The new cultural policies of difference | Cornel West

In the last years of the twentieth century, there was a significant change in sensitivity and the
perspectives of critics and artists. In fact, I would dare to say that a
new type of cultural worker, associated with policies of difference. These new forms of
intellectual awareness allows for a reimagining of the vocation of critic and artist,
that seeks to undermine the prevailing divisions of labor in academia, museums, and
mass media and gallery networks, although they maintain modes of criticism in
ubiquitous commercialization of culture in the global village. The traits that distinguish the new
cultural policies of difference are to condemn the monolithic and the homogeneous in the name of
diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; rejecting the abstract, the general, and the universal,
in the light of the concrete, the specific, and the particular; and to record history, contextualize, and pluralize,
emphasizing the contingent, the provisional, the variable, the tentative, and the changing.
It is unnecessary to say that these gestures are not unprecedented in the history of criticism or art;
but what makes them novel—along with the cultural policies they produce—is how and
what constitutes the difference, the weight, and the gravity given in the representation and in the
the way in which issues such as empire, class, race, gender, sexual orientation, age are highlighted,
nation, nature and region, recognizing at this historical moment a certain discontinuity and
interruption concerning the previous forms of cultural criticism. To put it bluntly, the
new cultural policies of difference consist of creative responses to circumstances
precises of the present moment—especially those of marginalized subjects of the First
world—, which discard degraded self-representations, articulating instead their
own sense of the flow of history in light of the terrors, anxieties, and fears
contemporary to the Noratlantic capitalist cultures, highly commercialized,
in a xenophobic escalation against blacks, Jews, women, gays, lesbians and the
elders. Vital areas of analysis are also located in the former communist cultures,
affected by rising nationalist uprisings against the legacy of hegemonic partisanship,
and in the diverse cultures of the majority of the inhabitants of the globe, suffocated by the cartels
international communication and the repressive postcolonial elites (sometimes in the name of
communism, as in Ethiopia), or starved by the austerity policies of the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund, which subordinates them to the North—as free capitalism
market in Chile.

The new cultural policies of difference are not oppositional simply because
question the mainstream cultural current regarding inclusion, nor because they try to
to scandalize, in a vanguardist way, conventional bourgeois audiences. Rather
its well-defined joints of personalities from the culture (almost always
privileged) who want to align themselves with the demoralized, the demobilized,
depoliticized and the disorganized to empower them and promote their social action and, if
if possible, prepare the collective insurgency for the expansion of freedom, democracy and

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individuality. This perspective compels these artists and cultural critics to reveal, as
integral component of their production, the very operation of power in its contexts
immediate work—namely, academia, museums, galleries, mass media.
However, such a strategy also binds them doubly in an irretrievable way: while it links
their activities towards the fundamental modernization of these institutions often remain
financially dependent on them (and then they talk about 'independent' creation). For
These cultural critics, theirs is a gesture that is simultaneously progressive and dependent.
But without social movement or political pressure from outside these institutions—actions
extraparliamentary and extracurricular like the social movements of the recent past—, the
transformation degenerates into mere adjustments or pure stagnation, and the role of the
"dependent progressives", no matter how fervent their subversive rhetoric may be, becomes
much more difficult. There can be no great advances or social progress without some form of
crisis in society, crisis usually generated by organizations or collectives that
they convince ordinary people to put their bodies and lives in danger.
supposedly, there are no guarantees that these pressures will yield the desired results, but yes
Is there a guarantee that the status quo will be maintained or will it suffer a regression if not applied?
any pressure.

The new cultural policies of difference face three basic challenges: the intellectual, the
existential and the political. The intellectual, who is generally presented as a debate
methodological at times when academic forms of expression monopolize life
intellectual, it is about thinking the practices of representation in terms of history, culture and
society. How are such practices understood, analyzed, and represented today? One can
try to answer this question properly only after accepting the perceptions and
the lack of vision of previous attempts to address it in light of evolution of the
crisis in the different histories, cultures, and societies. I will outline in broad strokes a brief
genealogy—a story that emphasizes contingent origins and the often
noble results—with examples of critical responses to this question. The historical framework
this genealogy characterizes the rich but flawed Eurocentric traditions about the
that are built—surpassing them—the new policies of difference.

The intellectual challenge

The ambiguous legacy of the Age of Europe constitutes an appropriate starting point. Between 1492 and
1945, the great European advances in ocean transportation, agricultural production,
state consolidation, bureaucratization, industrialization, urbanization, and imperial dominance, gave
place and shape the modern world. Treasured ideals such as the dignity of individuals (the
individuality) or the responsibility of institutions to the people (democracy)
they flourished in the world. Those ideals, refined in the crucible of the European Era, fueled
powerful criticisms against the illegitimate authorities: the Protestant Reformation against the Church
Roman Catholic; the Enlightenment against state churches; liberal movements against the
Absolutist states and the limitations of feudal guilds; the workers against the
subordination to the administrations; people of color and Jews against the decrees

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white and gentile supremacists; gays and lesbians against homophobic sanctions.
However, the discrepancy between pure rhetoric and lived reality, between the shining
The principles and real practices were enormous.

For the last European century—the last period in which European domination over the majority
part of the globe passed without being questioned or substantively challenged— it seemed that
a new world was being born. Matthew Arnold observed with pain, in his 'Strophes from the
Great Cartuja," which seemed to her to be "wandering between two worlds, one dead/the other
unable to be born.” Following Burke's sentiments regarding cautious reform and the fear of
anarchy, Arnold recognized that the old binder—the religion—, which had kept them united
clinging, often unsuccessfully, to the sickly regimes, could no longer continue to comply
with its mission by the mid-19th century. Arnold, like Alexis de Tocqueville in France, saw
that the mood of democracy was the trend of the future. He proposed a new conception
secular and humanist of culture, which could play an integrating role, cementing and
stabilizing a bourgeois civil society and an emerging imperial state. Its famous
reprobation of the immobilizing materialism of the decadent aristocracy, the vulgar pharisaism of
its embryonic middle classes and the latent explosiveness in the majority working class, was
motivated by the desire to create new forms of cultural legitimacy, authority, and order in a
rapidly changing moment of 19th century Europe. For Arnold, this new
conception of culture

seeks to end classes; to do everywhere the best that has been thought and known in
the current world; making everyone live in an atmosphere of kindness and light [...]

This is the social idea, and educated men are the true apostles of equality.
great cultured men are those who have a passion for spreading, for making it prevail, for
carry from one end to the other of society, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their
time; they are the ones who have worked to strip knowledge of everything that is hard,
rude, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it, to make it effective outside of
group of the cultured and learned, without ceasing to be the best knowledge and the best
thought of his time and, for that reason, a true source of kindness and light.

As an organic intellectual of a rising middle class, as a school inspector in

an expanding educational bureaucracy, as a poetry teacher at Oxford—the first layman
and the first to give lectures in English and not in Latin—and as an active participant in a
flourishing network of magazines, Arnold defined and defended a new secular culture of discourse
critical. For him, this discursive strategy would be embedded in the educational apparatuses and in
the press of modern societies, which contained and incorporated the terrifying
threats from an arrogant aristocracy and, especially, from an "anarchic" working class
majority. Their ideal of an unbiased, dispassionate, and objective research would regulate the
new secular cultural production, and its justifications regarding the use of state power
to stifle any threat to the survival and security of this culture, they are

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widely accepted. Arnold rightly pointed out: "our path not only towards the
perfection, but even towards security, seems to be that of culture.

These words are revealing in two senses. First, they refer to "our path" without
explicitly recognize who is included in that 'our'. This is symptomatic among many
Eurocentric bourgeois critics, whose universalizing gestures exclude (remaining silent
about it) or explicitly degrade women and people of color. Second,
they link culture to security, presumably the security of the "us" against the
barbaric threats from 'them'; that is to say, from those considered different in a way
pejorative. It goes without saying that Arnold's negative attitudes towards the working class
British, the women and especially the Indians and Jamaicans, in the Empire, clarify by
which conceives, in part, culture as a weapon for European male 'security'
burger

For Arnold, the best of the European Age was shaped from a mythological blend of the
Athens of Pericles, the late Republican Rome and the early empire, and England
Isabelina, could only be promoted if there was a affiliation that intertwined the middle classes.
emergent, a homogenizing cultural discourse in educational and university networks, and
a state advanced enough in its surveillance techniques to
to safeguard them. The candidates to participate in and legitimize this great effort of renewal
and cultural review would be the intellectuals willing to shed their narrow-mindedness, of
its provincialism and class identities, to embrace the biased class project
Arnold's media. "Outsiders, if we can call them that, people guided above all not by their
class spirit, but by a more general human spirit, by the love of perfection
human».4 It goes without saying that this perspective still informs many of the practices
academic and secular cultural attitudes today: the predominant criteria about the
canon, the acceptance of procedures and collective self-definitions of intellectuals. Without
embargo, Arnold's project was interrupted by the collapse of 19th century Europe: the First
world war. This unprecedented war brought to the surface the crucial and violent role
potential not of the masses that Arnold feared, but of the State that he announced.
ashes of that land ravaged by human slaughter, in some cases, of the populations
European civilians, T. S. Eliot emerged as the great cultural spokesperson.

Eliot's project to reconstruct and reconceptualize European intellectual culture, regulating the
critical and artistic practices after the internal collapse of imperial Europe, can
to consider oneself an answer to the acute question posed by Paul Valéry in The Crisis of
spirit, after the First World War:

Will this Europe become what it really is, namely, a small cape of the continent?
Asian? Or will this Europe continue to be what it appears to be, namely, a valuable part of the whole
the earth, the pearl of the orb, the brain of a vast body?

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In the post-war old continent, Eliot's image of Europe predominated as a
desert, of a culture of fragments without a unifying center. And although its practices
early poetics were more radical, open, and international than their eurocentric critique,
Eliot proposed a review of tradition and a return to it as the only way to
reconquer the cultural order and political stability of Europe. For him, history
contemporary had become—as Stephen stated in James Joyce's Ulysses
(1922)—in "a nightmare from which I was trying to awaken, [...] a vast panorama
of futility and anarchy," as Eliot himself stated in his famous review of the masterpiece
by Joyce. On the other hand, in his influential essay 'Tradition and Individual Talent',
declared:

But if the only form of tradition, of legacy, consisted in following the steps of the generation
immediately prior to ours, blindly or timidly adhering to their successes, the
"tradition" should not be encouraged. We have seen many currents lost in the sand.
similar; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much
more importance. It cannot be inherited and, if it is desired, it must be achieved with enormous
efforts.6

Eliot's fruitful notion of tradition is important because it fosters a sensitivity

historicist in artistic practice and cultural reflection. Such sensitivity, regulated—in its
case—due to a reactionary policy, it provoked a powerful assault against literary norms
existing—for example, the romantic poets were replaced by the metaphysical ones
symbolists - and incessant attacks against modern western civilization, such as the ideas
liberals about democracy, equality, and freedom. Just like Arnold's notion of culture,
the idea of tradition for Eliot was part of his intellectual arsenal, usable in the battles that
were fought in European cultures and societies.

Eliot founded his tradition in the Anglican Church, to which he converted in 1927; the one that he
it allowed space for his mind shaped by Catholicism, his Calvinist heritage, his
Puritan temperament and the fervent patriotism of the old American South, where it had been
created. Like Arnold, Eliot was obsessed with the idea of civilization and the horror of the
barbarism—echoes of Kurtz from Joseph Conrad, in "Heart of Darkness"—or rather to the
notion of the decline of European civilization. With the advent of the Second World War
worldwide, Eliot's obsession became reality. Again, the human slaughter without
precedents—fifty million dead, including an indescribable genocidal attack
against the Jewish people—which took place throughout Europe and around the world, marked the last
nailed the coffin of the Era of Europe. After 1945, it was already a devastated continent and
divided, mutilated by a humiliating dependence and deference to the United States and to the
Soviet Union.

The second historical coordinate of my genealogy is the emergence of the United States.
as a world power. This country was not prepared for that status. However, with the
recovery of Stalin's Russia—which had twenty million dead in the war—,

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felt compelled to make his presence felt all over the world. With the Marshall Plan for
strengthen Europe against the influence of Russia—and to open new markets to the
American products—, the takeover of Czechoslovakia by the USSR in 1948, the blockade of
Berlin that same year, the beginning of the Korean War in 1950 and the establishment, in
1952, from the NATO forces in Europe, it seemed clear that there was no way to escape from the
obligations of a world power.

The era that followed World War II in the United States, or the first decades
what Henry Luce envisioned as "the American Century," was not just a period of
incredible economic expansion, but of a vibrant cultural asset. According to the classic formula of
Ford, mass production needed mass consumption. The United States, whose
hegemony in the capitalist world no one challenged, they took growth for granted
economic. After his crude anti-communist McCarthyite obsession, buying all kinds of
articles became the first act of civic virtue for many citizens
North Americans of the time. The creation of a massive middle class—a working class.
prosperous with a bourgeois identity—was countered by the first major emergence
of subcultures of intellectuals who were not white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant (WASP): the
called "New York intellectuals," in the critique; the abstract expressionists in the
painting, and the Be Bop artists in jazz. Its emergence was a vital challenge to the elite of the
WASP, loyal to the oldest and most eroded European culture.

The first significant blow was dealt when assimilated American Jews arrived at
the highest echelons of cultural institutions: the academy, museums, galleries, the
mass media. Lionel Trilling is an emblematic figure. That entry of Jews into
the critical antisemitic and patriarchal discourse of exclusive cultural institutions
North Americans began the slow but certain end of hegemony and homogeneity of the
WASP culture. Lionel Trilling's project was to appropriate Matthew Arnold for his own purposes.
political and cultural fines, unraveling the old consensus of the WASP and building a new one
liberal academic consensus of the postwar period, around the Cold War: the presentation
anti-communist of the value of complexity, difficulty, variety, and modulation. Furthermore, the
the post-war boom laid the foundations for an intense professionalization and specialization of
higher education institutions in full expansion, especially in the field of
natural sciences, compelled to respond in some way to the successful adventures
Russian space. Humanistic scholars set out to search for new methodologies.
that could support self-images of rigor and scientific seriousness. However, critics
cultural figures such as C. Wright Mills, W. E. B. DuBois, Richard Hofstadter, Margaret Mead and
Dwight MacDonald fiercely opposed it. The suspicion regarding the 'academization'
knowledge is expressed in the well-known essay by Trilling On Teaching the
modern literature

Can we then not say that, when modern literature is brought into the classroom, the subject to whom
Is what is taught betrayed by pedagogy? We have to ask ourselves if, in our days, it isn't
A lot falls under the jurisdiction of the academy. More and more, as the

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universities are liberalized, and their benevolent imperialist gaze turns towards what has been
given to calling life itself, a feeling grows among our students that very little
it can be experienced unless it is validated by some established intellectual discipline.

Trilling laments the fact that university instruction often silences and tames the
radical and subversive artistic works in 'commonly regarded simple objects'. This
process of 'the socialization of the antisocial, or of the cultural assimilation of the anticultural, or of
the legitimization of the subversive" led Trilling to "question whether in our culture the study of
Literature remains a suitable means to develop and refine intelligence.
formulate this question with the intention of denigrating and devaluing academia, but rather in the
spirit of emphasizing the possible failure of an Arnoldian conception of culture to contain it
that he perceives as the increasingly accessible Pharisaical and anarchic alternatives to the
students of the 1960s; namely, mass culture and radical politics.

This threat is partially associated with the third historical coordinate of my genealogy: the
decolonization of the Third World. It is crucial to recognize the importance of this historical process
worldwide if one wants to capture the end of the European Era and the rise of the United States
as a world power. With the first defeat of a Western nation by a non-Western one
the victory of Japan over Russia (1905), the revolutions in Persia (1905), China (1912)
Mexico (1911-12) and much later, the independence of India (1947) and China (1948) and the
Ghana's triumph (1957)—the reality of a decolonized world appeared as something enormous.
Born from violent struggle, from the elevation of consciousness and from the reconstruction of the
identities, decolonization brought with it, simultaneously, new perspectives on the
from the ancient suppurating hidden side of the Era of Europe—which the colonial domination
it represents the costs of "progress," "order," and "culture"—, and the need for new
interpretations of the economic boom in the United States, where blacks, mestizos,
yellows, reds, women, elderly, gays, lesbians, and working-class whites live the same
costs, such as cheap domestic labor, than those from peripheral markets
Latin Americans and those from the Pacific, dominated by the United States

Franz Fanon was the one who best captured, in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), the impetuous
ferocity and the moral outrage that fueled the decolonization process:

Decolonization, which aims to change the order of the world, is obviously a

program of complete disorder [...] Decolonization is the meeting of two forces
opposed to each other by their very nature, which, in fact, owes its originality to a kind of
justification that comes from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies. Their first meeting was
marked by violence, and their existence together—that is, the exploitation of the native by the
colonel—was carried out by virtue of a huge arsenal of bayonets and cannons [...] For the
Thus, in decolonization there is a need for a total questioning of the situation.
colonial. If we want to describe it accurately, we could do so with these well-known.
words: «The last shall be first, and the first, last». Decolonization is the
implementation of those words.

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The naked truth of decolonization makes us recall the piercing bullets and the knives.
bleeding that emanates from her. Because if the last will be the first, this will only happen
after a bloody and decisive struggle between the two protagonists.

Fanon's vigorous words, although excessively Manichean, describe the

feelings and thoughts about the British occupation army and the Irish
colonized Northern Ireland, the Israeli occupation army and the subdued Palestinians of
the western bank and the Gaza Strip, the South African army and the oppressed black people of the
ghettos, the Japanese police and the Koreans residing in Japan, the Russian army and the
Armenian subordinates and other peoples in the south and east of the Soviet Union. Their words
they also evoke, in part, the feelings of many African Americans toward the
police departments in urban centers. In other words, Fanon is articulating the
sincere secular repudiation to be degraded and despised, hated and harassed, oppressed and
exploited, marginalized and dehumanized by the powerful imperialist countries and
European, North American, Russian, and Japanese xenophobes.

In the United States, in the late 1950s, during the 60s, and in the early 70s, these
De-colonized sensitivities sparked the movements for civil rights and power.
Black, as well as the former guerrilla fighters, feminists, mestizos, gay and lesbian people. During that period
we witnessed the collapse of the cultural homogeneity of the WASP and the collapse of the
ephemeral liberal consensus. The inclusion of African Americans, Latin Americans, Asian
Americans, the indigenous people, and women in the culture of critical discourse resulted in
intense intellectual controversies and the inevitable ideological polarization, primarily centered
in exclusion, the silences and the blindness to the cultural homogeneity of the WASP and in their
concomitant Arnoldian notions about the canon.

Additionally, these critiques promoted three vital processes that affected life
intellectual in the country. First was the appropriation of the post-war theories of Europe,
especially the works of the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer), of the
Franco-Italian Marxisms (Sartre, Althusser, Lefebvre, Gramsci), of structuralisms (Lévi-
Strauss, Todorov) and poststructuralism (Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault). Those diverse theories and
different, all concerned about keeping the radical projects alive, after the end of the Era
from Europe, tended to fuse versions of transgressive European modernisms with the
Marxist or post-Marxist left politics, and they unanimously avoided the term.
"postmodernism." Second, there was a recovery and a revision of history.
North American in light of the struggles of workers, women, African Americans,
Indians, Latin Americans, gays, and lesbians. The third was the impact of forms of
popular culture such as television, cinema, music videos, and even sports, about the
intellectual culture. Hip-hop, rooted in black culture, with followers among young people around the world
whole, it is a magnificent example.

After 1973— with the crisis of the international economy on a global scale, the fall of the
North American productivity, the challenge of OPEC nations to the North Atlantic monopoly

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about oil production, the increasing competition in high-tech sectors of the
Japanese and West German economies, and the sustained fragility of the structure
debt international—, the United States entered a period of loss of
self-confidence, combined with Watergate, and a contracting economy. As the
the living standards of the middle classes were falling, due to rampant inflation, and that the
quality of life was declining for most due to the rise in unemployment, underemployment and the
crime, a powerful and strong religious and secular neoconservatism emerged. In this fusion of
neonationalism, traditional cultural values, and "free market" policies served as
based on the Reagan-Bush era.

The ambiguous legacies of the European Era, American preeminence and the
decolonization continues to torment our postmodern moment, in which we assume so much
crimes against humanity as the contributions made for its benefit by
Europeans, North Americans, Japanese, Soviets, and Third Worlders. The hardships of the
Africans in the New World are an instructive example in this regard.

Until 1914, European maritime empires dominated more than half of the land and a
third part of the world's lands—almost 72 million square kilometers of territory
and more than 560 million people under colonial rule. This European control included a brutal
slavery, institutional terrorism, and cultural degradation of the black diaspora. The death of
About 75 million Africans during the centuries-long transatlantic slave trade is just a
Reminder, among other things, of the assault against black humanity. The conditions of servitude.
from that diaspora in the New World, where blacks were considered mere articles with
value of use, lacking all legal status, social position, and public value, can
to be characterized, as Orlando Patterson would say, as a birth alienation. This state
of perpetual and hereditary domination that the Africans of the diaspora acquired as of
birth produced the modern problem of its invisibility and anonymity. The practices
white supremacists sponsored by the prestigious cultural authorities of the churches,
the press and scientists promoted black inferiority and constituted the backdrop
in the background where the struggles of black people for their identity and dignity took place
(self-confidence, self-respect, self-esteem) and for economic resources.

An impossible aspect to evade is the search for validation and recognition of the
towns of the black diaspora took place in the ideological, social, and cultural lands of others
non-black towns. The attacks by white supremacists against intelligence, the
the capacity, beauty, and character of Black people required them to exhibit persistence
efforts to keep doubt, disdain, and even hatred against oneself at bay. The
selective appropriation, the incorporation and rearticulation of ideologies, cultures and
European institutions, along with a more or less limited African legacy of innovation.
linguistics in rhetorical practices, to the stylizations of the body to occupy a space
I miss them—hairstyles and haircuts, ways of walking, standing, gesturing,
to express oneself—and the means to establish and maintain camaraderie and community—through
example, antiphons, call and response styles, rhythmic repetition, risky syncopations in

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spectacular musical modes and rhetorical expressions were some of the strategies used
the ones that were appealed.

The issue of invisibility and anonymity in the modern black diaspora can be
understood as the condition of relative powerlessness to represent itself before
herself and before others, as complex human beings and, therefore, to counteract the
bombardment of negative, degrading stereotypes, carried out by the ideologies of the
white supremacists. The initial black reaction to feeling trapped in this vortex of
Europeanization was to resist the false and caricatured representation of the terms.
established by non-white norms and models—that were not questioned—and fight for
self-representation and recognition. All modern black, and especially the
cultural disseminators encounter this problem of invisibility and anonymity.
the initial response of the black diaspora became a form of resistance with moral content and
of a communal nature. That is to say, the struggle for representation and recognition emphasized
in moral judgments regarding the 'positive' black images, above and against the
white supremacist stereotypes. Those images "re-represented" black communities
monolithic and homogeneous so that they could displace the false representations of
these communities. Stuart Hall has referred to these responses as attempts to change
the relationships of representations.

These brave, yet limited, efforts of black people to combat cultural practices
Racists accepted uncritically the conventions and norms that were not black in two ways.
First, they proceeded to demonstrate, in an assimilationist manner, that black people were really
like whites, omitting the differences—in history, in culture—between whites and
Blacks. The specificity and particularity of blacks were dismissed to obtain the
acceptance and approval from whites. Second, these black responses rested on
a homogenizing impulse: they assumed that all black people were really alike,
thus obliterating the differences—of class, gender, region, sexual orientation—between them
the same. There are elements of truth in both statements, but the conclusions turn out
unjustified due to the elementary fact that non-black paradigms established the
terms of the responses.

The perception of the first idea is that blacks and whites are similar in a certain sense.
important, that is, in its positive capacities for human compassion, sacrifice
moral, service to others, intelligence and beauty; or negatively, in their capacity for
cruelty. However, the common humanity they share is thrown overboard when the idea
is wrapped in an assimilationist form, which subordinates the particularity of black people to a
false universality, that is to say, to rubrics or prototypes that are not black. Likewise, the perception of
the second proposal is that all blacks are "in the same boat" in some sense
important; that is, subjects to the abuse of white supremacists. However, it is carried out
too far this condition is common when viewed in a homogenizing way.
Omit the fact that racist treatment varies greatly according to class considerations,
gender, sexual orientation, nation, region, color, and age.

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The moral and communal aspects of the initial responses of the black diaspora to the
social and psychic obliteration were not simply the binary opposites of the images
positive/negative, good/bad that prioritized the first term in light of the white regulations,
so that the black efforts continued to be inscribed in the same logic as the
dehumanized. The fact that these answers were presented by black intellectuals.
middle class, predominantly men and heterosexuals, plagued by anxiety, and
struggling with his sense of double consciousness—namely, his own crisis of identity, entity and
audience, trapped between the search for approval and acceptance from whites and the
effort to overcome the already internalized association of blackness and inferiority—came to complicate
even more the matter. These complex anxieties of the intellectuals of the black community
modern motivations the two main arguments that serve as the basis for moralism
assimilationist and homogeneous communalism.

Any idea about 'the real black community' and 'positive images' carries a burden of
value, and also a social and ideological one. Continuing this debate implies questioning the possibility
of an undisputed consensus regarding them. Stuart Hall has aptly called this
I find 'the end of innocence or the end of the innocent idea of the essential black subject [...] the
recognition that 'black' is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category
"built." This recognition, increasingly widespread among the intellectual community of the
postmodern black community, is facilitated in part by the slow but certain dissolution of the
maritime empires of the European Era, and the expansion of new political possibilities
cultural joint ventures among formerly colonized peoples around the world.

The decisive push towards the end of black innocence, although foreshadowed at various levels
in the best moments of W. E. B. DuBois, Anna Cooper, C. L. R. James, James Baldwin,
Claudia Jones, the late Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, Amiri Baraka, and others, forces the
cultural workers of the black diaspora to face what Hall has called the "politics of
representation." The main objective is not just to access representation now.
to produce positive images of homogeneous communities, although obtaining a
wider access remains a practical and political issue. The questioning of the
stereotypes also do not constitute a primary objective, although it remains an effort
important, though limited. Following the model of the traditions of the black community in
music, athletics, and rhetoric, black cultural workers must constitute and maintain
discursive and institutional networks that deconstruct the previous strategies applied to the
formation of identity, the demystification of power relations that incorporate biases
classist, patriarchal, and homophobic, and build more versatile responses and
multidimensional, that articulate the complexity and diversity of black practices in the
modern and postmodern world.

Additionally, black cultural workers must research and question the other of the
blackness: the whiteness. The binary opposition logic of the images cannot be deconstructed.
the blackness without extending it to the very opposite condition of blackness/whiteness. However, not
it is enough to dismantle it, because the very idea of a deconstructive social theory is a

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combination of contradictory terms. Social theory is needed to examine and explain the
historically specific ways in which "whiteness" is a politically
built, parasitic on 'blackness', thanks to which the character can be conceived
deeply hybrid of what we want to say with 'race', 'ethnicity' and 'nationality'. By
For example, European immigrants arrived on the shores of America perceiving themselves
like "Irish", "Sicilians", "Lithuanians", etc. They had to learn that they were, above all,
"whites", based on the American discourse of whiteness - valued positively - and of
negritude with a negative connotation. This process by which people define themselves
same physical, social, sexual, and even politically, in terms of whiteness or blackness, has
a lot of weight not only on the constructed notions of race and ethnicity but also on the way
in which we understand the changing nature of nationalities in the United States. And given
the Americanization of the world, especially in the sphere of mass culture, such
Investigations, stimulated by the new cultural policies of difference, raise
critical issues of 'hybridity', 'status of exile' and 'identity' on an international scale.
Obviously, these inquiries must also encompass those of 'man/woman',
"colonizer/colonized", "heterosexual/homosexual", and others.

The demystifying critique

Demystification is the most enlightening mode of theoretical inquiry for those who promote
the new cultural policies of difference. The social structural analyses on the
empire
sexual, the nation and the region are trampolines, but not landing strips, for the most forms
desirable aspects of critical practice that take history (male and female) seriously. The
Demystification seeks to trace the complex dynamics of the structures of power.
institutional and of another kind, to reveal options and alternatives to practices
transformative; it also seeks to capture the way in which representational strategies are
creative responses to new circumstances and conditions. Thus, the central role is emphasized
from the human agency—always acted in circumstances that one has not chosen—either
critic, artistic, electoral or public.

I call 'prophetic critique' the demystifying critique—the appropriate approach for the new
cultural policies of difference—, because although it begins with social analysis
structural, it also makes its moral and political objectives explicit. It is partisan, biased,
committed and focused on the crisis, but always keeps a skeptical eye open to
avoid the traps of dogmatism, premature conclusions, formulistic approaches and the
rigid conclusions. In addition to structural social analyses, moral judgments and
politicians and pure critical consciousness, there is certainly an evaluation. However, its
The purpose is not to pit two works of art against each other as if they were racehorses.
career, nor create eternal standards that overshadow, discourage or even minimize achievements
contemporaries. We listen to Ludwig van Beethoven, Charlie Parker, Luciano Pavarotti,
Laurie Anderson, Sarah Vaughan, Stevie Wonder or Kathleen Battle; we read William.
Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, Ralph Ellison, Doris Lessing, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison or

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Gabriel García Márquez; we see works by Pablo Picasso, Ingmar Bergman, Le Corbusier,
Martin Puryear, Barbara Kruger, Spike Lee, Frank Gehry or Howardena Pindell, do not stop
sustain bureaucratic approvals nor encourage conversation during a cocktail, but to
feeling called by the styles they showcase through their deep perception, pleasure and
challenges. However, every evaluation—including the delight in Eliot's poetry, despite
of their reactionary political convictions, or the love for the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, to
margin of their affiliation with the Republican Party—, is inseparable, although not identical or reducible
to them, from social structural analyses, moral and political judgments and the operation of
an inquisitive critical consciousness.

The lethal traps of demystification—and of any form of prophetic criticism—are those of

reductionism, whether sociological, psychological, or historical. By reductionism, I understand the
analysis of a single factor—rudimentary Marxisms, feminisms, racisms, etc.—that reveals
a unidimensional functionalism or a hypersutil analytical perspective, which loses contact with
the specificity of the form of a work of art and the context of its reception. Few
cultural workers of any affiliation can negotiate the tightrope between the Scylla of
reductionism and the Charybdis of aestheticism, something that demystifying critics must do
the prophetic ones.

The existential challenge

The existential challenge to the new cultural policies of difference can be posed
just like that: How are the resources to survive and the cultural capital acquired for
to flourish as a critic or as an artist? For cultural capital—term by Pierre Bourdieu—
I understand not only the skills required for the practice of criticism but, what is even more
important, the self-confidence, the discipline and the perseverance necessary to have
success, without relying too much on the approval and acceptance of cultural trends
mainly. This challenge applies to all prophetic critics, but it is especially difficult
for people of color. The widespread modern European rejection of intelligence, skill, the
The beauty and character of non-white people is a burden that critics must bear.
and artists of color to "prove" themselves, in light of established norms and models by
the white elites, whose own legacy devalues and dehumanizes them. In summary, in the court of
criticism and art—or of anything that pertains to spiritual life—people of
colored are guilty; that is to say, they are not expected to meet the requirements of intellectual achievement.
until they 'prove' their innocence, that is, until they become 'acceptable' to us.

This is more of a structural dilemma than a matter of personal attitudes. The legacy
deeply racist and sexist that the Era of Europe has left us with a set of
deeply rooted perceptions about those people that include, of course, their own
self-perceptions. It is not surprising that the majority of intellectuals of color
they devoted many of their energies and efforts in the past to gain acceptance and the
approval of the 'white normative perspectives'. The new cultural policies of the
they advise putting aside this mode of mental slavery and freeing oneself, both for

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question the ways they are enslaved to certain conventions, as to learn and
build on those same norms and models. A mark of wisdom, in the context of
Any struggle is to avoid reflexive rejection and uncritical acceptance.

The new cultural policies of difference can only thrive if they exist.
communities, groups, organizations, institutions, subcultures, and networks of people of color
that they cultivate critical sensitivity and personal responsibility, without inhibiting expressions,
individual peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. This is especially necessary, given that
the escalation of hostility, violence, and racial polarization in the United States. Without
embargo, this critical meeting should not turn into a narrow closing of ranks. Rather, it should
to be an effort to strengthen and nurture, to forge stronger alliances and coalitions. The criticism
prophetic, with its emphasis on historical specificity and artistic complexity, addresses
directly the intellectual challenge. The cultural capital of people of color, with its emphasis
in self-confidence, discipline, perseverance, and subcultures of criticism, it also deals with
to satisfy the existential requirement. Both reinforce each other. Both are
motivated by a deep commitment to individuality and democracy, the ideals
morals and politicians that guide the creative response to the political challenge.

The political challenge

The appropriate responses to intellectual and existential challenges make the

practitioners of the new cultural policies of difference can meet the challenges
politicians. This challenge mainly involves forging strong and reliable alliances among
people of color and progressive whites guided by a greater moral and political vision
democracy and individual liberties in communities, states, and transnational companies—
for example, in corporations and information and communications conglomerates.

The Rainbow Coalition, led by Jesse Jackson, became a brave but flawed effort in this
sense. Brave for the tremendous energy, vision, and courage of its leader and followers; but
deficient because he did not take the critical and democratic sensibilities in his own seriously.
operation. In reality, Jackson's attempt to gain power at the national level is a
symptom of the weakness of American progressive politics, and a sign that it has declined
the ability to generate a movement or extraparlimentary social movements. But
given the current organizational weakness and intellectual timidity of leftist politicians in the
United States, the main option is that of a multiracial participation of citizens from
based on credible projects, in which people see that their efforts can make
let things be different.

The new cultural policies of difference set aside narrow particularisms, the
lack of vision and separatism, in the same way that they reject false universality and the
homogeneous totalitarianisms. Instead, they reaffirm the perennial search for the cherished
ideals of individuality and democracy probing deeply into particularities
humans and social specificities to build new types of connections, affinities and

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communities crossing empires, nations, regions, races, genders, ages and
sexual orientations.

There are three significant impediments to radical libertarian and democratic projects.
of the new cultural policies of difference: the extensive processes of objectification,
rationalization and commercialization worldwide. The first process, which Georg Simmel
it accurately emphasizes in The Philosophy of Money (1900), it consists of transforming beings
humans as manipulable objects. It promotes the notion that people's actions do not
they have an impact on the world, that we are only spectators and not participants in making ourselves and
to remake ourselves and society as a whole. The second, initially
examined in the seminal works of Max Weber, expands the bureaucratic hierarchies that
they impose impersonal rules and regulations to increase efficiency, defined in terms
of better service or better surveillance. This process leads not only to the disenchantment of the
mythologies of the past, but also to brutal, empty, and trivial ways of life. The
third and most important process—incomparably examined in the works of Carlos Marx,
Georg Lukacs and Walter Benjamin - increase market forces in the form of
oligopolies and monopolies, which centralize resources and powers, and promote cultures that
see individuals as mere consumers and as passive citizens.

These processes cannot be eliminated, but their harmful effects can be.
substantially mitigated. The bold attempt to lessen its impact, to preserve the entity of
people, to increase the scope of their freedom and to expand the operation of the
democracy is the fundamental purpose of the new cultural policies of difference.
crucial questions are: What is the moral content of one's own cultural identity? and what are
What are the political consequences of this moral content and cultural identity?

In the recent past, dominant cultural identities have been marked by

immoral patriarchal, imperial, jingoistic, and xenophobic pressures. The consequences
Politics have been, above all, a public sphere regulated by and for white men.
accommodated, in the name of freedom and democracy. The new cultural critique exposes and makes
bursting the exclusions, the blindness and the silences of this past, extracting from it projects
libertarian and democratic radicals who will create a better present and a better future. The
new cultural policies of difference are neither an ahistorical Jacobin program that
discard tradition and introduce new authoritarians with an air of moral superiority, not a
anti-imperialist "levelling" liberalism, with a guilt complex, that celebrates pluralism
symbolic as if it were an inclusion free of problems. Those new cultural policies
rather they acknowledge the difficulties in the struggle to fundamentally transform the
societies and highly objectified, rationalized, and commercialized cultures, in the name of
of individuality and democracy. This means locating the structural causes of
unnecessary expressions of social misery (without reducing all that human suffering to causes
historical), describing the hardships and problems of demoralized citizens and
despoliticized, trapped in cycles of therapeutic relief driven by the market—
drugs, alcoholism, consumerism—and projecting visions, analyses and actions

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alternatives that arise from particularities and lead to moral and political linkage. This
linkage is not a sign of a homogeneous unit or a monolithic totality, but rather
from the construction of a contingent and fragile coalition, in an effort to achieve goals
radical, libertarian, and democratic commons that overlap.

In a world where most of the resources, wealth, and power are concentrated
in enormous corporations that support political elites, the new cultural policies of
the differences may seem merely visionary, utopian, and fanciful. The recent
reductions in social service programs, for businesses to retract at the table of
negotiations between workers and administrations, the acceleration of production processes in
the workplaces, and the increase in military budgets reinforce this perception. And
Surely the growing disintegration and decomposition of civil society is also added.
families, neighborhoods, and schools destroyed. Can a civilization that spins more and more
around the market activity, more and more around the buying and selling of items,
expand the scope of freedom and democracy? Will we be mere witnesses to its slow
decay and its end, a painful outcome already foreshadowed in many communities of
poor blacks and mestizos, what reaches us all quickly? These are overwhelming
Questions remain unanswered, but the challenges they pose must not be left unaddressed.
The new cultural policies of difference aim to tackle these enormous and urgent issues.
challenges. It will require all the imagination, intelligence, courage, sacrifice, love, and good humor
that we can gather

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