An Anatomy of Multiculturalism < "Where is the Zulu Tolstoy?" and other silliness>

"we happened to have been born in to meet on the ground of the universally significant."

"Multiculturalism has arisen through the spreading of the idea that the so-called universal was in fact only partial: one side of the story pretending to be the whole story, the interests of some groups passing themselves off as the interests of all."

"Tonto! Tonto! We are surrounded by Indians!" the Lone Ranger said in an old joke; and like Tonto, many contemporary readers have come to respond: "What do you mean 'we?'"

"there are always many parties to every human experience, and that their experiences of the same event are often profoundly divergent."

The current debate over the canon is growing polarized between defense of tradition against "barbaric" innovations, and defense of change against the "tyranny" of received wisdom. At the risk of making both sides unhappy, the dean of Yale College argues for a more nuanced approach.

There once was a time when literate culture -- the things educated people know and believe other people should know -- possessed certain well-marked features. The contents of literate culture were internally coherent; they were widely agreed to; and above all they were agreed to be universal in their interest or meaning. What happened in education, according to this understanding, was that we came out of whatever local, parochial origin we happened to have been born in to meet on the ground of the universally significant. In literature, we studied the work not of those who expressed themselves "like us," but of writers who transcended such limits of time and place -- writers with names like Homer and Shakespeare. In philosophy we read not those who thought the way people think where we came from, but thinkers of perennial, transcultural significance: Plato, for instance, or Rousseau.

A current caricature says that this model of education was only ever subscribed to by the elite, but historically this is quite untrue. During its long reign the concept of universal culture was often valued especially highly by outsiders. When W. E. B. DuBois, the great African-American intellectual of the turn of the last century, looked for an image of a profound human unity to set against the racial segregations being perfected in his time, he turned to the literary classics: "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not," he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). You would recoil if I sat next to you at the whites-only lunch counter, DuBois implies, but Shakespeare doesn't when I sit and read his plays. For DuBois, culture restores the common ground that local social arrangements deny.

The educational revolution for which multiculturalism is a shorthand name embodies an unravelling of this older consensus. Multiculturalism has arisen through the spreading of the idea that the so-called universal was in fact only partial: one side of the story pretending to be the whole story, the interests of some groups passing themselves off as the interests of all.

"Tonto! Tonto! We are surrounded by Indians!" the Lone Ranger said in an old joke; and like Tonto, many contemporary readers have come to respond: "What do you mean 'we?'" So a line like "The Odyssey exemplifies the fundamental human desire to wander and adventure," a classroom truism not long ago, would now provoke the quick retort: "'Human' to be sure, if humans are assumed to be men. But what about that wife who sat home while Odysseus got to wander?"

In recent years the growing suspicion of alleged universals has led to a heightened sense that there are always many parties to every human experience, and that their experiences of the same event are often profoundly divergent. In the wake of this realization, it has come to seem that real education is to be found not in the move from the local to the generalizedly "human," but in the effort to hear and attend to all the different voices of human history -- the voices of those who have dominated the official stories, but also those silenced or minimized by the official account. We know we are in the neighborhood of this new plan of education whenever history is given us in plural, contending versions: when the story of The Odyssey is also considered from Penelope's point of view; when Columbus's discovery of America is seen not just from the European but also from the Arawak or Taino vantage; when the history of the Pilgrim settlement takes into account the different history it produced for native populations; and so on.

We have all seen the profound educational shift that has taken place in this country as the second of these models has begun to displace the first in recent years. Having been taught in the older of these ways, but lived to teach and be reeducated in the newer one, I have had, by pure historical coincidence, an intimate experience of this great tectonic shift. Here I offer a few reflections on how this still-unfolding revolution looks to a person who has seen it from both sides.

There are, in truth, a great many things to say about this transformation. The first and most obvious is that it embodies a playing out in education of a contemporary social drama that ranges far beyond the sphere of education itself. When our successors look back on the second half of this century, the Civil Rights movement will surely strike them as one of the most decisive developments in the history of our time. As we know, this movement led a nation that had accepted legal segregation to become first embarrassed by, then to seek to reform, the practice of discrimination based on race. Having begun with this focus, the Civil Rights movement has extended itself by the force of analogy, creating the perception that many other forms of social differentiation -- the different treatment of women, of other minorities, of the disabled, and so on -- were as unjust and unjustifiable as racial discrimination. The modern sentiment that men and women should win advancement only on the grounds of individual ability, and not because of the groups they can be lumped into, has made for changes in college admissions, corporate hiring, professional recruitment, and virtually every other social practice in the United States.

In the world of education, it has expressed itself as multiculturalism. Multiculturalism embodies the ideal of equal opportunity implemented at the level of the curriculum -- the urge to open the field of study, like other places of visibility and prestige, to women, minorities, and others previously left out of account.

To its partisans, multicultural education is a matter of justice done at last. But there are many who are in sympathy with these social goals who still regard their educational effects as pernicious. One common cry is that this movement's political ends are leading it to abandon a long-cherished heritage education has passed down from generation to generation. But to this it can be replied that the history of education is a history of change more than any of us like to admit. We all tend to share the sense that the things we studied in school had probably been taught there since time immemorial, and so should continue to be taught until the end of time. But our schoolings were themselves often products of reforms that had succeeded and then been forgotten. What subject could seem more timeless than English? But English wasn't thought a fit matter for university study before the 19th century: it was a modern, vernacular literature, and education's business was with the Classical. My own field, American literature, entered college curricula later still, not much earlier than 1940, having been dismissed as a mere colonial appendage of English after English got itself academically accepted. "What . . . at one time has been held in little estimation, and has hardly found place in a course in liberal instruction, has, under other circumstances, risen to repute, and received a proportional share of attention," President Jeremiah Day wrote in the Yale Report of 1828. Seen against such a background, it may be possible to regard current curricular revolutions as the latest chapter of a long story of change, not an unprecedented deviance saved for modern times.

But the central objection to multicultural reforms comes from the belief that traditional literate culture is more meaningful than newly promoted objects of study -- that the lives and works of the hitherto ignored, however much we may wish to feature them for sentimental or political reasons, are less remarkable human achievements than the classics, and their study therefore less rewarding. (Saul Bellow meant this when he asked: "Where is the Zulu Tolstoy?") This is a weighty charge, but to it we might reply: How could you know that these things are less valuable except by having studied them, extended them your sympathy, and given them your patient attention? A silent premise of much of my education was that there were all manner of things not worth knowing about and that we could know they were not worth knowing without bothering to consult them. When I came to the study of American literature, for example, I often read that Hawthorne, Melville, and the other geniuses of the American Renaissance wrote in opposition to a popular sentimental literature of unimaginable banality, and -- in a beautiful convenience -- my contemporaries and I understood that there was no need to read this work in order to be confident of its perfect worthlessness. From a later vantage I can testify that when one takes the trouble to look into them, ignored or downvalued traditions -- even the mid-19th century sentimental novel -- can turn out to contain creations of extraordinary power and interest. (There would be no need to make this point for our own time, when the achievements of women and minorities are unmistakable; what contemporary literature course would leave out such great American writers as the Asian-American Maxine Hong Kingston, or the African-American Toni Morrison, or the Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez?) My own career in the last 15 years had led me to be increasingly engaged with writers from outside the traditional canon. In my courses I now frequently teach authors from hitherto ignored traditions together with their more famous contemporaries -- Frederick Douglass and Fanny Fern with Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott and Charles W. Chesnutt with Mark Twain. And in my classes such writers do not just add new material, they substantially change and enrich the terms on which every author is grasped and understood.

In my experience then, without causing any defection from the classic authors I still love, teach, and value, the changes associated with multiculturalism have brought a real renovation, a widening of the field of knowledge and a deepened understanding of everything it contains. Yet without in any way retracting what I have said, it seems to me possible to wonder whether current ways of conceptualizing and implementing multicultural education are as problem-free as some proponents imply. If the older model of education had its limits, the new program has a potential to enmesh us in limits of its own; and a full assessment would want to reckon these dangers together with the advantages it might supply.

To mention three problems very quickly: Multiculturalism has promoted an inclusionistic curriculum. Its moral imperative not to discriminate leads it to want to put everything in and leave nothing out. But there is an undeniable danger that the practice of universal curricular representation can degenerate into high-minded tokenism. Everyone has seen the new-style school anthologies and curricular units with snippet samplings of all the nation's or world's peoples. Like all official school instruments, these show the strong sense of feeling answerable to a vigilant cultural authority that watches their every move. The old-style textbook paid obeisance to an imaginary censor who asked: "Are we being sufficiently patriotic? Are we avoiding blasphemy and smut?" The new one's choices show it similarly attentive to a moral overseer who asks for instance: "Have we got our Native American? Our Asian-American? Is our black a man? If so, have we also got a black woman?"

Asian-American Maxine Hong Kingston,
African-American Toni Morrison,
Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez

I have never heard of Richard Rodriguez. Does he write in Spanish, in English, neither or both? If he writes in Spanish, what makes him better than Cervantes or Luis Borges?

Maxine Hong Kingston is a very mediocre author of formula fiction, and Toni Morrison's "writing" utterly sucks.

Between the three of you, you have pretty much nailed it. The chief flaw (and fatal conceit) of high-minded multiculturalism is that it does not recognize why our study of certain literature is more important than our study of some other literature to our development, and our realization of our potential. It is also apparent that many multiculturalists are not high-minded at all, but would simply seek to subvert western culture and the weaken the foundations of America's strength.

We had all better understand the modus operandi of these cultural destroyers if we are to survive their tactics.

They worship abortion.....which is the path to fomenting the destructive lifestyles they embrace....a fully fornicating society, recerational sex, every manner of sexual deviancy. All of these activities are meant to subjugate, degrade, and finally anihiliate Christian values.

The destroyers establish their bona fides by kneeling at the feet of multiculturalism---or what I call "hyphenates"----a set of balkanized self-serving special interest groups and voting blocs of Americans with hyphens attached to their national origins----who are their financiers, and who expect repayment, usually in the form of government handouts.

Once that little routine is completed, the destroyers have established themselves as "open-minded, tolerant and compasionate humanitarians," and are now free to commit any crime, do any deeds, and literally get away with murder, if necessary.

At the same time they're committing these crimes, they keep muttering they're doing it "for the children."

Vicimization is the secret of their success and earns them many rewards. If all else fails, the libs crouch down, start sobbing, and assume the position of "victim."

Most significantly-- and mark this well-- with destuctive liberal culture destroyers, it is a matter of tearing down the "establishment" and rampaging over conservatives and conservative values. Liberals are constrained from acting in any way that might give aid and comfort to traditional American values.

And remember, tearing down America is the way they get invited to all the A-list gatherings, by which they network, and plot more devastation.

Clearly, these individuals exhibit an elitist, unmitigated contempt for conservatives, and all the noble ideas our Nation once stood for.

Utter nonsense. "Multiculturalism" is simply shorthand for "all things white and European.......BAD; all things black or brown..........GOOD".

Exactly so; this is what multiculturalism means in most University settings these days. The author of the post gives a fascinating overview of Literary culture but dances around the main issue which is whether there rationally understandable and universal aesthetic standards. The main thrust of philosophy over tha last 200 hundred years has been the relentless attack on the possibility of universal concepts. This anti-nomian bias has profoundly damamged the concept of art and the ability to make aesthetic judgements.

There are universal and objective standards that should allow any educated person to distinguish between Herman Melville and Harold Robbins. Multiculturaliam in the academy is really politics by other means. In order to enshrine a new political order it is first necsessary to trash the icons of the old order. Multicutualism has accomplished this task with remarkable rapdity.

Leo Tolstoy IS a btter writer than Elmore Leonard and George Washington is a more important figure than Harriet Tubman but by today's academic standards no one is allowed to state the obvious.

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