The Minority Rights Revolution.

Vol. 15 No.3 (March 2005), pp.204-207

THE MINORITY RIGHTS REVOLUTION, by John D. Skrentny. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2002/2004. 496pp. Hardcover (2002). $35.00 / £22.95. ISBN: 0-674-00899-5. Paper (2004). $18.95 / £12.95. ISBN: 0-674-01618-1.

Reviewed by Jon Goldberg-Hiller, Department of Political Science, University of Hawai’i. Email: hiller@hawaii.edu .

John Skrentny’s book presents an impressive history and analysis of the transformation of civil rights law that occurred in an explosive decade, 1965-1975. Not only did these years witness the gelling of an anti-discrimination regime responsive to many “minorities” that affected the power of the judiciary and realigned the political parties, but it also inspired much of the law and society movement and the forms of analysis that have defined socio-legal studies ever since. That Skrentny challenges so many of these academic ideas, particularly the assumption that law and rights are mobilized from below, makes this book important for socio-legal scholarship.

Relying on a rich archive of personal letters, official memoranda, interviews with government officials, and contemporary journalism, Skrentny concludes that the rights revolution that occurred in this decade “was characterized more by an anticipatory politics than a participatory one” (p.328).

With the exceptions of the black civil rights movement and to a lesser extent the 1965 immigration reform, policy was not promoted by the networks of federated interest groups [characterizing the] early veterans’ organizations and the women’s movement of the 1920s. To win rights for Latinos, women, American Indians, Asian Americans, and the disabled, nothing like 1932’s “Bonus Army” of poor veterans that occupied Washington demanding extra payments was needed. Neither was this the mass politics of the New Deal Era, such as the one-million-member Townsend movement for old-age pensions or the institutionalized, organized muscle of Big Labor. Nor was it the coordinated, courageous mass movement for basic, classically liberal black civil rights that culminated in 1965. . . . For the groups that policymakers saw as analogous to blacks, mass mobilization, civil disobedience, or rioting were simply not necessary (pp.328-9).

In part, the social movement model fails, he argues, because the federal government had already absorbed several movement leaders who advocated from within. But there were more reasons that help explain why “the revolution took place while no one was watching” (p.249). While this theme of a “silent revolution” is not new to socio-legal analysis (see, for example, Jacob 1988), several dynamics that Skrentny observes are worth evaluating for how they may encourage us to renew and reevaluate our theories about rights.

Although Skrentny avoids the term “governance” and its associated theoretical apparatus, there is much in the story he tells to cause us to think about the ways in which the anticipatory politics of rights resulted from an [*205] attempt at building political power and institutionalizing social control. To some degree, the expansion of rights beyond African Americans resulted from electoral concerns. Nixon’s bumbling attempt to gain the women’s vote (inhibited in part by his incessant need to depict women’s rights in a humorous style designed to play to the men), and Goldwater’s successful insistence that Nixon follow Johnson’s lead and play for Latino support underscore this dynamic. The rights revolution also had aspects of what Gramsci (1971) called a “passive revolution,” or an effort by the state to preempt political mobilization (see also Piven and Cloward 1977). For example, Skrentny shows how Asians and American Indians, despite little pressure from below for inclusion in EEO accounting and only trivial support from EEOC administration, nonetheless remained important to monitoring discrimination for fear that removing them from review “would mobilize these groups and produce a loud outcry” (p.129).

Governance in the theoretical frame of governmentality (see Cooper 1998; Foucault 1991; Rose 1996) can also be seen in the ways Skrentny emphasizes the importance of subjectivity in the construction and regulation of “minorities,” especially the compelling and yet problematic analogy to African American civil rights, and it is here that socio-legal scholars may find the richest trove to mine. The successes of the African American civil rights movement that culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act provide a conceptual model for thinking out legitimate subjects and appropriate remedies for anti-discrimination. This model often motivated administrators to understand the expansion of anti-discrimination machinery as a moral imperative to the extent the “oppressed” seemed similarly situated, thus facilitating disability protections, bilingual education, and many policies for women (despite the awkwardness of the analogy when it came to implementation). The model also limited protections for white, predominantly Catholic “ethnics” whose identities and forms of social discrimination would not easily conform. The black analogy also linked this form of subjectivity to concerns over state security whose genealogy lay in Cold War struggles against a “lawless” Communist enemy eager to exploit and publicize the dismal state of civil rights in the United States. This domestic commitment to civil rights (though not social rights), forged in an effort to publicize a global human rights alternative to the Communist bloc, has recently become an important avenue for thinking out the commitments and limits to a rights regime absent social mobilization in the United States and elsewhere (Dudziak 2000; Johnson 2003; Patton 2002). Skrentny provides interesting detail to further this project.

One irony of the black analogy is that it provided both the cultural impetus for the minority rights revolution as well as its limit, as revealed in the subsequent political revulsion to affirmative action for African Americans and its inelasticity in relation to ethnic whites and sexual minorities. Skrentny does not always make enough of these limits, only hinting at the seeds of a counter-mobilization against the civil rights era that we see around us today. Some women, he notes, opposed women’s rights as antagonistic to femininity, and [*206] gay rights have long been seen as unpalatable where they cannot be assimilated to the black analogy (especially where there is little documentation of discrimination against gays). But, just as the cold war served as a template for the minority rights revolution, the legal integration that emerged in this revolutionary period likely informs counter-mobilization today and deserves more genealogical attention.

One obstruction to this genealogy in Skrentny’s analysis is his willingness to separate what he calls “policy” from symbolism. Framed in this way, it becomes hard to understand the question, “Why rights?” in this decade, and it often limits the scope of the rights revolution to the fuzzy horizon of “unpopularity.” More attention to the cultural dynamics of the black analogy and the ways in which rights created cultural meanings as policy would deepen our understandings of the ironies, paradoxes, and triumphs of the rights revolution (see, e.g., Richards 1999). For example, the administrative universalization of the one-drop rule from segregationist legal definitions of race to emergent categories such as “Hispanic” and “Asian” in this period might also be used to explore the forms that political demands did take (e.g., Brown 1995), or how they created a political quiescence in the language of Murray Edelman (1971) who was ever suspicious of distinguishing political meaning from political “outputs.” Where Skrentny has more success with these categories is in showing the mutual entanglement of judicial and administrative actions.

Another problem with Skrentny’s inattention to counter-mobilization can be found in lost opportunities. Busing, for example, probably did as much to sour many Americans’ taste for the rights revolution as affirmative action, but it plays little role in this book.

Despite these critical remarks, the book is an impressive and important analysis that helps us reevaluate the role of political demand and rights mobilization in the historical production of the rights revolution. Linking the revolution to its counter-revolution today, and the ways in which mobilization by the anti-pluralist right wing has now supplanted that of the liberal pluralist left, is an important task that can find one anchor point in the historical work of this author.

REFERENCES:

Brown, Wendy. 1995. STATES OF INJURY : POWER AND FREEDOM IN LATE MODERNITY. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Cooper, Davina. 1998. GOVERNING OUT OF ORDER: SPACE, LAW, AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING. London ; New York: Rivers Oram Press; Distributed in the USA by New York University Press.

Dudziak, Mary L. 2000. COLD WAR CIVIL RIGHTS: RACE AND THE IMAGE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Edelman, Murray J. 1971. POLITICS AS SYMBOLIC ACTION; MASS AROUSAL AND QUIESCENCE. New York: Academic Press. [*207]

Foucault, Michel. 1991. GOVERNMENTALITY. IN THE FOUCAULT EFFECT: STUDIES IN GOVERNMENTALITY. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (eds). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. SELECTIONS FROM THE PRISON NOTEBOOKS OF ANTONIO GRAMSCI. New York: International Publishers.

Jacob, Herbert. 1988. SILENT REVOLUTION: THE TRANSFORMATION OF DIVORCE LAW IN THE UNITED STATES. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Johnson, David K. 2003. THE LAVENDER SCARE : THE COLD WAR PERSECUTION OF GAYS AND LESBIANS IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Patton, Cindy. 2002. “Stealth Bombers of Desire: the Globalization of ‘Alterity’ in Emerging Democracies.” In Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin Manalansan (eds). QUEER GLOBALIZATIONS: CITIZENSHIP AND THE AFTERLIFE OF COLONIALISM. New York: New York University Press.

Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard Cloward. 1977. POOR PEOPLE’S MOVEMENTS. New York: Vintage Books.

Richards, David. 1999. IDENTITY AND THE CASE FOR GAY RIGHTS: RACE, GENDER, RELIGION AS ANALOGIES. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rose, Nikolas. 1996. “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies.” In Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (eds). FOUCAULT AND POLITICAL REASON: LIBERALISM, NEO-LIBERALISM, AND RATIONALITIES OF GOVERNMENT. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

*************************************************************