Culture Wars –excerpts from Who Built America textbook (2000)

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Reaganism was far more of a political than an economic success. If at the end of the 1980s the Reagan administration itself stood at a policy impasse, its eight years of governance had nevertheless shifted the nation's politics well to the right. The Republican Party no longer had room for a liberal, pro-welfare-state wing. The Democrats still controlled Congress, though they had neither the votes nor the will to propose social or economic legislation of the sort once championed by Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. Reagan Republicans set the nation's political agenda, even if they could not always carry the day on any particular issue. If the culture of the university and the old-line philanthropies remained largely liberal, conservative intellectuals were a growing presence on the television talk shows, on newspaper opinion pages, and in such influential, well-funded think tanks as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato, Hudson, and American Enterprise Institutes.

But Reaganite political power was not matched by a conservative capacity to transform the nation's social mores or restrain the increasingly adventuresome character of U.S. culture, entertainment, and social thought. This was an enormous frustration to many intellectuals and politicians of the Right, who saw Reaganism not merely as a political or economic doctrine but also as a movement to reverse some of the dramatic cultural changes that had transformed American society since the 1960s. William Bennett, Reagan's secretary of education, denounced 'relativism" and 'multiculturalism" in university curricula, arguing instead for a return to the study and celebration of what he called the "Judeo-Christian tradition." Likewise, Allan Bloom, a neoconservative political theorist, briefly soared to prominence with publication of The Closing of the American Mind a 1986 best-seller that assaulted student activism, cultural relativism, academic Marxism, and rock-and-roll. Columnist George Will warned that 'everything connected with culture, from literature through science, depends upon a network of received authority."

But American culture never conformed to this Reaganite orthodoxy. Evangelical Protestantism continued to grow in numbers, and in 1986 allies of the conservative televangetist Pat Robertson won control of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest religious denomination. But the influence of the religious Right did not extend far beyond its own ranks. Several states did impose some restrictions on the right of women to secure an abortion, especially if they were teenagers or in the last trimester of pregnancy, but this medical practice remained legal and widely available in the United States. Women continued to increase their numbers within the workforce, and at the end of the 1980s affirmative action programs still benefited those racial minorities who sought employment, job promotions, or admission to college. Meanwhile, several well-known fundamentalist ministers, including Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, became embroiled in embarrassing sex and financial scandals. Enthusiasm for their TV programs waned after 1987, prompting Jerry Falwell to disband his Moral Majority. In 1988, when Pat Robertson ran for the GOP presidential nomination, its ads campaign was a flop.

On network television, the celebration of wealth and ruthless entrepreneurship that had helped define the Reagan era, such as Dallas and Falcon Crest, were canceled in the late 1980s. They were replaced by successful situation comedies such as Roseanne, Married . . . with Children, and The Simpsons, which revolved around the many frustrations and occasional joys of hard-pressed working families.

On the music scene country still held the greatest radio audience, but rock-and-roll, which dominated record sales, continued to showcase the nation's cultural avant-garde. The two biggest pop stars of the 1980s, Michael Jackson and Madonna, were not only fabulously successful entertainers but also racial and gender experimentalists. Jackson, whose 1982 album Thriller sold more copies than any other record in history, transformed himself into a racially and sexually ambiguous icon. Likewise, Madonna, an indefatigable exhibitionist, redefined a modern earthy feminism …. The portable boom-box made listening both more all-pervasive and more private. Musictelevision (MTV), a genuinely new art form, burst onto the scene in 1981. Rap, or hip-hop, emerged from the African-American ghetto early in the 1980s. Combining rhythmic verse with a driving beat derived from scratching the surface of a record and sampling the music of other rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll performers, rap spoke to the daily experiences of black inner-city youth facing gang violence, the crack epidemic, police brutality, and economic strain. By the end of the decade, many Chicanos, who introduced bilingual lyrics, and white suburban teenagers had enthusiastically embraced the music, the accompanying hip-hop style in fashion, and rap's outlaw image. Rap stimulated the resurgence of a black nationalist sensibility. Groups such as Public Enemy, whose Fight the Power was an openly Afrocentric anthem, and KRS-One, who preached a more inclusive 'edutainment' message, moved the music onto political terrain, as did the controversial recordings of 2 Live Crew and N.WA. ('Niggahs With Attitude"). So did Spike Lee's hip-hop- inspired 1989 film Do the Right Thing, which depicted the escalating, sometimes violent racial tensions that still divided America's multi-ethnic cities…….

On Trial: Gender, Race, and National Identity

The 1990s were a decade of high-profile investigations, hearings, and trials in which the new politics of race, gender, and American identity were played out before a media-savvy audience of millions. The courtroom and the hearing room now served as a site of furious contention. These televised spectacles were not, in fact, well suited to resolving the nation's deep-seated cultural and social divisions. But a fascinated citizenry focused its gaze on these events because no new election and no new statute could fully represent the complicated and contradictory values Americans brought to their understanding of race, sex, and nationhood.

President Bush's decision to nominate Clarence Thomas to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat of civil rights pioneer Thurgood Marshall in 1991 would have been controversial in any event. Thomas had been born in poverty, but the Yale-educated black conservative had criticized civil rights leaders and had helped undermine affirmative action litigation as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) during the early years of the Reagan administration. Republicans therefore backed Thomas, while leaders of the civil rights community, who wanted to keep an African-American on the Court, were split.

Thomas's confirmation battle before the Senate Judiciary Committee became red hot in October 1991 after Anita Hill, a black law professor who had been an aide to Thomas at the EEOC, testified that the nominee had frequently made lurid remarks to her and repeatedly pressured her for dates. Feminists and liberals hostile to the Thomas nomination immediately championed Hill's charges. The nominee charged that his accusers were turning the confirmation proceedings into a "high-tech lynching.' The nation watched in stunned amazement as a panel of white male senators subjected Hill's motives and veracity to fierce personal attack. The Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of fifty-two to forty-eight, but the battle cast a long shadow. First, post-1960s black conservatism no long seemed an oxymoron; among African-American writers and intellectuals, Thomas symbolized the emergence of an articulate, conservative black minority who challenged civil rights liberalism. Second, the Thomas-Hill confrontation before an all-male committee put the issue of sexual harassment and its meaning at the forefront of public debate. In 1992 the EEOC recorded a 50-percent jump in official complaints on the issue; that same year, female candidates ran for Senate and House seats in record numbers.

Television played a key role in two additional racial spectacles of the early 1990s. On the evening of March 3, 1991, a black motorist, Rodney King, became a symbol of white racism and police brutality when a nearby resident captured on videotape the beating he suffered at the hands of four Los Angeles policemen. Millions saw King, who was lying on the ground, take fifty-odd blows from club, foot, and flashlight. Sympathy for King turned to violent outrage in April 1992 when a white suburban jury acquitted his police assailants. Black and Latino rioters burned hundreds of houses and stores in the South Central section of Los Angeles, particularly those occupied by Korean immigrant shopkeepers. The police and National Guard were called in, and fifty-three people were killed and thousands injured. Property damage amounted to a billion dollars, making the riot the most costly in U.S. history. The King beating and the riot heightened the wall of mutual distrust that had long existed between blacks and Los Angeles police. This tension became a key issue two years later, when police arrested the former football star and sports commentator O.J. Simpson after the stabbing murder of his ex- wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman, both of whom were white. Simpson, who was light- skinned, rich, and articulate, had earned the confidence of corporate advertisers and become famous as aTV personality and pitchman. His trial, which saturated the airwaves and dominated everyday conversation for nine months in 1995, proved an international media extravaganza. Ca- ble News Network (CNN) offered 631 hours of direct televised coverage, which increased its ratings and revenues by close to 50 percent. Simpson's expensive, high-powered defense team exploited the racial dimensions of the Los Angeles trial. They charged the detectives who investigated the murder with racism and portrayed their client as the victim of a biased system of justice. Although much evidence indicated that Simpson had been an abusive and violent husband, opinion was racially polarized by the trial. Sixty percent of all African Americans thought Simpson innocent, while 75 percent of whites believed him guilty. In October 1995 a jury of ten women and two men -nine blacks, two whites, and one Hispanic-took less than four hours to acquit him of all criminal charges. Although a lawsuit by families of the two murder victims eventually forced Simpson to pay millions in civil damages, his acquittal in 1995 demonstrated how pervasive were the racial constructions that framed a divergent social and legal reality for Americans, white and black.

The success of the 1996 Million-Man March' seemed to confirm the continuing centrality of race--as opposed to class, or politics, or gender--as a defining identity for huge numbers of African Americans. Answering the call of the Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan, hundreds of thousands of African-American men assembled peacefully, on the Washington Mall to affirm their solidarity and dignity. Leaders of the march, the largest convocation of African Americans since the 1963 March on Washington headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, made no demands on the government but implored black men to reclaim the moral and economic leadership of the black community and black family. Indeed, the self-affirming, religious quality of the gathering paralleled that of the predominantly white male Promise Keepers, an evangelical Protestant movement that filled scores of football stadiums to preach the return of male authority and responsibility within the Christian family.