to ensure that hiring and admissions decisions were, in fact,

truly race neutral.58

MCRI bulletins and press releases were replete with quotations from white women

and racial minorities describing the persistence of affirmative action as a stigma of

dependency, unnecessary paternalism, and as undermining their own sense of

achievement through individual merit. As Connerly argued, ‘‘I cannot describe to you

the anger and humiliation that fills me as a ‘black’ man to be viewed with such

misplaced pity and misguided patronization.’’59 Connerly’s use of quotations as a

distancing device likely indicates his non-identification with the state’s racial

categorizations. Similarly, Gregory Creswell, an African American resident of Detroit

(and later, libertarian candidate for state governor) argued:

Politicians insult me when they claim that we ‘‘need’’ race preferences, or even moreboldly, that preferences really help anyone ‘‘in need’’ of assistance. Look at theresults over the last 30 years. The idea that individuals with less preparation canperform well by simply being given a pass is something we all know doesn’t work.We need to expect more, not less, from our children, our schools, and ourpoliticians.60

The foregoing appeal touches on a host of themes that are common criticisms of

the MCRI: frustration over state paternalism and the violation of meritocratic norms,

anger at the stigma of dependency and other violences enacted by the state’s ‘‘social

engineering,’’ and a rejection of the continuing significance of race. Each of these

arguments works to discount a politics based on difference. As Connerly laments:

My heart cries especially for low-income black people who are such easy prey fordemagogues and charlatans who purport to represent black people, but only exploitthem for their personal benefit by appealing to their worst fears about theircountry. Many of these individuals who fall prey to ludicrous charges that ‘‘theman’’ hates black people are uneducated and rely on others for political guidance.How much longer must a majority of black people live a self-imposed exile outsidethe mainstream of American life simply because of their paranoia about race andtheir insistence on seeing every transaction in their country*social, political, andeconomic*through the prism of race? How can one live a full and complete life as

412 B. Jones & R. Mukherjee

a member of any community when constantly looking over one’s shoulder fordemons that were essentially exorcised decades ago?61

The classification of racial subjects by the state, Connerly argued, causes African

Americans to internalize the state’s racial hierarchies and to resign themselves to a life

of ‘‘racial paranoia and a false sense of exclusion’’ from the mainstream of American

life.62 Inequalities structured along racial lines are thus a product of a self-imposed

form of segregation, encouraged by the state. Rather than viewing ‘‘every transaction

. . . through the prism of race,’’ Connerly demands that African Americans recognize

their encounters with racisms as mere ‘‘paranoia,’’ and instead, pull themselves up by

their proverbial bootstraps. Following the trope of paternalism and self-reliance,

African Americans are portrayed as passive victims who must remake themselves as

active, rational, neoliberal subjects.

White women similarly helped carry the torch against state paternalism. While

‘‘reverse discrimination’’ arguments rendered whiteness visible in the CCRI debates,

the theme of white victimization in the MCRI rhetoric was effaced by white women’s

angry claims of victimization at the hands of the state on the basis of gender. Echoing

arguments on behalf of racial minorities against state paternalism and the stigma of

dependency MCRI campaign director Jennifer Gratz argued: ‘‘As a woman, I’m

offended that anyone thinks that I need a preference to compete and I have a different

message: Women can and have competed without preferences and women deserve the

respect of only being offered a job, a promotion, a contract, etc. because she is the

best person for the position.’’63 These arguments against state paternalism are an

interesting example of a strategy whereby social identities are rendered political as a

means of ultimately depoliticizing them. In other words, difference is rhetorically

invoked as a means of calling for a return to blindness to difference.

Likewise, Barbara Grutter’s speech at the announcement of the MCRI suggested

how white women were doubly discriminated against on the basis of both race and

gender by unnamed ‘‘bureaucrats in public institutions [who] discriminate with

impunity.’’64

Thirty years ago as a young woman, I entered a sexist work environment,empowered and emboldened by the promise of the equal opportunity statementand encouraged by the strides being made*only to find myself 25 years laterdiscriminated against on yet another basis*this time race. That is not progress!65

In contrast with oppositions set up in the CCRI campaign that pitted white

women against African Americans, the MCRI arguments drew connections between

the shared subalternity of white women and racial minorities, portraying them as

autonomous, neoliberal, and multicultural (that is, ‘‘post-racial’’ and ‘‘post-

feminist’’) subjects united against state discrimination and intervention. Thus,

white women were positioned as allies of the movement, who together with

comparably victimized blacks, suffered a shared history of state violence and

repression. As Connerly put it, ‘‘to deny Jennifer Gratz and Barbara Grutter access

to the University of Michigan (UM) in the name of ‘diversity’ is a distinction

without difference in denying James Meredith access to ‘Ole Miss’ because of his

From California to Michigan 413

race.’’66 Such arguments, moreover, allowed anti-affirmative action debates to

expand in order to dispute the public recognition of other social identities, namely

gender. While CCRI advocates largely fell silent on the question of the positive

consideration of gender, this new frame of a neoliberal, multicultural subject against

a racist and sexist social engineering state permitted race and gender to be talked

about together in Michigan.

The question of gender preferences entered the debate in Michigan with a post-

feminist bent*empowering women to reject a paternalistic state and break the glass

ceiling through their own merit, while at the same time reaffirming a patriarchal

conception of the family. MCRI supporters argued that affirmative action created

competition between men and women for the same positions, upsetting the gendered

division of labor within the household, and posing a challenge to patriarchal

structures that sustained the nuclear family. As Jennifer Gratz put it:

Gender preferences to men or women harm everyone by distorting the way familiesand societies are structured. Just as I would never consider giving a futuregranddaughter a preference over a grandson, or have any desire to personallyreceive a preference over my brother, government should never use gender as areason to give special treatment. Not only are preferences wrong, they arefundamentally destructive to the family and to relationships between men andwomen.67

Neoliberal rationality, and embedded within it, the logic of the nuclear family, were

thus violated insofar as capitalism relies on women’s unpaid labor performed in the

familial sphere, allowing the reproduction of ‘‘masculine’’ paid labor. In this way,

the terms of the MCRI debate were structured on grounds that affirmative action poses

a threat to nuclear families by pitting ‘‘wives against husbands and brothers against

sisters.’’ Statements such as this worked to individualize social difference, de-centering

women as a group with common political interests and framing affirmative action

policies as an individual and personal matter of choosing between a son and a

daughter.68

For Lauren Berlant, the legitimacy of state regulation and intervention in family

life is made possible in part by a neo-conservative discourse that works to politicize

the intimate sphere, positioning the family and the conduct of individuals at the

center of debates over the moral strength of the nation.69 Thus, much like the

argument against racial diversity that race ‘‘preferences’’ undermine the nation by

contradicting the doxa of market and neoliberal sensibilities, the state’s under-

mining of the family through gender preferences represents a second front, insofar

as familial stability and the values instilled in subjects through the apparatus of the

family are imagined to stand in for the moral fabric of the nation. Thus, the framing

of affirmative action policies as a threat to the traditional family structure aligns

itself with related arguments circulating in the public sphere, including current

campaigns to preserve the heteronormativity of marriage and debates over the

legality of abortion and the legitimacy of the state to manage and control women’s

bodies.

414 B. Jones & R. Mukherjee

Valuing Diversity: The State vs. The Market

As we have suggested, an important strategic emphasis in Michigan were challenges

to the legitimacy of the state’s recognition of social difference and the value of

diversity. Disputing the commonsense that the nation’s strength lies in its diversity

and in the expansion of social and cultural citizenship, advocates of MCRI called on

competing neoliberal logics to argue that the nation’s economic prosperity should be

attributed to meritocratic norms. Thus, unlike the CCRI case, MCRI proponents

primarily criticized affirmative action not in terms of fairness or deservedness (i.e.,

imagining black ‘‘quota addicts’’ versus white victims of ‘‘reverse discrimination’’),

but as an irrational violation of neoliberal logics, and thus, a threat to the nation and

the colorblind national subject. Diversity, in this formulation, is another case of the

state catering to ‘‘political correctness.’’ As Connerly argued:

There are few ideals that are more fundamental to the definition of America thanequality. But this ideal is constantly being trampled in the service of ‘‘diversity.’’ . . .The rationale for this new religion of ‘‘diversity’’ is that America is a better placewhen all of our institutions are ‘‘diverse.’’ . . . There is not one major Americansuccess throughout our history that can be placed at the doorstep of ‘‘diversity.’’ Allthat we are as a nation we owe to merit and individual enterprise. A quota system isthe antithesis of a meritocracy. Quotas seek to build a workforce, a student body, ateam, that ‘‘looks like America’’ or that ‘‘reflect[s] the ethnic and racial compositionof the community.’’ An enterprise or venue based on merit simply tries to be thebest that it can be with nary a thought given to the physical or ancestralcharacteristics of those involved.70

Diversity’s trampling of equality is indicative of neoliberalism’s hostility to

difference. Affirmative action’s assaults on ‘‘merit and individual enterprise’’ were

framed as undermining values considered ‘‘national.’’ Connerly’s appeal to market

logics and his dismissal of the diversity rationale reflect a narrow view of the nation as

a project in efficient entrepreneurship and the accumulation of capital. The state’s

consideration of race, gender, and other social considerations with the goal of

generating diversity in institutions of higher education, along with the logic that a

diverse group selected not according to merit alone is by definition substandard, was

linked in the MCRI arguments to a loss of excellence in research institutions,

particularly in the technological and scientific fields deemed crucial to the

maintenance of US economic competitiveness. Likewise, in terms of state contracting,

affirmative action policies were tied to the costs of hiring black- or female-owned

firms that were presumed to be less cost-effective and less efficient. These exceptions

to neoliberalism were seen by MCRI advocates as signaling the acceptance of

mediocrity in all domains administered by the state.

MCRI advocates occasionally conceded that diversity could be a desirable social

outcome, but that it was best achieved through adherence to market logics. For

example, an MCRI bulletin reported a study finding that African American students

admitted to top-tier law schools under affirmative action policies were reportedly

more likely to be unprepared and to drop out than other students. However, if those

same students were admitted to less demanding programs according to individual

From California to Michigan 415

merit alone, the study suggested, they would be more likely to graduate.71 Arguing

that the specific problem of a lack of black lawyers be left to the market, MCRI

proponents were able to see beyond systemic racism and white privilege in order to

suggest that the interests of all were best served by adhering to neoliberal logics and

by keeping the state out of the business of ‘‘social engineering.’’

Race, Rationality, and Neoliberal Governmentality

Assaults on affirmative action, as they have played out over the course of the past

decade, offer a number of crucial insights about the shifting discursive terrain of race

and racial justice in the current post-soul era. First, they showcase the growing

epistemic legitimacy of the neoliberal excision of social difference from the public

sphere. Illuminating the consequences of its enclosure into the private realm, they

reveal, for example, how abiding race and gender inequities are eclipsed in public

discourse, how state mandates for racialized and gendered redistribution have been

effectively gutted, and ultimately, how the legitimacy of ethno-cultural and gendered

recognition by the state has been eviscerated in recent years.

Second, these shifts illuminate the potency of neoliberal multiculturalism and

other rhetorical strategies aimed at depoliticizing difference in reducing racial and

gendered programs for social justice to mere ‘‘political correctness,’’ and in

celebrating opponents of such programs as colorblind, cosmopolitan champions of

a ‘‘new America.’’ Neoliberal adherence to market logics in the governing of the social

enables interpellations of ‘‘post-race’’ and ‘‘post-feminist’’ strivers as ideal citizens

who compliantly buy into the commonsense of citizenship as a relationship of

contractual exchange and the belief that unregulated markets and unfettered capital

accumulation are key to and sufficient for social provision.

In this light, the strategic alignment of anti-affirmative action rhetoric with the

logics of other neoliberal assaults on citizenship, including recent movements to

protect the heteronormativity of marriage and to manage fears of an ‘‘activist’’ state

working on behalf of ‘‘narrow interests,’’ has worked to anchor more deeply

neoliberalism’s political legitimacy. It is in this sense that the historic election of the

first African American to the US presidency is of a piece with ballot victories against

affirmative action and the nationwide crush of state-level initiatives against gay

marriage. Pitting idealized notions of a neoliberal, post-race, post-feminist, and

difference-blind nation against an interventionist, race- and gender-conscious, social

engineering state, these electoral victories hint simultaneously at the ethical and

political costs of the state’s management of inequalities structured along lines of race

and gender, as well as the epistemic rationality of ‘‘post-racial’’ state discourses. The

current arc of the ascendancy of neoliberalism, it will appear, enables vicious assaults

on social justice and the logics of social provision while it simultaneously redefines

the expansive redistributive mandates of multiculturalism to fit the doxa of market

fundamentalisms and ‘‘post-race’’ and ‘‘post-feminist’’ entrepreneurisms.

In drawing out these comparisons, we take caution to avoid leveling social

differences as Ward Connerly does when he suggests that ‘‘to deny Jennifer Gratz and

416 B. Jones & R. Mukherjee

Barbara Grutter access to UM in the name of ‘diversity’ is a distinction without

difference in denying James Meredith access to ‘Ole Miss’ because of his race.’’72

While our analysis alludes to the ways in which neoliberalism presently works to

bring together diverse movements against a politics of recognition, we must also be

sensitive to how these strategies are shaped in relation to the particular institutional

and political histories of different categories of difference. Faced with diverse

pressures, the state has historically taken steps to institutionalize anti-racism and

anti-sexism, permitting neoliberals to assert that what remains of racial inequalities

are byproducts of an artificial, state-imposed ‘‘culture of victimization’’ and what

remains of gender inequalities derives from a stigma of continued ‘‘state paternal-

ism.’’ It is important to note, however, that the same cannot be said for sexuality.

Surprisingly, the myth of an ‘‘activist’’ state defending ‘‘political correctness’’

continues to persist despite a history of policies such as ‘‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’’

and the ‘‘Defense of Marriage Act’’ that reflect a persistent unwillingness to commit

to the institutionalization of gay rights.73

Our findings suggest finally that an oppositional politics must be prepared to

engage with not only the rejection of racism and sexism, but also the larger neoliberal

assault on citizenship and the welfare state. While the Obama administration has

made some gestures to extend social rights*most notably through the promise of

expanding healthcare and funding for education*the rule of neoliberal logics

persists with bipartisan support through workfare, the paradigm of citizenship as

contract (rather than status), the apparent indifference to the social violence resulting

from the push for ‘‘free’’ markets, the proliferation of ideological and structural

constraints on organized labor, the institutionalization of charitable and business

models of social provision, and so on. As the consequences of unbridled market

fundamentalisms play out on the backs of ordinary Americans, foreclosed home-

owners, and bankrupted small business owners whose fortunes are etched in sharp

contrast against those glibly absorbing state-sponsored corporate bailouts and

bonuses, we offer this analysis of the MCRI in the hope that if national values of

equality and social justice can be deployed to support a regressive, neoliberal

conception of citizenship, perhaps they can be redirected to support the expansion of

citizenship as well.

Notes

[1] In the decade between the success of the CCRI in 1996 and in Michigan in 2006, we have

witnessed similar debates over the fate of affirmative action programs in Florida, Texas,

Washington, and Nebraska. In the immediate aftermath of the CCRI, grassroots organizing

efforts to get popular initiatives on state ballots modeled closely after the Californian

measures were reported in as many as 21 states nationwide and at the federal level. See Lou

Freedberg, ‘‘GOP Trying to Ban Affirmative Action,’’ San Francisco Chronicle, June 18, 1997,

A1; William H. Honan, ‘‘Efforts to Bar Selection Based on Race: Moves Are Made Across the

Nation,’’ New York Times, March 31, 1996, A14; Mark Hornbeck, ‘‘Engler quiet on racial

quotas,’’ Detroit News, May 18, 1998, D1; Herbert A. Sample, ‘‘Prop. 209’s Backer Has New

Goals,’’ San Diego Union-Tribune, November 10, 1998, A10; Sam H. Verhovek and

From California to Michigan 417

B. Drummond Ayres, Jr., ‘‘The 1998 Elections: Voters Back End to State Preferences,’’ New

York Times, November 4, 1998, B2.

[2] See Jodi Melamed, ‘‘The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal

Multiculturalism,’’ Social Text 89, no. 24 (2006): 1�24.

[3] Ibid., 1.

[4] Ibid., 1.

[5] See Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, Foucault and Political Reason:

Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and the Rationalities of Government (London: Routledge, 1996);

Michel Foucault, ‘‘Governmentality,’’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed.

Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1991), 87�104; David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,

2002); David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism

(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, Governing the Present:

Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008); Ann

Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial

Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

[6] Katharyne Mitchell, ‘‘Geographies of Identity: Multiculturalism Unplugged,’’ Progress in

Human Geography 28 (2004): 642.

[7] Roopali Mukherjee, ‘‘Regulating Race in the California Civil Rights Initiative: Enemies, Allies

and Alibis,’’ Journal of Communication 50 (2000): 27�47.

[8] Ibid., 33�9.

[9] Earlier, in 1998, voters in the state of Washington approved Initiative 200, an anti-affirmative

action measure that closely resembled the CCRI, and was consequently referred to as the

‘‘son of 209’’ in press accounts nationwide. See ‘‘Initiative 200: Another Blow to Affirmative

Action,’’ Star Tribune, November 7, 1998, 18A. The MCRI, then, is properly one among a

family of anti-affirmative action siblings, each produced by a specific combination of

political lineage and discursive circumstance.

[10] ‘‘Excerpts from Justices’ Opinions on Michigan Affirmative Action Cases,’’ New York Times,

June 24, 2003, A24.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] In the Supreme Court’s decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978),

Justice Lewis F. Powell staked out the constitutionality of the ‘‘diversity rationale’’ that

permitted the use of race as a ‘‘plus factor’’ in admissions decisions. Simply put, in the

language of constitutional law, race can be permissibly considered in admissions decisions

when its use is ‘‘narrowly tailored’’ to promote a ‘‘compelling governmental interest’’ in

promoting diversity. The Bakke Court allowed race to be taken into account ‘‘as one factor

among many’’ in individualized evaluations of applicants, that is, as a ‘‘plus factor’’ within

competitive admissions policies.

[14] In 1997, voters in Houston rejected a similar initiative that many attributed to the inclusion

of language indicating it would ‘‘end affirmative action programs.’’ See NAACP, ‘‘Affirmative

Action History,’’ http://www.detroitnaacp.org/publicpolicy/affirmative.asp (accessed February

17, 2005). Given that public polls find consistently that Americans are opposed to racial

quotas but strongly sympathetic toward affirmative action, the inclusion of the term in ballot

summaries for the CCRI had earlier yielded a prolonged court battle between the California

Attorney General who was charged with wording the summaries and CCRI opponents who

argued that a ballot summary that made reference to ‘‘preferential treatment’’ but remained

silent on ‘‘affirmative action’’ misled voters by making the language of the measure more

palatable than it might have otherwise been to voters. See Harriet Chiang, ‘‘Judge Wants

‘Affirmative Action’ in Prop. 209 Summary,’’ San Francisco Chronicle, August 2, 1996, A22;

John Howard, ‘‘Supreme Court Upholds Lundgren on Prop. 209: Ruling Bars Language

418 B. Jones & R. Mukherjee

Describing it as Repeal of Affirmative Action,’’ The Fresno Bee, August 13, 1996, A3.

Mukherjee, ‘‘Regulating Race in the California Civil Rights Initiative,’’ 29.

[15] S. D. Melzer, ‘‘Michigan Meets Malcolm X: Governor Granholm Joins Forces with a

Trotskyite Group to Suppress Democracy,’’ Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2005, A13.

[16] Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative, ‘‘Yes on 424!’’ http://www.nebraskacri.org/ (accessed March

21, 2009).

[17] Tim Hoover, ‘‘Amendment 46 Fizzling Out,’’ Denver Post, November 7, 2008. http://

www.denverpost.com/ballotissues08/ci_10920596 (accessed March 21, 2009).

[18] See, for example, Judith Butler, ‘‘Uncritical Exuberance,’’ November 5, 2008, http://

www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/11/05/18549195.php (accessed June 2, 2009); Bill Fletcher,

Jr., ‘‘Obama*History, Challenges and Possibilities,’’ November 6, 2008, http://www.

BlackCommentator.com (accessed June 2, 2009); Salim Muwakkil, ‘‘The Squandering of

Obama,’’ In These Times, July 14, 2007, http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3268/ (accessed

August 22, 2010); Adolph Reed, Jr., ‘‘Obama No,’’ The Progressive, May 2008, http://

www.progressive.org/mag_reed0508 (accessed August 22, 2010); Adolph Reed, Jr., ‘‘Where

Obamaism Seems to be Going,’’ July 16, 2008, http://www.blackagendareport.com (accessed

June 2, 2009); David R. Roediger, How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and

Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon (London: Verso, 2008); ‘‘Roundtable: From King to

Obama: Race in America,’’ Social Science Research Council, April 4, 2008, http://

www.ssrc.org/raceinamerica (accessed June 2, 2009); Paul Street, Barack Obama and the

Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008); Jonathan Tilove, ‘‘For Scholars of

Race, an Obama Dilemma,’’ Seattle Times, August 13, 2008, http://seattletimes.nwsource.

com/html/nationworld/2008109755_scholars13.html (accessed August 22, 2010).

[19] Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, ‘‘Critical Rhetorics of Controversy,’’ Western Journal of

Communication 63 (1999): 526�38; Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders:

Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University

Press, 2002), 19.

[20] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Social Change

(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 121�89.

[21] Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, eds., ‘‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of

Government,’’ in Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life,

(Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 53�83.

[22] See Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, (New York: New

Press, 1999); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2005); Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). For a genealogical account of how state

dependency came to be racialized and gendered in the US, see Nancy Fraser and Linda

Gordon, ‘‘A Genealogy of ‘Dependency’: Tracing a Keyword of the US Welfare State,’’ in

Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition (London: Routledge,

1997), 121�50.

[23] Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. See also Margaret R. Somers, Genealogies of

Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2008). Likewise, in ‘‘The Strong Neo-liberal State: Crime, Consumption,

Governance,’’ Theory & Event 8, no. 3 (2005): 1. Paul A. Passavant argues that rather than

weakening the power of the state, neoliberalism has instead spurred proliferations in state

tactics of governance, both repressive and ideological, that coalesce around twin priorities of

punishing crime and managing consumption. It is important to note too that neoliberalism

has additionally created powerful structural and ideological barriers that significantly limit

the possibility of an oppositional politics.

[24] See Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship, 66�92 for a discussion of neoliberalism as market

fundamentalism and its relationship to religious fundamentalisms.

From California to Michigan 419

[25] Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, ‘‘Contract versus Charity: Why is There No Social

Citizenship in the United States?,’’ in The Citizenship Debates: A Reader, ed. Gershon Shafir

(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 113�30. See also Somers,

Genealogies of Citizenship.

[26] For a discussion of ethopolitics and the governing of responsible communities, see Nikolas

Rose, ‘‘Community, Citizenship and the Third Way,’’ American Behavioral Scientist 43 (2000):

1395�411.

[27] See Henry A. Giroux, ‘‘Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial: Anti-Black Racist

Pedagogy under the Reign of Neoliberalism,’’ Communication Education 52 (2003): 191�211.

Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 339; Melamed, ‘‘The Spirit of Neoliberalism,’’ 13�20.

[28] See Roopali Mukherjee, The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era

(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 198�230.

[29] Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, ‘‘‘New Racism,’ Color-Blind Racism, and the Future of Whiteness in

America.’’ in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, ed. Ashley W. Doane and

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (New York: Routledge, 2003), 271�84.

[30] See Lisa A. Flores, Dreama G. Moon, and Thomas K. Nakayama, ‘‘Dynamic Rhetorics of

Race: California’s Racial Privacy Initiative and the Shifting Grounds of Racial Politics,’’

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 181�201; Charles A. Gallagher,

‘‘Color-blind Privilege: The Social and Political Functions of Erasing the Color Line in Post

Race America,’’ Race, Gender & Class 10 (2003): 22; Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L.

Krizek, ‘‘Whiteness as Strategic Rhetoric,’’ in Whiteness: The Communication of Social

Identity, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin (London: Sage Publications, 1999),

87�106; Catherine R. Squires, Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial

America, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007).

[31] For a discussion of cultural recognition as a precondition for full democratic participation,

see Seyla Benhabib, ‘‘From Redistribution to Recognition? The Paradigm Change of

Contemporary Politics,’’ in The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 49�81; Nancy Fraser, ‘‘From Redistribu-

tion to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘‘Postsocialist’’ Age,’’ in Justice Interruptus:

Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition (London: Routledge, 1997), 11�40.

[32] Mitchell, ‘‘Geographies of Identity,’’ 642.

[33] Ibid.

[34] The neoliberal moment has seen the depoliticization of formerly politicized identities often

associated with the new identity-based social movements (i.e., ‘‘post-feminism,’’ ‘‘post-

soul’’). On the other hand, some collective identities and solidarities (political affiliation,

religion, national belonging) have thrived under this particular formation of neoliberalism

and neoconservatism. For a further discussion see Wendy Brown, ‘‘American Nightmare:

Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,’’ Political Theory 34 (2006): 690�714; See also Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 81�5.

[35] Brown refers to the way in which political differences are recast in public discourse as

cultural differences. See Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity

and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 19.

[36] Giroux, ‘‘Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial,’’ 192.

[37] Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 335�7.

[38] See Melamed, ‘‘The Spirit of Neoliberalism,’’ 1�24.

[39] For an example of this type of critique, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity:

How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).

Nancy Fraser, on the other hand, has argued for an understanding of how both culture and

political economy ‘‘work together to produce injustices.’’ See Justice Interruptus, 3.

[40] Giroux, ‘‘Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial,’’ 199.

[41] Flores, Moon, and Nakayama, ‘‘Dynamic Rhetorics of Race,’’ 184.

[42] Howard Winant, cited in Flores, Moon, and Nakayama, ‘‘Dynamic Rhetorics of Race,’’ 184.

420 B. Jones & R. Mukherjee

[43] Melamed, ‘‘The Spirit of Neoliberalism,’’ 1.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Flores, Moon, and Nakayama, ‘‘Dynamic Rhetorics of Race,’’ 192.

[46] Ibid., 195�6.

[47] Melamed, ‘‘The Spirit of Neoliberalism,’’ 16.

[48] Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 360�1.

[49] Mukherjee, ‘‘Regulating Race in the California Civil Rights Initiative,’’ 33�9.

[50] Ibid., 35.

[51] Mukherjee, The Racial Order of Things, 41�5; Squires, Dispatches from the Color Line, 75�82.

[52] This neoliberal positioning has also informed strategic moves to discredit one of the MCRI’s

most visible detractors, By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). BAMN was described by

conservative commentators in the mainstream press as a ‘‘radical, socialist group’’ displaying

contempt for democracy. See Thomas Bray, ‘‘Beware Using ‘Racist’ Label in Racial

Preferences Battle,’’ Detroit News, August 17, 2005, http://www.michigancivilrights.org/

media/bray16Aug2005.pdf (accessed February 17, 2006); Anthony Dick, ‘‘Uncivil ‘Civil-

Rights’ Group: BAMN vs. Equality,’’ August 18, 2005, http://www.nationalreview.com/

comment/dick200508180831.asp (accessed February 17, 2006); Michigan Civil Rights

Initiative, ‘‘Statement Regarding BAMN National Chairman’s Intimidation Tactics,’’ June

13, 2006, http://www.michigancivilrights.org/6_13_06_pr.html (accessed January 11, 2009).

[53] Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, ‘‘Detroit’s Radical City-Funded ‘African Town’ Business

District,’’ September 26, 2004, http://www.michigancivilrights.org/media/09262004-africa-

town.pdf (accessed February 17, 2006).

[54] Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, ‘‘MCRI Puts End to Minority Group Fighting for Race

Preferences,’’ October 6, 2004, http://www.chetlyzarko.com/business/10062004-infighting-

press-release.pdf (accessed January 11, 2009).

[55] Ward Connerly, ‘‘End the Race Party: Identity Politics Will Get the GOP Nothing Good,’’

National Review Online, September 30, 2005, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/

connerly200509300813.asp (accessed February 17, 2006).

[56] For further discussion of multiracialism as a challenge to the white/black binary, see Lauren

Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 175�220; Squires, Dispatches from the Color

Line, 101�24.

[57] David Theo Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (London: Routledge,

1997), 61.

[58] Flores, Moon, and Nakayama, ‘‘Dynamic Rhetorics of Race,’’ 189�90; Mukherjee, The Racial

Order of Things, 77.

[59] Ward Connerly, ‘‘Taking it to Michigan: Announcing the ‘Michigan Civil Rights Act,’’’ July

8, 2003, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-connerly070803.asp (accessed

February 17, 2006).

[60] Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, ‘‘Michigan Civil Rights Initiative Challenges Governor

Granholm, Politicians for Real Solutions,’’ January 19, 2005, http://www.michigancivilrights.

org/media.html (accessed February 17, 2006).

[61] Ward Connerly, ‘‘End the Race Party.’’

[62] Ibid.

[63] Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, ‘‘Some Women’s Groups Show Inconsistency on Race/

Gender Preferences Issue, MCRI,’’ September 8, 2004, http://www.michigancivilrights.org/

media/womensgroup-press-release.pdf (accessed February 17, 2006).

[64] Barbara Grutter, ‘‘Announcement of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative,’’ July 8, 2003,

http://www.michigancivilrights.org/grutter.htm (accessed February 17, 2006).

[65] Ibid.

[66] Ward Connerly, ‘‘Taking it to Michigan.’’

From California to Michigan 421

[67] Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, ‘‘Michigan Civil Rights Initiative Will End College

Admissions’ Discrimination Against Women,’’ December 21, 2004, http://www.chetlyzarko.

com/business/12212004-male-achievement.pdf (accessed January 11, 2009).

[68] Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, ‘‘Some Women’s Groups Show Inconsistency.’’

[69] See Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, 1�24 for a discussion of the

politicizing of the intimate sphere and its relationship to the project of infantile citizenship.

[70] Ward Connerly, ‘‘The Q-Word & American Realities,’’ National Review Online, December 1,

2005, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/216129/q-word-american-realities/ward-connerly

(accessed October 15, 2010).

[71] Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, ‘‘Study: Law Schools Hurt Minority Students Through

Preferences,’’ November 11, 2004, http://www.michigancivilrights.org/media/law-school-

release.pdf (accessed February 17, 2006).

[72] Ward Connerly, ‘‘Taking it to Michigan.’’

[73] Thanks to one of our anonymous reviewers for bringing this issue to our attention.

422 B. Jones & R. Mukherjee

Copyright of Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies is the property of National Communication

Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the

copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for

individual use.