What does affirmative action backlash have to do with 90s alt rock & today's alt right?
In which I discuss both Cheryl Harris's iconic "Whiteness As Property" article and the less-than-iconic Creed song "One"
Some Sunday in 1992 or 1993 high school freshman Robin confused the heck out of her Presbyterian Sunday School class when she made a presentation about Nine Inch Nails’ 1989 single “Head Like a Hole.” She argued the song’s critique of materialism (a.k.a. “God Money”) had something philosophically and ethically in common with Christian theological commitments to the spiritual over the material. Though my audience really struggled to separate the song’s then-countercultural aesthetics from the lyrics’ possible philosophical commitments, reflecting back upon this incident today I see that baby Robin may have stumbled on the beginnings of something whose significance was not something anybody could have really anticipated in the “End of History” early 90s.
Pretty Hate Machine gives voice to a sense of personal aggrievement and wounded entitlement that chimes with the one that has come to define the 21st century American conservative movement increasingly dominated by Christian nationalism. In Daphne Carr’s 33 ⅓ volume on that album, she argues its songs “focus almost exclusively on the personal tragedy of the people and institutions that fail one individual: Trent Reznor. NIN’s lyrics explore the repressions of religion, family, and society, but only as they pertain to one life” (21). Whereas industrial music traditionally rages against the machine both literally and figuratively, Carr argues that Reznor reframes industrial’s heaviness as an expression of private individual aggrievement. For example, the line in this paper’s title comes from the pre-chorus to “Head Like a Hole.” Whereas bands like Ministry and KMFDM sample George H.W. Bush’s “New World Order” line or encourage “black man white man rip the system” to frame the issue as precisely a systemic one, “Head Like A Hole” narrates the perspective of an individual experiencing some sort of personal injury. And here I mean personal injury in the sense used in American civil law, i.e., as lost property right.
From incels raging about women owing them sex to Moms for Liberty griping that the presence of LGBTQ+ people and media interferes with their property rights in their children, contemporary alt-right movements use claims of personal injury to go viral and create media spectacles drawing disproportionate attention to their causes. This paper traces the genealogy of this affect of wounded entitlement backwards from 2020s alt right media through 1990s alternative rock to 80s and 90s affirmative action backlash. Returning to Cheryl Harris’s landmark 1993 article “whiteness as property,” I show how she identifies a new form of such property evolving out of then-current anti-affirmative action arguments: whiteness as personal injury. I then trace the performance of this sort of whiteness-as-property in 90s alternative rock, and contextualize this analysis with respect to sociologist Jennifer L. Pierce’s work on the rise of affirmative backlash narratives in 90s news media. Both the newspaper and radio industries grew increasingly financialzed in the 1990s. In a financialized media industry, the main audience a company addresses is not consumers but investors, who want to believe their investments are capable of exponential growth. Building on my earlier work on resilience, gender, and neoliberalism, this paper argues that the performance of wounded entitlement is a way for people with otherwise privileged identities (i.e., cishetero nondisabled white men) to tap into resilience discourse and perform damage that can then be overcome in the sort of spectacular and exponential enclosure of value expected in a financialized market. Financialized media industries--especially ones like newspapers and alt rock radio that try to appeal explicitly to men--encourage the performance of wounded entitlement or personal injury because that’s how men, especially white cishetero men, can exhibit the kind of “scalable” value financialized markets prize.
Wounded Entitlement
In my sense of the term, “wounded entitlement” or “personal injury” refer to a structure of white subjectivity grounded in what critical race theorist Cheryl Harris calls “whiteness as property.” This theory names the phenomenon whereby white people experience the benefits white supremacy grants them as property rights, such as the right to non-trespass. According to Harris, “the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset” (1713) that U.S. law treats as such, i.e., as property. Though the idea that white people had a property interest in their white identity dates back to chattel slavery and the colonization of North America, it wasn’t critically thematized as such until 1989 - a little over a decade into the emergence of Critical Race Theory as a field of legal scholarship. According to Harris, the first critical legal scholarship to discuss whiteness as a “property interest” is Derrick Bell’s 1989 paper in George Mason Law Review on Plessy vs. Ferguson. Harris’s landmark 1993 article “Whiteness As Property” takes this idea and traces its full history in U.S. law. Focusing on Plessy vs. Ferguson, Brown vs. Board of Education, and late 80s/early 90s anti-affirmative action suits, Harris argues that “whiteness shares the critical characteristics of property even as the meaning of property has changed over time.” (1714). Plessy treats whiteness as “status property”, limiting legitimate property ownership only to those of white status. Brown treats whiteness as “the settled expectations of relative white privilege as a legitimate and natural baseline.” (1714) In both cases, property right is framed as a “right to exclude” (1714), such as the right to exclude non-whites from property ownership, or the right to exclude non-whites from trespassing upon settled expectations of white privilege.
Harris’s discussion of late 20th century legal debates about affirmative action suggest the emergence of personal injury as a third iteration of whiteness as property. Affirmative action’s core function was to give members of historically-marginalized groups preferential treatment to make up for the ongoing structural impacts of that marginalization; in this respect, its function was as much about the distribution of advantage as it was reparation or “corrective” compensation for past individual harm. However, Harris argues that “the property interest in whiteness has skewed the concept of affirmative action by focusing on the sin or innocence of individual white claimants with vested rights, rather than on the broader questions of distribution of benefits and burdens” (1780). Because affirmative actions’ corrective effects had the potential to unsettle white people’s settled expectations of relative white privilege, mainstream debates about the program centered exclusively on the issue of whether individual white people (men) deserved the loss of that entitlement through some quote-unquote sin against minorities. As she notes, ”lawsuits brought by white males claiming constitutional injury allegedly produced by affirmative action programs have proliferated and garnered support in many quarters” (1767; emphasis mine). These anti-affirmative action suits treated such redistribution as an injury to plaintiffs’ civil person that deprived them of their “settled expectations” in whiteness as property, much in the same way that a negligent driver might deprive someone they injure in a car crash of things like full use of their body or future earning potential. Even though the wrong here is a constitutional matter, these anti-affirmative action lawsuits treat it as a personal injury lawsuit. “By disavowing the essential jurisprudential nature of affirmative action to be both corrective and distributive,” Harris argues, “conflict that is both private and public in nature becomes wholly privatized” (1783). Ignoring the distributive or fairness question and focusing only on the corrective one, late 20th century anti-affirmative action rhetoric and jurisprudence frames whiteness as property as a form of private individual grievance or personal injury.
This shift from the systemic level to the level of the private individual Harris identifies in anti-affirmative action rhetoric in the late 1970s through early 1990s is the same shift Carr attributes to Pretty Hate Machine in its move from industrial’s systemic critique to individual aggrievement. I’m not making any claims of direct causation about anti-affirmative action rhetoric and Rezonor’s lyrics, but I am noting that this philosophical move of shifting registers from the systemic to the private in a way that frames wrongs as matters of personal injury was widespread in American popular culture and jurisprudence from the late 1970s onward. The performance of white masculinity as personal injury was part of what Christian Sharpe calls “the weather”: “our environments…our climate” (ITW 104), “the machines in which we live” (111). I’m less interested in whether any particular musician had a stake in or was influenced by this anti-affirmative action rhetoric and more interested in establishing (1) that this structure of white masculine subjectivity was pervasive throughout the 80s and early 90s, and (2) that personal injury was a variation of whiteness-as-property very present in late 20th century jurisprudence.
The Music
White masculinity as personal injury is all over 90s alt rock. First, let me illustrate Carr’s contention that PHM personalizes and privatizes the systemic harms of things like the Church, the Family, and the capitalist State. First, the pre-chorus to “Head Like a Hole” is repetitions of “No you can’t take it/No you can’t take that away from me.” Musically, these repetitions function somewhat similarly to the role of repetitions in the beginning of what I call The Soar: it builds tension leading up to the big hit on the first word of the chorus. The “it” or “that” under threat is the narrator’s self-”control” or self-ownership; Carr notes that this song was “a response to [producer] Gottlieb’s meddling with Reznor’s work” (33). The narrator fears his creative self-control and ownership of his intellectual property is threatened with nonconsenusal trespass.
“Terrible Lie” uses similar phrasing in its bridge: “don’t take it away I need you/someone to hold on to.” That is repeated again in the bridge, again with something like a proto-Soar at the end leading into the next verse. More interestingly, “Terrible Lie” does something that happens across PHM and which will become increasingly common in 90s alternative as it gets more bro-ified (to use Chris Molanphy’s term). There is a tradition among women vocalists that goes back to the beginning of recorded music where they use romantic relationships as synecdoches for broader social and political relationships. Angela Davis discusses this in Blues Legacies: the personal is political. But in “Terrible Lie” as in many other 90s alt rock songs, the political becomes personal. This song uses second-person pronouns in a way that makes it unclear whether Reznor’s narrator is angry at an institution like Christianity or an interpersonal relation, stereotypically figured as feminine. On the one hand, “Terrible Lie” is about eschatalogical anger at a disappointing God; on the other, it’s about “someone” to hold on to. Similarly, “Sin” could be about an institution or, with lyrics like “your kiss,” a person. There’s a telling moment in Carr’s book when an her interviewee Gus from Cleveland intuitively connects a discussion of his perceived betrayal by society and actual abandonment by his mother with “Terrible Lie”:
I told my dad that one day we would get the good things we deserved in life. Just then, I had this sudden aggression for my mother and for all those like her…I told my dad, ‘To calm me from my thoughts…let’s listen to some music,’ The first song I decided to play was the clearest thing I ever heard in my life: ‘Terrible Lie’” (63)
The song’s fourth line is “I think you owe me a great big apology”, and for Chris that “you” is both society and his estranged mom. For Chris, “Terrible Lie” connects the sense of being owed by society with the sense of private familial wrong: he experiences both as private personal debts.
The nadir of this trend is Seether’s 2007 “Fake It,” which hit the top of the Billboard Alternative Songs chart in January 2008. The lyrics equate the ultimate Gen X sin of selling out with women faking orgasms, and includes the line “I feel raped.” Here, the most gendered form of criminal personal trespass is a figure for how the masculine narrator feels he’s been treated by the music industry. But there are plenty of less obviously distasteful examples, like Puddle of Mudd’s “She Hates Me,” Incubus’s “Love Hurts,” Audioslave’s “Like A Stone,” even Foals “Mountain At My Gates.” These songs use the feeling of being wronged by an intimate partner as a metaphor for whiteness-as-property qua personal injury.
Ditching the metaphor, Creed’s 1997 “One” is an “All lives matter” take on affirmative action. With lyrics like “I feel violent I feel alone…Discrimination now on both sides/Seeds of hate blossom further,” the song gives voice to the same sorts of backlash that proliferated US print media headlines in the leadup to the 1996 presidential election, such as “Men: Many Whites Feel They’ve Been Cheated” (SF Chron May 95) or “White Men’s Eroding Economic Clout Contributes to Backlash” (SF Chron March 95). Interestingly, the song shifts between jangly, both-sidesy verses whose calls for “one” might evoke the U2 track of that name, and grungy, Stone Temple Pilots-y choruses about feeling angry, violent, and alone. The more “90s alt” sounds accompany the more aggrieved sentiments. Creed’s “One” uses alt rock styles to sonify white masculine ressentiment over affirmative action specifically. And that association sticks. In a March 2000 review of Creed’s show at Minneapolis’s Target Center, SPIN’s Michael Totorello describes lead singer Scott Stapp as “a man stricken by…affirmative action” (66). As one of the most iconically derogatory examples of 90s alt rock, it’s interesting that Creed is the band with a song and an ensuing reputation for didactically connecting affirmative action backlash to the sound of grunge-influenced alt rock.
Whereas mainstream rock’s libidinal economy has traditionally centered around white men’s appropriation of stereotypical cishetero Black masculinity in order to perform a supposedly greater degree of physical and sexual prowess than basic white dudes have access to, the libidinal economy expressed in Pretty Hate Machine and represented in “One” is different. Instead of disidentifying with white masculinity by appropriating Blackness, these media objects depict a white masculinity nonconsensually denied property rights to which it is supposedly entitled. This is a white masculinity distanced from itself not through conquest and appropriation, but through perceived personal injury, one that cuts out the middle man of racial identity and goes directly to racialized property relations. This idea obviously needs more fleshing out in future research.
Wounded Entitlement and Financialized Media Industries
Millennial corporate alt rock radio was an environment that fostered the performance of white masculinity as wounded entitlement, largely due to its financialization. As an August 2000 New York Times article explains,
Though the audience for alt rock radio was a narrow demographic of middlebrow white men, Clear Channel was itself performing for a different audience: investors. The main concern of Clear Channel was not so much the profitability of their stations (if it was they might have put more resources into actual local programming), but its stock price. This was well-known in the industry at the time. WOXY owner Doug Balogh told The Nation in 2003 that “There used to be two constituencies in this business: advertisers and listeners. Now with this concentration there are three: Wall Street, stockholders, and the fraction of the one percent of the population who actually fill out [Arbiron listening] diaries.” Stockbrokers, shareholders, and user data are what counts in the corporate radio biz in the early aughts. And by these metrics, the path to success lied in narrowcasting to men by broadcasting music that oozed stereotypical white masculinity…
…which, as we saw earlier in my discussion of Harris, was getting increasingly reconfigured as a performance of personal injury. The men corporate alt rock radio programmers sought out were invested in very specific and conservative form of masculinity, to the point that KROQ music director Kevin Weatherly described alt rock radio as “red state rock” in 2005, two years after The Chicks got canceled for criticizing Bush 43’s approach to the Iraq war. As Jennifer Pierce shows in her 2012 book Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Gender, and the Backlash against Affirmative Action, by the early aughts one of the leading themes in red state media (and perhaps unsurprisingly also in The New York Times) were “reverse discrimination” narratives about white men who supposedly got short shrifted by affirmative action. As Peirce argues, “print media” in the 80s and 90s exhibited an “eagerness to construct sensational headlines about white male injury” (31). For example, in the November 1990 issue of SPIN, Jefferson Morley’s feature titled “Kulturkampf” stated that “young white males…resent integration, especially affirmative action, as an imposition and a threat” (70). Pierce’s study of mainstream American newspapers from 1990-1996 shows that white men were commonly depicted as “angry and resentful” (27) specifically over affirmative action; she shows how media misrepresented facts and manipulated polling data to “construc[t] the perception of white male resentment and injury” (38). Common sense had it that to be a young white man was to be angry, specifically at the personal injury one suffered due to affirmative action. That’s one reason behind my claim that romantic loss serves as a metaphor for this more political loss: the media had constructed what Pierce calls a “dominant” (38) narrative that white guys were mad, and when they were it was about affirmative action.
Both alt rock radio and the newspapers Pierce analyzed programmed this style of white masculine personal injury as a response to the financialization of their industries. A 1999 Nieman Labs report shows that as “Newspapers have become part of companies whose…operations [are] linked to the demands of equity markets. This has created increased pressure for optimum financial performance at a time when results are increasingly difficult to achieve.” Like corporate alt rock radio programmers at the time, newspapers responded to such pressures “streamlin[ing] costs by eliminating those readers who were less attractive to advertisers.” If affirmative action backlash stories were common, you can guess which readers were “less attractive.” As both alt rock radio and newspapers struggled amid waves of financialization, they both sought out white men as a core audience with content that foregrounded the new sense of whiteness-as-property Harris identified in her 93 analysis of affirmative action backlash.
Why would they do this?
Building on my own work on feminine resilience and neoliberalism, it’s possible to understand the performance of white masculine personal injury as one way this hegemonic identity adapts to resilience discourse and the imperatives to model one’s self as a bundle of human capital that can “scale” in value the way flipped assets can.
As scholars such as myself and Michelle Murphy have shown, finacialized markets expect investments to grow exponentially and spectacularly in their returns. Feminized phenomena can perform such spectacles by resiliently overcoming the gendered damage patriarchy does to them; feminized phenomena can grow so significantly because patriarchy had been keeping them back to begin with. Resilience discourse and its “look, I overcame!” narrative is a neoliberal restructuring of femininity that turns patriarchal damage into a resource that femme subjects can flip into human capital by creating a spectacle of its overcoming. Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s “Telephone” video, with its story of murdering a misogynist boyfriend, is an example of feminized resilience discourse. Resilience is a way to respond to austerity that leans femme; wounded entitlement is a way to respond to austerity that leans masc. Instead of overcoming oppression, wounded entitlement makes a spectacle out of being owed, trespassed, or otherwise having one’s property rights violated. For cishetero white men, however, the only way to appear to start from behind is to claim you have been denied what patriarchal racial capitalism otherwise entitles you to—for example, by affirmative action. In a financialized radio and newspaper industries, it makes sense that a format narrowly targeting white men would elevate music that performed that sort of masculinity: it’s a gendered performance of the sort of value-creation investors expect from their assets.
Financialization and its demand for resilient scalability hit media industries just as affirmative action backlash was reshaping whiteness-as-property into a structure of personal injury. Thinking about the prevalence of white grievance in today’s even more thoroughly financialized media, we need to center these structural issues in media industries and racial formations and treat grievance less as a personal moral failing and more as behavior motivated and rewarded at the structural level.