This can’t be true. Are you *sure* there’s no Max Faber? (Alright, I can accept there’s no Max Faber). But did you read a draft copy of the book? Some sort of pre-edited version? It could NOT have been published with that kind of error, right?

Right?

This is going to rattle me all day....

Cognitively Dissonant, at 2:10 pm EDT on April 9, 2008

Though it may seem simplistic and/or pedantic, some people of color, in their rush to distance themselves from their heritage and what they often see as inferior status, still have the need to be accepted by those they consider superior: professors, scientists, wealthy people.

This, to use the seemingly quaint but nevertheless apt term, search to become better is something I undertook, and something that took me a long while to get over. Having been born in the U.S. to an immigrant father, from Mexico, and a mother born in California, I “felt” early on that my family and I were not normal. I couldn’t put my little finger on it, but at school (and I didn’t feel this way at home), teachers and students made it clear, usually implicitly, that I was not one of them. Everything about me was different: skin color, Spanish accent, food, celebrations, values, and outlooks.

When I realized how different I was seen out of the house, I resolved to change so that I could be acceptable to peers and teachers, whom, we were taught ironically, that since they were educated there sole concern was to educate all students. But again, especially when my parents visited the classroom, teachers did not speak to my parents the same way they did to others. Their body language (guarded, suspicious, patronizing) said as much. They clearly felt, I later learned, that to speak with an accent and be from Mexico meant one was inferior. I wanted no part of that.

So I secretly changed from being Mexican to being Spanish, a term and condition much more acceptable to my peers. I refused to speak Spanish, eat Mexican food, or listen to Mexican music. I indulged in baloney (that’s how we spelled it) sandwiches dripping with mayonnaise. Rainbow Bread was the bread of choice.

This need to change, to become something acceptable, made me turn my back on my Mexican friends and of course my relatives. I suddenly saw them as uncivilized, ignorant about important things such as how to dress and speak and carry oneself, unbelievably low class, especially when they listened not to Elvis or the Everly Brothers, but to Jorge Negrete, Mariachi Vargas, and Tito Puente.

I resented who I was, tried like hell to become, as corny as it sounds, Beaver Cleaver or Rusty on “Rin Tin Tin.” I hated Tonto, the Cisco Kid, and Speedy Gonzalez. These emotions and views were not transitory or in any sense something that would soon pass.

When I entered college, full of guilt and yet also pride because I was going to college, none of my classes were multicultural. Everything I read and studied was based on the deeds of mostly white men, with a few white women here and there. To me this was normal. Thus I concluded no one but white people did anything worthwhile in the academic world.

Then a bomb hit me: Ethnic Studies. In these classes, I learned why I felt as I did, how these emotions were generated, and how society perpetuates superiority to the point that many people of color (some desperately passing as white if their pigmentation allowed) refuse to have others know of their ethnicity. Many people of color, then, more than willingly adopt a culture they think is acceptable and sophisticated and loaded with superiority, to the point we end up declaring that our ethnicity, and that of all people of color, is inferior.

We run from ourselves, hide the evidence of our foreign grandparents, and do all we can to be seen like those we admire. Carlos Fuents’ great novel, “The Death of Artemio Cruz” explores this need to be like the “norteamericano,” though we may hate him. We subsume that hate and do all we can to become superior, to the point that we castigate and snipe at those people of color who inconveniently define and explain why we’ve forsaken our heritage and culture.

When this happens, those who’ve betrayed themselves tend to attack those who tell us about ourselves.

I somehow think about Clarence Thomas and Condoleeza Rice and Alberto Gonzalez as I write this. All three are beneficiaries of Affirmative Action in some way, yet they in the end denied the importance of that fact.

Thus it’s painful to see “intellectuals” of color attacking one another, trying to argue away the importance of Multicultural and Ethnic Studies, striving to retain superiority.

Such is the effect of racism and superiority in this country, assimilation and aculturation, inferiority and superiority.

The irony is that so many of our parents literally killed themselves so we could rise in terms of education and jobs, so we could t least become middle class—yet when some of us reach that situation, we think we’ve become better than those we’ve left behind. And we hide behind academic credentials and publications to prove that we are better. Of course, it’s pointless to do so, but that doesn’t stop us from trying, so ingrained is our early education that told us we’re not good enough.

At some point, we need to take steps to not use our education solely to prove academic legitimacy and superiority, instead using our education to help others leave the imposed squalor, academic and otherwise, imposed on them by attitudes that makes betray outselves and our families.

Leonard Adame, Community College Instructor, at 6:05 pm EDT on April 9, 2008

Max Faber

If my 1960s G.I. German still serves me well, “Faber,” in German, means “color,” as in “colored.” Perhaps, unconsciously, Professor Baker is outing Max Weber as a person of color passing for white. On the other hand, he could be outing himself. Doctor Freud would have fun with this.

Robert Hinton, New York University, at 11:40 am EDT on April 10, 2008

Leonard Adame

I read the review (critique?) of Baker’s book with interest. Baker’s book seemed full of self-important puffery. It was very amusing that he was caught in an error of the magnitude of Max Faber. I read on into the comments to find out how others had reacted, and found the gem of Professor Adame’s response. How beautifully you have stated the reality of the assimilation experience. It is one of the wonderful aspects of our life today that we can be in the middle class, without having to be totally of the middle class. The self-consciousness of your changes and choices alters so much. I teach a class where we talk a lot about ethnicity and race and gender, I will take your comment to them. It reminds me of Arturo Madrid’s essay “Missing Persons and Others.” That is high praise. You write of your experience in a manner which makes it very accessible. It is not puffed up at all by academic jargon. Thanks.

Rebecca Shipman Hurst, Community College Professor, at 1:10 pm EDT on April 10, 2008

Mr. Adame, Thank you for your post!

I took some courses at college in a number of departments that heavily rely on postmodern theory that this author seems to champion. It was discouraging because it seemed like my professors felt that the only way to address the real and toxic problem of racism in our country and social structures was for people to align with a radical and very narrow worldview. This worldview banks so much on rhetoric and calls racist or oppressive people who would chose a number of things deemed “normative” like finding comfort in a domestic setting, fulfillment in ones profession, or a belief in the necessity of war. All these things are problematic but the viewpoints endemic in so many humanities departments find them to be completely incompatible with a healthy society. I had thought the goal should be for people to be secure and free enough that they can come to their own conclusions about how society and personal lives should be led, hopefully with an eye still firmly on the well being of everybody else. If this means that they choose to be ridiculously bourgeois or blatant careerists or radical polyamorous ecofeminists, that should be OK. All this esoteric, exclusionary stuff just seems like so much wheel spinning.

Who Asked You, at 3:15 pm EDT on April 10, 2008

Max Faber lives!

Max Faber is also, with Georg Bernhard Hummel, co-author of “Succincta theologiae anti-deisticae delineatio, cujus cap. I et II ... proponunt,” (1764) a crucial influence on Irving Kristol and the neocons. How could you not have known this?

Jay Weiser, Associate Professor of Law & Real Estate at Baruch College, at 11:40 pm EDT on April 11, 2008

As commenter John Steed reveals above, it’s no surprise that the name of Houston Baker is tarnished at Duke. When will Vanderbilt catch on?

He’s the face of the university on its website! See It To Believe It, posted by KC Johnson at Durham-in-Wonderland.

Stu Daddy, Duke University T’77, at 5:00 am EDT on April 16, 2008