Chapter 3

Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse:

A Dilemma-Centered Rhetorical analysis

Herbert W. Simons

Heading north from Denver on a suburban highway offering splendid views of the Rockies to the west, one soon comes upon Boulder, Colorado and to the nearby communities that together constitute the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD). Home to the University of Colorado’s flagship campus, Boulder is in many ways an idyllic city, affluent, cosmopolitan, blessed by climate and geography, a center for learning and research.A ring of open space surrounds the city and a creek bringing water from on high runs through it. Leading out from Boulder toward the Rockies are bikeways and hiking trails, along which the habituated local traveler moves easily through the thin mountain air while the visitor huffs and puffs.[1]Proximity to the Rockies has brought tourism to Boulder, which, together with high tech start-ups and other University-related sources of purchasing power, insures an ample supply of good eateries, watering holes, and cultural amenities. The fast-growing suburban enclaves that border the city partake of its benefits, and they, like Boulder, are generous in support of their public institutions.

Not incidentally, Boulder is also a liberal Mecca. It combines classical with progressive liberalism, of a kind that has lost favor in much of the United States, but is nevertheless a source of civic pride. Colorado, like the rest of America, is classically liberal in the sense of commitments to such well established liberal values as democratic decision-making, good government, the rule of law, public education, respect for the individual, freedom of speech and of the press, and a modicum of compassion for the less fortunate.[2] These accoutrements of a centuries old ideological tradition in Western Europe and America are so well entrenched as to be honored even by social and political conservatives.[3]They are among the values of our Founding Fathers and of the British parliamentary tradition, from Locke through Bentham and Mill, and they have found their way into the workings of local communities and local institutions.

But Boulder is also progressivelyliberal,[4] and thus is seen in some parts of Colorado as “ultra-liberal” and even as “crazy” liberal.People of a progressively liberal bent migrate to the Boulder area, and they in turn help sustain its liberal ethos. As characterized by more conservative Coloradoans, Boulder sends “tax-and-spend” liberals to Congress and to the state legislature. Its morality, if you can call it that, is a throwback to the freewheeling, overly permissive values of the sixties. Its Open Space regulations are hypocritical, defended in the name of environmental preservation, but providing a bonanza to homeowners in the form of skyrocketing real estate prices. In fact, Boulderites tolerate, and indeed celebrate, lifestyle diversity to a far greater degree than in such conservative enclaves as Colorado Springs.[5] They place a far higher premium on social and economic equality, as illustrated by the emphasis placed at the 2/27/01 BVSD meeting on closing the educational achievement gap.And, as was also manifested at the 2/27 BSVD meeting, they are especially sensitive to issues of race.

Into this progressively liberal environment came news that a committee of teachers at BSVD’s Mesa Elementary School, overseeing a Science Fair, had first permitted but then “pulled” a third grader’s “Barbie” experiment, one that reportedly provided scientific evidence of a preference by fifth graders for a white Barbie over a black Barbie, whatever the color of the Barbie’s dress. They did so moreover, in the name of sensitivity to Mesa Elementary’s minority children, albeit at the risk of appearing insensitive to the girl who did the study and of seeming all too eager to cover over what may have been the fifth graders’ learned prejudices. The decision also called into question their commitment to other liberal values, including freedom of speech and of scientific inquiry.Thus l’affaire Barbiegate, including news of the experiment and of its removal from the Science Fair competition, exposed fissures in the community’s liberal ideology, made all the more embarrassing by the attention Barbiegate received well beyond the BVSD’s boundaries.

The Barbiegate saga is of interest to rhetoricians like myself for many of the same reasons that it garnered press attention nationwide. Here on a human scale was a drama of great forensic complexity, a comedy in Burke’s sense of the term,[6] featuring well-meaning citizens at loggerheads over what it meant to “do the right thing.” At one level, the drama was geographically confined, but other communities could identify with Barbiegate because in a broader sense, its problems were their own.

And, indeed, the Barbiegaters seemed caught up in conflicts that were not entirely of their own making. The questions of justice and policy that circulated through the proceedings and press commentaries were given a distinctive cast by affluent Boulder’s distinctive mix of classical and progressive liberalism.Barbiegate was also symptomatic of larger conflicts between liberals and conservatives, and within liberalism since the early successes of the civil rights movement.[7] Race figured prominently in Barbiegate discourse, and in much else that was raised at the 2/27 School Board meeting. Even as they differed over Barbiegate, those who addressed its racial implications bespoke commitments to one or another variant of liberal ideology.

Ideologies are widely shared systems of belief that arise out of peoples’ needs to make sense of the world. They are the glue that binds ideas together, including ideas so seemingly disparate as capital punishment and right-to-life, freedom of speech and freedom to have anal sex, love thy enemy and just war. In this sense, they are strategically adapted to our need for a unifying “common sense.” But because ideologies must square so many circles, serve so many masters, be adapted to so many situations, they require a degree of flexibility-—of meaning, of purpose, of logic--that may strain credulity and even appear contradictory. Thus the same ideology that draws us together may also divide us from each other and even from ourselves. Hence the need to address these problems rhetorically.

A Dilemma-Centered Analysis of Barbiegate Rhetoric

This essay offers an analysis of Barbiegate discourse, taken as a whole. It also ventures separate rhetorical assessments of textual fragments by some of Barbiegate’s principal actors: among them the complainant, David Thielen, the “defendants” and their supporters,and various school board members, including Board Vice-President Bill De la Cruz.

It does so with a view toward gleaning larger lessons from Barbiegate, all the while as it underscores the distinctive, local, situated character of the discourse itself. It likewise brings a theoretical and historical framework to bear upon the textual fragments being examined, rather than treating them atomistically, or at a purely local level, as some discourse analysts are wont to do.

As in much of my work, the approach that I take here to rhetorical analysis is dilemma-centered.[8]I look for evidence of rhetorical dilemmas in the discourse being examined and in the larger currents of ideological opinion that swirl through Boulder and beyond. I look too for more mundane tensions. The “Barbiegaters” are enacting roles, representing agencies and institutions, speaking for constituencies, and in so doing confronting the usual run of rhetorical problems for people in their positions. How to appeal to multiple and diverse audiences, balance ethics against expediency, weigh the long term against the short? How to contest while appearing cooperative, preserve one’s options while appearing wedded to principle, wield power while appearing to cede it to others, serve one’s individual or group interests while also (perhaps) seeking to promote the greater good?

Finding evidence of rhetorical dilemmas in the tape and transcripts make available to the book’s contributors was not difficult. On opposing sides of various divides, the leading Barbiegaters trafficked in ambiguities, hid behind platitudes, dodged ultra-sensitive issues, smoothed over other tough issues that could not be ignored, and came dangerously close in some cases to contradicting themselves. But these apparent defects of character or logic can be understood and perhaps even admired given the rhetorical predicaments the Barbiegaters confronted. One value of dilemma-centered analysis is that it renders talk explicable which might otherwise seem anomalous or immoral. Recurrent patterns of such talk also provide indicators of larger societal problems. And, as was repeatedly illustrated in Billig et al’s Ideological Dilemmas, talk of this kind is rhetorically interesting from artistic and theoretical perspectives.[9]Skilled practitioners of the art often find ways to extricate themselves from dilemmas or to practice effective damage control. But even the best practitioners may compound their rhetorical problemsin their efforts to manage them.[10]Dilemma-centered analysis also reveals limitations in prescribed forms of talk. I find evidence of that in the inability of the school officials to mount their strongest case.

Much that I have to offer in this paper in the way of conclusions from the evidence will be impressionistic. This is due in part to questions left unanswerable in the record made available to the book’s contributors. How, for example, did the Barbiegate story get press attention, and why did it take two weeks for it to break in the press? Who else within the community did Thielen talk to, besides ACLU representatives, and with what effect? What behind-the-scenes conversations took place between Thielen and BVSD officials in the period between the “pulling” of his daughter’s science project and the first BVSD meeting (2/13/01) at which he registered his complaint? Who were the various school and BVSD officials, what did they say to each other, and who carried the most weight?What strategies, if any, did they develop for responding to press reports? How did the story play on local radio and TV, or in CU Boulder’s widely read daily newspaper? When did it become national and even international news, and how were those accounts read by the BoulderValley community?[11]

I had related questions. Because Barbiegate took place in Boulder proper, did that lead residents of BVSD who lived outside the hub city to distance themselves from it—as a Boulder problem but not a BoulderValley problem?Was Boulder liberalism such as to produce tinges of liberal guilt over the way its fifth graders had voted? Was this yet another sign that Boulder’s children lacked the liberal zeal of their parents, and might even go over to the other side? Had anyone talked with the children who participated in the experiment or who learned about it second hand?

Then, too, one could raise legitimate questions about the competence and freedom from bias of this message analyst. Despite these limitations, I remain reasonably confident about the epistemological stance taken in the paper and about the impressions here recorded.Early on, in preparation for this article,I decided against posing as a disinterested spectator,while at the same time not claiming to bracket issues of truth or falsity, wisdom or folly--for example, by adopting the stance of the methodological or programmatic relativist.[12] Neither stance seemed appropriate for a crisis of this sort, one that fairly cried out for truth-claims that could not, however, be vouchsafed by appeal to some foundational court of last resort. I would be operating then in the contingent realm of judgment rather than certainty, required to own up to my own liberalism, while also making clear that I was not blinded to its problems.

Would I also be obliged therefore to acknowledge that my own relativism rendered me incapable of choosing between competing logics—those, for example, of Thielen and of the teachers who decided to remove his daughter’s Science Fair project? I don’t believe so. Not always is a choice necessary, and even when one is called for, the choice can be defended on non-foundationalist, contingent grounds, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith has argued.[13]In his introduction to Ideological Dilemmas, Billigand his colleagues make precisely this point as regards the conventional wisdom of a dominant cultural ideology like classical liberalism. True, he says, it will contain a logoi and a dissoi logoi, as reflected in seemingly contradictory aphorisms. Do many hands make light work? They do, in some circumstances. But it may also be the case on occasion that too many cooks spoil the broth. To the person who is excessively cautious, it may be appropriate to say, “Never ventured, never gained.” To the excessively venturesome, a word of caution may be called for: “Look before you leap.” Smith and Billig make clear that one can argue relativistically and yet persuasively.

What, then, will we be able to say about the reliability of this visitor’s Barbiegate analysis? Will the story I tell account for the discourse of Barbiegate, “capture” its essence, resolve its mysteries, vindicate my theoretical framework? Or will this (inadvertently?, ultimately?) be a story of my liberalism, my affluence, my liberal guilt, my misimpressions of Boulder culture, my chutzpah in presuming to know what caused what, my rhetorical problems in attempting both to appear credible as a message analyst and at the same time both opinionated and modestly self-effacing? I may be the last to know.

Propositional Claims

The following observations and judgments about Barbiegate discourse are arrayed as numbered propositions.

Prop. I. Boulder (and BoulderValley more generally) was embroiled in paradox by virtue of its mix of affluence and progressive liberalism.

Boulder’s affluence made its progressive brand of liberalism affordable, and this is no small thing. But this also had the effect of keeping “Denver-like” problems like poverty and race conflict from Boulder’s doors, thus rendering it vulnerable to charges that it was really a haven for white privilege,giving mere lip service to its concerns for the poor and the oppressed.A March 1 editorial in the Daily Camera took aim at Boulder liberalism.“Here in Boulder, this ocean of mostly-white faces, we may use all of the politically correct labels…and we may yearn to be accepted as the tolerant, supportive people we believe we are, but we are not immune from the taint of prejudice….”The editorial goes on to provide a telling example. Based on self-acknowledged prejudicial “profiling” by a resident of an upscale Boulder neighborhood, Boulder police accosted two young Latinos, both innocent of an alleged robbery, and manhandled them before questioning them. Says the editorialist, “We live (by choice) in an environment where we seldom have to live our words. It’s easy ‘armchair’ philosophizing.”[14]

A mix of affluence and progressive liberalism also raises the bar for communities like Boulder, preventing them from ever appearing “good enough.” There are always larger problems to be solved (e.g., famine in Africa, mistreatment of animals) requiring larger expenditures of public resources. And conservatives are right when they express skepticism about how much government can do. Thus, affluent progressive liberalism is an easy target for criticism, even from those it seeks most to help. I believe Mesa PTA President Jordana Ash when she says that Mesa Elementary is “an incredible school, an award-winning school.”[15] And I believe board members Teresa Steele and Jean Bonelliwhen they express particular concern for the needs of underperforming minority children. But that still leaves Boulder liberals vulnerable to verbal darts from those whose praise it most ardently seeks. Boulder may or may not have “a history of hating black folks,” as Million Man March representative Alvertis Simmons alleged at the 2/27 school board meeting,[16]but it would not be surprising if many black folks in cities like Denver hated Boulder, despite its good works and even better intentions.

Prop. II.L’affaire Barbiegate posed a series of rhetorical dilemmas, made especially vexing because the Boulder community is liberal, is well-meaning, and is also vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy on the very sorts of issues it was forced to confront.

Consider first the questions of whether and when one should conceal or reveal one’s prejudices. The adult white subjects in the Barbiegate experiment were savvy enough to express a preference for the lavender dress, not the Barbie with a skin color similar to their own. Arguably, this is a good thing. Direct expressions of racist feelings and beliefs have become anathema in America. But owning up to prejudice can also be regarded as a good thing. The woman who mistakenly implicated the two Latinos in a robbery was congratulated for admitting to unconscious prejudices. Who among us, after all, is not prejudiced? But suppose that the adult white Barbie subjects had responded as the fifth graders had done?Board member Janusz Okolowicz speculated that they may have “lied.”[17]True enough! But their honesty, normally considered a virtue, would not in this case have been rewarded. What’s the difference?