Just yesterday I picked up the collected edition of Rachel Pollack's run on Vertigo's Doom Patrol. I remember seeing listings for it back in the 90s, when she started writing it, and I was struck then by the announcements that she was a poet and novelist - which crystallized for me that the book was something different, if you followed up Grant Morrison with a poet, of all things.
Even back then I had some inkling of who Grant Morrison was, even if I hadn't actually read any of his comics. Though I guess that feeling of the "grown-upness" of Vertigo came from the descriptions of the other books being published in the line at that time: beyond Sandman and Hellblazer and Swamp Thing were Shade, the Changing Man; Enigma; Moonshadow; Chiaroscuro. All of these, going by the descriptions, dealt with more mature themes than the mainline DC books, so it made sense that the line would hire a "proper" writer.
I never picked up Doom Patrol at the time, though I did come across some early Grant Morrison issues in Italian compilations that I'd buy on vacation. I think I skipped past those pages, though, because I was just buying these books for the Justice League and Legion of Superheroes issues that they contained. So I didn't actually encounter the Grant Morrison Doom Patrol until a couple of years ago.
More recently, I heard of Rachel Pollack's passing, so I was reminded of her time on Doom Patrol, and learned that they had indeed collected her run. Those issues have probably been impossible to find for the last 30 years, because they weren't plagued with particularly stellar sales. I've spoken here before of the pleasure of finding old comics from that period that are rare but not valuable, so I appreciated the chance to get my hands on these issues.
Anyway, in the collected edition there's a foreword from series editor Tom Peyer, in which he talks about the prank he and Pollack played in the original issues' letter column (Pollack also mentioned it, and the snippets of the letters are pretty funny). They'd already hired her, but they ran letters from her in each issue, where she asked with increasing insistence to be made the new Doom Patrol writer, culminating in the announcement in Morrison's last issue that Pollack would indeed be the new writer.
The thing that set off a lightbulb in my head was Peyer's line about "the great American terror that someone, somewhere, is getting something they don't deserve". This terror is what's driven some of the worst behavior by the west in recent years (not just here in the US, but in Europe, and probably Canada too): Comicsgate and Gamergate are two examples, in which right-wing trolls threw a fit about women in the comics and video game industries.
(As a quick aside, those 90s solicitations for Pollack's Doom Patrol made no mention of the fact that she was a trans woman, a fact I didn't learn until the last decade. One imagines that DC might have made a bigger deal of it if they'd hired her now, which would have led to a predictable backlash from those Comicsgate idiots. But also, Pollack makes a nice counter-example to those who think gender transitions are something new)
But it's also what's driven the decades-long campaign against affirmative action, which seems to have culminated this week in the US Supreme Court's decision to limit the ways that Harvard and the University of North Carolina can apply race in their admissions process.
I don't want to debate the merits of the SCOTUS decision, or of the defense by Harvard or UNC. I'm not a lawyer or legal scholar, and I appreciate it's a thorny topic, given that Harvard seems to have been using some pretty gross racism against Asian students to prioritize Black and Hispanic students.
But that line by Tom Peyer is a perfect encapsulation of why affirmative action has been so controversial for so long. The opposition to it turns on the idea not that you're attempting to right historic wrongs, but that you're taking jobs or university places from deserving, qualified (read: white and/or male) people and giving them to undeserving (read: non-white and/or non-male) people.
That formulation speaks to a lot of people's sense of fairness, which is why it's been so successful in cutting back affirmative action, especially in higher education. Even the most fair-minded people want to see jobs go to the most qualified people; conversely, nobody wants to see critical jobs go to someone who has no idea how to do these jobs based only on their skin color or other circumstances.
However, support for affirmative action varies depending on how you ask the question. A lot of people who might support measures to reduce wealth inequality among different ethnic or racial groups will express opposition to these measures if they're painted as giving jobs to the "undeserving". The other way to look at this is that a lot of people who don't care about racial inequality can go around saying they want to do something for disadvantaged groups, but it has to be the "right" measure, whatever that may mean.
Unfortunately, affirmative action is another of those areas where the left has allowed reactionaries and the radical right to define the terms of the debate. Instead of being able to defend access to good jobs and education as the way to improve outcomes for historically disadvantaged groups (because the right also doesn't want these groups getting access to welfare, again the "undeserving" idea), progressives are left looking silly by defending a system that seems like it's just there to advance incompetent people. Not that anyone ever notices when a white guy is shown to be incompetent (ahem *Frank Lampard* ahem)
Progressives also end up unwittingly bolstering existing racial tensions, where people of certain disadvantaged groups feel they're competing with other such groups for the scraps left by the dominant group. Harvard's black-balling of Asians is a good example: there's a sense among some Asian parents, anecdotally in my experience, that their kids are working hard for places in college only to be denied by affirmative action for "less deserving" students.
Funnily enough, we got a clear picture of who the "less deserving" students were a few years ago, when the Varsity Blues scandal erupted. Here was a group of parents paying extraordinary amounts to fudge their kids' standardized test scores and extracurriculars, in order to get into elite schools (and USC) that they wouldn't have been able to get into otherwise. And, uh, most of those parents were white, which means, for example, Lori Loughlin's kid (who didn't even want to go to college) was taking a spot from a "more deserving" student.
There was talk about affirmative action then, too, and what this admissions scandal meant for students of color. What's depressing is that the question of how to properly address these racial gaps and provide opportunities fell by the wayside again until this week. Signs suggest that once the dust has settled from this latest decision, that question will get ignored again, and Americans will go back to worrying that someone who "shouldn't" be getting into Harvard, or being promoted to manager, or even writing a comic book, will be getting those things.
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