TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070891/0708100.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 23.9 KB | 494 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 12

COVER STORIES

Whose America?


A growing emphasis on the nation's "multicultural" heritage
exalts racial and ethnic pride at the expense of social cohesion

By PAUL GRAY -- Reported by Sam Allis/Boston, Jordan Bonfante/Los
Angeles and Cathy Booth/Miami


    Exactly 215 years ago this week, some subjects of Britain's
King George III adopted a Declaration of Independence that
asserted the necessity for a sovereign and free United States of
America. The ground moved under that hall in steamy, summertime
Philadelphia; an idea was proclaimed that would shake and reshape
the world. Yet the entire world was hardly represented. All 56 of
the signatories were white males of European descent, most of
them wealthy property holders. Like some of his co-
revolutionaries, Thomas Jefferson, who was primarily responsible
for the soaring language of the document ("We hold these truths
to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ."), owned
black slaves. In this context, what could "equal" mean? And why
were only "men" created that way?

    Americans over 40 might be startled by a description of
the Glorious Fourth that points out the racial, sexual and
social characteristics of the Founding Fathers, never mind
taking a swipe or two at Jefferson. But most of today's
schoolchildren would not be surprised. It is now fairly
commonplace to learn American history in the context of who has
oppressed, excluded or otherwise mistreated whom. All across the
country, students are imbibing a version of the past and present
that their parents would not recognize.

    Some of the fundamental images of the American gallery of
national icons have received a dramatic reworking. Gone, or
going fast, is the concept of the melting pot, of the U.S. as
the paramount place in the world where people came to shed their
past in order to forge their future. Gone too is the emphasis
on the twin ideals that form the basis of the American
experiment: that rights reside in the individual rather than
with social or ethnic classes and that all who come to these
shores can be assimilated by an open society that transforms
disparate peoples into Americans. Instead there is a new
paradigm that emphasizes the racial and ethnic diversity of
American citizens, of the many cultures that have converged
here, each valuable in its own right and deserving of study and
respect.

    In the critical optic of this new "multicultural"
perspective, American history as it was once written -- those
often tedious treks from Christopher Columbus to Dwight
Eisenhower -- leaves out too much, namely nearly everyone who
was not a white male. Some adherents go further, questioning
whether the Western ideas and ideals that gave birth to America
discriminate against people from other traditions. A more
radical school argues that those values are no more than the
ethnic expression of "Eurocentric" culture and should be taught
only as such.

    The spread of new multicultural perspectives throughout
America's schools has taken place without much notice;
curriculum revisions, even sweeping ones, do not appear on local
ballots. But these are not merely academic disputes. Especially
in diverse, secular societies such as the U.S., a shared sense
of the past plays a pivotal role in the way values and vision
are transmitted from one generation to the next. "History is
part of a society's attempt to structure a self-image and to
communicate a common identity," points out Eugen Weber, a
professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. "No
community can exist as a community without common references.
In a modern nation they come from a history."

    The issues now being raised -- although they are presented
under the bland guise of syllabus reform -- are thus too
important to be left to teachers, school administrators and
social commentators alone. Everyone deserves a say, for the
customs, beliefs and principles that have unified the U.S.,
however imperfectly, for more than two centuries are being
challenged with a ferocity not seen since the Civil War.

    Put bluntly: Do Americans still have faith in the vision
of their country as a cradle of individual rights and
liberties, or must they relinquish the teaching of some of these
freedoms to further the goals of the ethnic and social groups
to which they belong? Is America's social contract -- a vision
of self-determination that continues to reverberate around the
world -- fatally tainted by its origins in Western European
thought? What kind of people do Americans now think they are,
and what will they tell their children about that?

    The multicultural crusade has become part of a wider
ferment on American campuses that includes the efforts to
mandate a greater "diversity" within faculty and student bodies
as well as the movement, derisively labeled "political
correctness," that seeks to suppress thoughts or statements
deemed offensive to women, blacks or other groups. Some of this
has provoked flare-ups, notably at Stanford University, which
in 1988 decided to revamp its first-year course, Western
Culture, in response to critical pressure. Some students and
faculty members at the elite, ethnically diverse institution had
complained that the course syllabus offered only the writings
of white males. The prospect of one or more of these -- Plato?
Shakespeare? -- being kicked out to make room for women and
minorities caught traditionalists' attention, as did a
demonstration at which students chanted "Hey, hey, ho, ho,
Western Culture's got to go!" In the end, Stanford excised no
one from the reading list; it added optional new assignments.

    Now multiculturalism is again in the glare of public
attention, thanks to the release of a report recommending
changes in the way social studies are taught in New York State
public schools. State Education Commissioner Thomas Sobol,
responding to complaints from a number of minority groups, chose
a panel of 24 educators to review the curriculums in history and
related courses. One of their tasks was to suggest innovations
that would improve students' understanding of "the cultures,
identities, and histories of the diverse groups which comprise
American society today." Some critics predicted that the report,
a year in preparation, would be a hatchet job on existing
academic standards.

    They were right, although this report avoids the
blistering tone of an earlier Task Force on Minorities, also
commissioned by Sobol, that hit its controversial stride in the
opening sentence: "African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Puerto
Rican/Latinos and Native Americans have all been the victims of
an intellectual and educational oppression that has
characterized the culture and institutions of the United States
and the European American world for centuries."

    By contrast, there is no inflammatory rhetoric in the new
report. In fact the document is filled with soporific
educationese ("Foundational to this end is the commitment to the
development of intellectual competence in our students").
Perhaps to assuage those potential critics not put to sleep by
the prose, the report throws in periodic tributes to the concept
of national unity: "With efforts to respect and honor the
diverse and pluralistic elements in our nation, special
attention will need to be given to those values,
characteristics, and traditions which we share in common."

    But the document is curiously silent on what those shared
values are. It even seems hesitant to acknowledge the fact of
U.S. citizenship; wherever possible, it advocates an awareness
of global "interdependence" as a fundamental educational
concern. In its constant elevation of group and ethnic
interests, it represents a radical departure from the way
Americans have traditionally viewed the passing on of knowledge
in the common school as a means of creating citizens out of a
polyglot and diverse pool of young citizens-to-be.

    This fact did not account for the report's initial
notoriety. A few easily isolated examples of suggested reforms
got most of the attention. Among them:

    -- Students would be discouraged from calling Africans who
were brought to the U.S. in bondage "slaves." Instead they
would be referred to as "enslaved persons," which would "call
forth the essential humanity of those enslaved, helping students
to understand from the beginning the true meaning of slavery."

    -- Thanksgiving would be discussed not only as a feast day
for whites but as a less joyous occasion for Native Americans.

    -- The habit of looking at geography from a European point
of view would cease. "The Far East" and "the Middle East" would
disappear, replaced by "East Asia" and "Southwest Asia and
North Africa."

    -- Describing certain Americans as "minorities" would also
be phased out: "If social studies is to be taught from a global
perspective, many of the so-called minorities in America are
more accurately described as part of the world's majorities."

    All these proposals have the merit of being specific and
thus open to debate. The improvement wrought by "enslaved
person" over "slave" may not strike everyone as immediately
apparent; to Americans who know their own history, "slave" is
a word heavily charged with the connotations of brutal,
involuntary degradation. As to the matter of Thanksgiving,
Edmund Ladd, 65, a Zuni Pueblo Indian and an anthropologist in
New Mexico, says, "We celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas and all
the holidays that are Anglo-induced because that's the day we
don't have to go to work. Thanksgiving is an excuse for us to
get together." The adoption of "East Asia" raises the question
"East of where?" It is difficult to imagine what a "global
perspective" might be, given the report's vague prose.

    The most revolutionary changes propounded by the Sobol
panel are harder to identify, since they rest on a series of
buried premises that are offered, sometimes glancingly, as
assumptions shared by all Americans. But are they? Does everyone
agree that "education should be a source of strength and pride"
for diverse ethnic groups? How about the notion that teaching
individuals to fulfill their own abilities is secondary to
training them to participate in "cultural interdependence"? Or
that U.S. children should view themselves as citizens of the
world rather than of America? Are we all on the same page when
it comes to the classroom as a training ground for "social
action"?

    And what of the following sentence: "Unlike earlier
periods when one demonstrated one's intellect by how much one
knew, i.e., how many facts one has at her/his command,
increasingly we recognize the mark of intellect to be the
capacity independently to analyze, manipulate, synthesize and
critically interpret information in the interest of problem
solving." In other words, it is now more important to know how
to think than to have anything concrete to think about. Perhaps
facts can be imported from Japan. Now, may we see a show of
hands on all this?

    We already have. Two members of the Sobol panel -- Kenneth
T. Jackson of Columbia University and historian Arthur M.
Schlesinger Jr. -- inserted their dissents from the report's
conclusions within the report itself. Said Jackson: "I would
argue that it is politically and intellectually unwise for us
to attack the traditions, customs and values which attracted
immigrants to these shores in the first place." Also appended,
somewhat jarringly in the prescribed context of racial and
ethnic harmony, is a lengthy statement by Ali A. Mazrui, Albert
Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at the State University
of New York, Binghamton, arguing that the word holocaust should
not be reserved exclusively for the Jewish experience under the
Nazis. American Indians and African Americans, the professor
insists, have a right to that term as well.

    How did things -- not just in New York but in school
systems across the nation -- get to the muddy pass epitomized
by the Sobol report? Principally because an abstract theory
happened to catch and ride a new wave of actuality. The idea of
multicultural education in its most extravagant current form was
born during the 1960s amid the campus turbulence and
intellectual stimulation provoked by the civil rights movement
and, later, protests against the war in Vietnam. The established
centers of authority in U.S. life were not holding; to defend
traditional values in the teeth of outraged demonstrations by
young people was somehow to condone genocide in Southeast Asia,
not to mention racism in the American South. Many deans adopted
a defensive policy of giving students whatever they wanted, if
only to keep them quiet. And among the things they wanted were
special programs in black studies, then similar enclaves of
women's studies, which were followed by successive demarcations
of subject matter along racial or ethnic boundaries.

    To the surprise of many doubters, the work and the
students turned out by such programs were often first rate.
These supposedly marginal areas of academic inquiry produced
information -- about the achievements of women, facets of life
outside the U.S. mainstream, the work of minority artists,
Americans whom history had ignored -- that rattled the
complacency of orthodox humanities departments. And many of the
graduates of these programs remained in academe, either studying
for advanced degrees or earning tenure as teachers.

    While they moved up the rungs, something else was going
on. The 1965 Immigration Act passed by Congress had reversed a
policy, in place for four decades, of favoring Europeans and
making things tough for other applicants. Suddenly people from
throughout the Third World found it easier to enter the U.S.,
rapidly changing the demographics of the nation. Between 1980
and 1990, the white non-Hispanic majority in Los Angeles County
turned into a minority. In the U.S. as a whole during the same
decade, the number of Hispanics increased by 53% to 22.4
million, roughly 9% of the nation's population. The Dade County,
Fla., school district, the nation's fourth largest, now includes
students from 123 countries.

    The new immigrants came for the same reasons that had
propelled their predecessors: to escape poverty, hopelessness
or oppression, to seek economic opportunities and to live in
freedom. This huge influx of people can be seen as the latest
affirmation of American values, of the global allure exercised
by the ideals on which the nation was founded.

    But that is not the vision conveyed by many of the
multiculturalists, those veterans of the '60s and their younger
colleagues, who looked at the people arriving in their
classrooms and noticed that many of them, in some cases nearly
all of them, had no connection whatsoever with Europe. As Sobol
himself has noted, "By the year 2000, 1 out of 3 children in New
York public schools will be minority. In New York City, 1 out
of 4 children under 10 has non-English-speaking immigrant
parents. This is not the world of the 1950s."

    Why, then, were these children being forced to learn a
history that derived almost exclusively from Western thought and
examples? This was a good question that was probably answered
too quickly by teachers and administrators on the front lines:
No reason, no reason at all. In their defense, these educators
faced formidable problems -- students who did not speak English,
classrooms disrupted by the clash of different mores and
patterns of behavior confined in close quarters. Also, there was
the troubling matter of school dropouts and of the persistent
underperformance of some blacks and Hispanics, as compared to
that of most Asians and whites. Blame for all this could not be
placed on children who lacked the preparation or the motivation
to learn, so the fault must lie with what they were being
taught.

    At this point the debate over multicultural viewpoints
stumbled into a philosophical muddle from which it has yet to
emerge. Broadening the base of available knowledge was one
thing, and an admirable one at that. Thanks to the proddings and
scholarship of the multiculturalists, histories of the U.S. have
grown remarkably more inclusive, representative and accurate.
Oldsters who spent time in school learning that Myles Standish
was too bashful to propose to Priscilla Mullens and had to ask
John Alden to do it for him (to which Priscilla is apocryphally
said to have replied, "Why don't you speak for yourself, John?")
may now wonder why teachers never found a few minutes for
Harriet Tubman or W.E.B. Du Bois.

    In 1987 California adopted a new social-studies curriculum
for its public schools, from kindergarten through the 12th
grade, that is widely regarded as a model of its kind. The
course of study pays great attention to the variety of world
cultures; it also "recognizes the multiracial character of
American society, now and in the past." Yet the conceptual focus
for all this information remains fixed on the challenge of
becoming an educated American citizen. The syllabus "teaches
democratic values and holds them up as a measure against which
we may judge ourselves as well as others."

    But amplified histories did not satisfy some
multiculturalists, including a number of influential
African-American scholars, who objected that new wine was simply
being poured into the same old bottle. The central narrative of
the American saga was still white and European, as were most of
the main characters; filling the background with a smattering
of minorities did not remove this problem.

    Inconveniently enough, this "problem" cannot be accurately
erased. North America was populated by a number of indigenous
peoples long before the Europeans arrived, but the society that
evolved and that persists today was modeled on Western examples.
More specifically, the influence of the British, who held and
ruled the original 13 colonies, is inescapable. The language,
the system of representative government, the structure of law
and the emphasis on individual liberty were all adopted from
the Enlightenment ideals being formulated in what was once
known as the mother country. Other basic American principles,
such as the idea of the separation of powers, which is
fundamental to the American Constitution, derive from the French
philosopher Montesquieu.

    It is an article of faith among most multiculturalists
that no system of values is innately superior to any other; all
cultures are created equal. As a way of looking at the world,
this notion has considerable merit. It is, among other things,
a useful corrective to chauvinisms and insularities. But to
describe the Western tradition as just one of many equally
important contributors to the American identity is to make hash
of history, and of one of history's boldest experiments.

    Faced with the pervasive traces of Western thought
embodied in American life, some multiculturalists claim that
this Eurocentric bias discriminates against those from different
traditions. But for openers, Eurocentric is decidedly a fuzzy
term, lumping together a vast diversity of nationalities and
peoples, past and pres ent. In what person or doctrine can
Eurocentrism be embodied? Savonarola? Jane Austen? Deism?
Communism? Insofar as it means anything specific, Eurocentric
looks suspiciously like a code word for "white." In attempting
to combat racism, radical multiculturalists seem all too willing
to resort to racism of another stripe.

    Furthermore, the oppressive effects of Western thought on
nonwhites is not as clear-cut as most multiculturalists assume.
Certainly, many past immigrants were encouraged to ape their
"betters," as the parlance then called them -- to model their
speech and demeanor on the dominant examples of white
Anglo-Saxon Protestants, some of whom, in turn, were trying to
imitate the British aristocracy. But this imperative belongs to
the transient domains of fashion and snobbery, and in any case
sycophancy is not unique to America or to Western societies.
Harder to grasp is the way in which Western principles
discriminate against the non-Western or nonwhite. Who or what
is the villain here? Galileo? Einstein? The Magna Carta? The
Bill of Rights? Was Martin Luther King Jr. diminished, made to
feel inferior, when he read Henry David Thoreau along with
Gandhi on civil disobedience? Or for that matter when he
contemplated the Reformation launched by his 16th century
German namesake?

    Ultimately, multicultural thinking, for all its nods
toward pluralism and diversity, can lead to several regressive
orthodoxies. One is the notion that truth is forever
encapsulated within collective identities, that what white males
or females or blacks or Hispanics or Asians know about their
experiences can be communicated only imperfectly to people
beyond their pales. Those without the experience can never
really know its essential features. The authority of any
statement is locked within the skin of the speaker.

    Afrocentrism, a cult within the multicultural movement,
displays some distressing signs of authoritarianism. A series
of "baseline" essays, commissioned by the Portland, Ore., school
district as a reference for teachers and now in widespread use
elsewhere, contains some sweeping assertions: "Black literature
is manipulated and controlled by white editors and publishers."
And: "Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority,
Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman,
dark in color." The claim that ancient Egypt, one of the cradles
of Western civilization, was a black culture is a central tenet
of Afrocentrism. Corroborating evidence is flimsy, but that is
apparently not important. Writes John Henrik Clarke, professor
emeritus of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at City University,
New York: "African scholars are the final authority on Africa."

    The Western tradition contains a refutation of this
take-my-word-for-it approach. It can be seen in the Greek and
Roman philosophers, then again most vividly in the writers of
the European Enlightenment -- Voltaire, Locke, Berkeley, all
DWEMs (dead white European males), but perhaps worth a hearing
in spite of this handicap. In one way or another, they argued
that the validity of any statement can be tested independently
of, and in no logical way depends upon, the person who makes it.
This idea, totally color-blind, is one of the greatest
instruments for human freedom ever conceived. It made democracy
possible, since it enabled each citizen to reach reasoned
judgments, and its spirit pervades the documents that
established the U.S.

    Perhaps most unsettling, radical multiculturalism turns
upside down the principles that drew, and continue to draw,
people to America: the freedom to create a new personal
identity, and the chance to become part of a nation of people
who have done the same thing. There is a contradiction between
these commands to be oneself while also being part of a common
culture, a creative tension that has produced a literature
populated by loners, rebels and misfits. Also, come to think of
it, a lot of stress and nervous breakdowns. No one ever said it
was easy to be an American, to learn the rules anew each day,
every day.

    Whatever else it may accomplish, the current debate
highlights the enduring volatility of the American experiment.
There is no guarantee that the nation's long test of trying to
live together will not end in fragmentation and collapse, with
groups gathered around the firelight, waiting for the attack at
dawn. No guarantee, that is, except the examples its citizens
have set -- examples not as frequent as their ideals mandate,
but precious nonetheless -- of getting out of the skins of their
prejudices and meeting each other as the equals they truly are.

    And a very Happy 215th Birthday to us all, whoever we
think we are.