Opinion
American culture has little interest in restorative social justice
By Ian Baize ’18
October 27, 2016
Tags opinion
Over fall break, I got the chance to catch up on Netflix’s excellent Luke Cage, the latest in a number of series based on lesser-known Marvel heroes produced by that network. The next such series is Iron Fist, scheduled to premiere in spring of next year, which has raised some controversy over its casting decisions. In the comics, Iron Fist is Danny Rand, the son of a New York industrialist who travels to a mystical city in the Himalayas, where he receives martial arts training and superhuman abilities which he then uses to fight crime upon his return to the city. Conceived during the kung-fu craze of the 70s, Iron Fist also carries with it dated conceptions and tropes. The titular character, for example, represents a textbook example of the white protagonist who uses other cultures first as an object of his curiosity, and then as a tool to further his own needs and ends. The culture from which Rand draws his powers appears with all the subtlety and grace that you might expect from 70s martial arts comic book. As such, progressively-minded fans were disappointed by Netflix’s decision to cast Finn Jones, best known for his turn as Loras Tyrell on HBO’s Game of Thrones, as Danny Rand instead of an Asian-American actor.
In addition to giving the Marvel Cinematic Universe its first major Asian-American face, casting an Asian- American actor would have helped remedy some of the racial trope issues with the show, as well as opening the possibility of exploring interesting questions of identity within the context of modern American society. So, then, if its so simple, why didn’t they do it?
What is at issue here is what I’ll be calling restorative social justice, for the sake of clarity if nothing else. The general idea of restorative social justice entails policies or actions that attempt to adjust for historical or structural disadvantages or wrongs. In the case of the Iron Fist casting, the benefits of such action is relatively clear: casting an Asian-American actor would have both gone some way to correct how that character operates as a function of Western tropes, and chipped away at the problem of the under-representation of Asian Americans in popular media. The obstacle this course of action faces, despite its common acceptance and advocacy on college campuses, and indeed part of the explanation for why this casting change did not take place, is that the mere idea of restorative social justice is itself profoundly controversial, and one that America has an extensive recent history of fighting against.
Affirmative action in college admissions is one of the few examples of such a restorative program actually taking place as a matter of policy. And it is widely reviled, including on this campus, with many believing that it provides an unfair advantage to minority students. In a recent Gallup poll, 65 percent of Americans disapproved of the Supreme Court’s decision to allow race and ethnicity to continue to be a factor in college admissions. Although this disapproval is higher among white people, is not limited to them, nor does it change with increased knowledge of the college admissions process. Adjusting for historical and structural disadvantages, which is what affirmative action seeks to do, is viewed by large portions of the American public as fundamentally unfair and contrary to our idea of a meritocracy. Now, the liberal college answer is that, given social and historical reality in which white people are generally wealthier and have better access to good public education it’s only fair to be accounting for these differences in opportunity in college admissions. But this is an unpopular and, to many, a fundamentally un-American answer.
What do these examples (and others, including the idea of paying reparations to the African-American community, President Obama’s 2009 “apology tour,” Oklahoma’s 2015 AP US History bill and others, that time and word counts will spare you my explanation of) have in common? They involve, either implicitly or explicitly, looking critically at either, or both of, America’s past and present, and trying to repair, remunerate or at least begin to remedy the ills suffered therein. And all are met with opposition ranging from hostility to overt derision to, in the case of affirmative action, scapegoating for one’s own shortcomings. I propose that there are two main reasons for these reactions.
First, American popular culture has little place in it for nuance. I would ask readers to look no further than this election as evidence for this view: for elements of one side, criticizing Hillary Clinton at all if one plans to vote for her draws cries of false equivalence, abetting the enemy and sometimes even sexism; the other embraces a worldview with all the nuance of a white nationalist fever dream. Meanwhile, the proliferation of heavily partisan news sources in the age of social media allows for people to get access to information exclusively through media that agrees with them, so it should come as no great surprise that criticizing America at all strikes some as betraying its very essence. In a world without gray areas, these are one and the same.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, there exists a perception that such restorative measures somehow interfere with American ideals of self-reliance and social advancement. The example of affirmative action is perhaps the most useful here, as it is the more widely-discussed and enduringly controversial. Its opponents contrast affirmative action policies with “merit-based” ones, to the point where polling on the subject, including the poll cited above, uses the same language. This, of course, implies that affirmative action policies are not only merit-irrelevant, but also that they get in the way of those seeking to enter college based on their own accomplishments. Restituting a certain social group for continued wrongdoing seems to be antithetical to the American ideal, as it inevitably requires the acknowledgment that something is deeply wrong in the way American society functions today, a claim which damns by association all those defending and profiting from the current system. One cannot at once believe that American society is adequately fair and also support restorative social justice.
I write this not to discourage those who pursue and defend these policies. I do only propose that, however, because discussions of social justice on college campuses so frequently turn to and involve these policies, we take a serious look at the problem of perception facing them and make a legitimate effort to think about overcoming them, as in a democratic society it is a necessary hurdle to clear. In other words, discussions revolving around restorative social justice must account for and attempt to counteract the very real opposition that exists to this concept outside of certain, specific activist circles, including liberal college campuses. It appears, therefore, that Netflix’s superhero shows would be a good place to start.