TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040891/0408640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 84

Teach Diversity -- with a Smile


By Barbara Ehrenreich


    Something had to replace the threat of communism, and at
last a workable substitute is at hand. "Multiculturalism," as
the new menace is known, has been denounced in the media
recently as the new McCarthyism, the new fundamentalism, even
the new totalitarianism -- take your choice. According to its
critics, who include a flock of tenured conservative scholars,
multiculturalism aims to toss out what it sees as the
Eurocentric bias in education and replace Plato with Ntozake
Shange and traditional math with the Yoruba number system. And
that's just the beginning. The Jacobins of the multiculturalist
movement, who are described derisively as P.C., or politically
correct, are said to have launched a campus reign of terror
against those who slip and innocently say "freshman" instead of
"freshperson," "Indian" instead of "Native American" or, may the
Goddess forgive them, "disabled" instead of "differently abled."

    So you can see what is at stake here: freedom of speech,
freedom of thought, Western civilization and a great many
professorial egos. But before we get carried away by the
mounting backlash against multiculturalism, we ought to reflect
for a moment on the system that the P.C. people aim to replace.
I know all about it; in fact it's just about all I do know,
since I -- along with so many educated white people of my
generation -- was a victim of monoculturalism.

    American history, as it was taught to us, began with
Columbus' "discovery" of an apparently unnamed, unpeopled
America, and moved on to the Pilgrims serving pumpkin pie to a
handful of grateful red-skinned folks. College expanded our
horizons with courses called Humanities or sometimes Civ, which
introduced us to a line of thought that started with Homer,
worked its way through Rabelais and reached a poignant climax
in the pensees of Matthew Arnold. Graduate students wrote
dissertations on what long-dead men had thought of Chaucer's
verse or Shakespeare's dramas; foreign languages meant French
or German. If there had been high technology in ancient China,
kingdoms in black Africa or women anywhere, at any time, doing
anything worth noticing, we did not know it, nor did anyone
think to tell us.

    Our families and neighborhoods reinforced the dogma of
monoculturalism. In our heads, most of us '50s teenagers carried
around a social map that was about as useful as the chart that
guided Columbus to the "Indies." There were "Negroes," "whites"
and "Orientals," the latter meaning Chinese and "Japs." Of
religions, only three were known -- Protestant, Catholic and
Jewish -- and not much was known about the last two types. The
only remaining human categories were husbands and wives, and
that was all the diversity the monocultural world could handle.
Gays, lesbians, Buddhists, Muslims, Malaysians, Mormons, etc.
were simply off the map.

    So I applaud -- with one hand, anyway -- the
multiculturalist goal of preparing us all for a wider world. The
other hand is tapping its fingers impatiently, because the
critics are right about one thing: when advocates of
multiculturalism adopt the haughty stance of political
correctness, they quickly descend to silliness or worse. It's
obnoxious, for example, to rely on university administrations
to enforce P.C. standards of verbal inoffensiveness. Racist,
sexist and homophobic thoughts cannot, alas, be abolished by
fiat but only by the time-honored methods of persuasion,
education and exposure to the other guy's -- or, excuse me,
woman's -- point of view.

    And it's silly to mistake verbal purification for genuine
social reform. Even after all women are "Ms." and all people are
"he or she," women will still earn only 65 cents for every
dollar earned by men. Minorities by any other name, such as
"people of color," will still bear a hugely disproportionate
burden of poverty and discrimination. Disabilities are not just
"different abilities" when there are not enough ramps for
wheelchairs, signers for the deaf or special classes for the
"specially" endowed. With all due respect for the new politesse,
actions still speak louder than fashionable phrases.

    But the worst thing about the P.C. people is that they are
such poor advocates for the multicultural cause. No one was
ever won over to a broader, more inclusive view of life by
being bullied or relentlessly "corrected." Tell a 19-year-old
white male that he can't say "girl" when he means "teen-age
woman," and he will most likely snicker. This may be the reason
why, despite the conservative alarms, P.C.-ness remains a
relatively tiny trend. Most campuses have more serious and
ancient problems: faculties still top-heavy with white males of
the monocultural persuasion; fraternities that harass minorities
and women; date rape; alcohol abuse; and tuition that excludes
all but the upper fringe of the middle class.

    So both sides would be well advised to lighten up. The
conservatives ought to realize that criticisms of the great
books approach to learning do not amount to totalitarianism. And
the advocates of multiculturalism need to regain the sense of
humor that enabled their predecessors in the struggle to coin
the term P.C. years ago -- not in arrogance but in self-mockery.

    Beyond that, both sides should realize that the
beneficiaries of multiculturalism are not only the "oppressed
peoples" on the standard P.C. list (minorities, gays, etc.). The
"unenlightened" -- the victims of monoculturalism -- are
oppressed too, or at least deprived. Our educations, whether at
Yale or at State U, were narrow and parochial and left us
ill-equipped to navigate a society that truly is multicultural
and is becoming more so every day. The culture that we studied
was, in fact, one culture and, from a world perspective, all too
limited and ingrown. Diversity is challenging, but those of us
who have seen the alternative know it is also richer, livelier
and ultimately more fun.