True multiculturalism
Hassenger, Robert
TRUE MULTICULTURALISM ROBERT HASSENGER SETTING NO BOUNDARIES Higher education continues to reap the effects of the social reforms of the sixties and seventies, both encouraging and discouraging....
...2) so are you: we cannot avoid being captives of our epistemologies...
...When our students' intellectual commitments come into conflict with our or their political sympathies, we should explore why...
...or from "representation" on the faculty, because only those who have "experienced" the sexism, racism, etc...
...But race and sex are insufficient grounds for excluding these scholars from the curriculum, and to do so does a disservice to the values of inquiry and objectivity...
...We should "teach the conflicts," as the philosopher Richard Rorty has argued, not compromise scholarship by ideology...
...Perhaps it must be...
...To "dialogue" with them is to accept their premises...
...and these should be explored...
...If we are to examine the instances of cruelty and exploitation in the Greco-Roman, Judaic and Christian traditions, we cannot be expected to look only at the achievements of third-world cultures, but not at their shortcomings as well...
...Students need to learn how to make judgments based upon intellectually defensible standards, not conformity to what is ideologically correct at a given time...
...Perversely, by insisting upon the "experiential" criterion for all, we are led to question how women can teach Shakespeare, or blacks, Melville...
...But our students' minds should not be coerced into correspondence with some socially constructed reality...
...Commonweal 10 April 1992: 11...
...The very respect for diversity and for reasoned argument come out of the Western tradition...
...And this can be done without confining ourselves and our students to authors and books that pass ideological muster, or which must be taught by "representatives" of everyone who can fit her position on a placard, or capture it in a sound bite...
...Would his Jewishness add to or subtract from his "objectivity," his ability to assure that Shakespeare is being taught as he "felt...
...As Kenneth B. Clark pointed out in Pathos of Power, political, economic, and social egalitarianism should not invade the areas of intellect and aesthetics...
...A curriculum for the emerging multicultural community, and one that would be more useful for historically disenfranchised students, would examine the relationships of power to belief, thought, and artistic expression in every society...
...True multiculturalism would set no boundaries by gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, political orientation, or class origins...
...They should not be expected to be equally successful in college— or after...
...And we must be consistent: if using academic criteria for determining what "should" be taught means one can be charged with "uniculturalism" (for which read racism/sexism), then dialogue is impossible...
...More students would be better off for learning what it is like to be female, or black, or gay (or white or male, for that matter...
...Choices about the curriculum will be the locus of many conflicts...
...But, not so properly, it has also sometimes come to mean, with the rise of "multiculturalism," a subordination of academic to political concerns...
...Ethnocentrism is portrayed exquisitely by the DWEM who wrote Othello and The Merchant of Venice...
...And enter those who offer a new "discipline," one that invalidates the knowledge and methods of those in tenured teaching positions, who are unable to deconstruct, revolutionize, or de-phallogocentrize the curriculum...
...The tensions between community and difference—otherness—can be confronted in the curriculum...
...To pretend so, and to use differential criteria of success in evaluating their academic work, is a cruel hoax...
...More students, from a wider range of backgrounds, are going to college...
...The result can be a reductio ad absurdum: Western sieve replaces Western Civ, in Jacques Barzun's turn of phrase...
...To suggest that such DWEMs as Plato and Sartre, Aquinas and Freud, Locke and Nietzsche are speaking with one voice because of their sex, race, and class is nonsense, and indeed betrays a woeful ignorance of the sociohistorical process...
...They do not seem to recognize that even the appeal to liberal guilt is a peculiarly Western phenomenon, and that the very idea of oppression is grounded in Western categories of thought, as the sociologist Andrew Hacker has noted...
...Those who play this game are able to immunize themselves from criticism through the revisionist position that all thought is political...
...Our obligation is to help them to learn how to learn, and this does not mean inculcating a political position that we have decided our students "need...
...We should study such phenomena as the rise of capitalism in Japan and the persistence of nationalism and religious fundamentalism in the West as well as the East, the destruction of the Aztec empire and the cultures of the native North Americans...
...If one opposes the view that, say, the Western "canon" must be thrown out as "an exercise in colonization," he (this is easier with males, preferably white, but see Stephen Carter's Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby) is charged with being racist, sexist, homophobic...
...To explain away all fanaticism and oppression by rationalizations that rob these cultures of their complexities is condescending and patronizing...
...but these need not altogether replace the expectation of competence...
...But this need not force us into a Foucauldian reductionism that would dismiss the contributions of the Western tradition, or of individual intellect and imagination...
...To make our decisions by application of the principle of least offense is to distort free inquiry, and to do a disservice to those who are already spending more energy celebrating their victimhood than overcoming it, as Stephen Carter, Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell, and other African-Americans have recently been pointing out...
...In the deconstructionists' indeterminancy of meaning lies the future for those who feel "uncomfortable": we seem to have a politics of identity for those who feel excluded, either from "representation" in a curriculum that purportedly reflects only the work of DWEMs (dead, white, European males...
...Of course power has determined the received wisdom of any society or cultural tradition...
...There is room for compassion and sensitivity...
...Multiculturalism is to be welcomed, if it means scholarship about those things which have been foolishly ignored or relegated to the second-rate...
...These new critics aspire not only to deconstruct, but to engage in "restitutive criticism," to restore the voices of those who feel—and feeling sometimes seems a principal criterion—alienated, by drawing upon the guilt of the white liberal...
...The curriculum can be enlarged to include these...
...Even to address such questions is ludicrous...
...But these can be constructive...
...Intimidation and epithet have replaced rational argument...
...There are a couple of immediate rejoinders: (1) how could we not...
...So "multiculturalism" is too often neither "multi" nor "cultural...
...All education "imposes" values...
...Their demand—for civil rights or against the Vietnam War—was to extend the basic rights and responsibilities of the democratic heritage, insisting upon a reconciliation of the ideals of Western civilization with the practices of that civilization as they knew it...
...But we cannot be hampered in our quest by sacrificing the tools of critical thinking in order to avoid someone's feelings of alienation, of being "disrespected...
...Teachers should constructively challenge the thinking—indeed, even the "sensibilities"—of college students...
...Social inequalities cannot be overcome and remedied by changing the curriculum—or by blaming differences in academic performance on "institutional" racism, sexism, and the like...
...An honest intellectual perspective, however, would certainly take into account the social and historical forces that have shaped all expressions of culture—including the au courant...
...Certainly there are social and historical reasons why almost all influential economists, say, have been white males...
...At least some of the appeal of the ideology of multiculturalism is that it serves a different kind of "victim's" revolution on campus...
...Not everyone, black or white, male or female, begins with the same advantages, preparation, and talent as others...
...It is "institutionally" racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, ageist, ableist, speciesist, and looksist...
...Earlier, campus protesters were primarily students, with some faculty supporters...
...True diversity" for many multiculturalists means that gender and ethnicity must match the fields in which the new orthodoxy is taught, because a scholar's race and sex must be correctly brought to bear on the subject...
...How does the curriculum get involved...
...We need to understand our failures, not to explain them away...
...Even teaching children to read and write is a choice, reflecting a worldview...
...What of the charge that we are "imposing a certain worldview...
...The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their educations...
...Enter those who insist that Western culture is inherently hostile to women, blacks and other minorities, and homosexuals...
...Now, many of the protesters are on the faculty, and the enemy is not government or business, but the "canon" of Western civilization...
...We should not wish to indoctrinate, but to invite students to join the conversation...
...With this wider range of students, the call for "cultural diversity" has properly meant a heightened concern for multicultural perspectives in the curriculum...
...But a multicultural perspective should not mean some kind of proportional representation, reading lists by head count, a kind of intellectual affirmative action...
...A black American should not be made to feel guilty because she wants to study the Renaissance, or the Chicago novel, rather than to specialize in African-American literature, as some are told they have a "responsibility" to do...
...of the culture can really teach about it...
...Does this mean that only a white male of European extraction can teach these...
...If we are guilty of ethnocentrism and prejudice, the way to educate ourselves and our students is to engage these, by drawing upon all available resources...
...Most of us have syncretistic identities, belonging to more than one culture...
...It is ironic that some of the victims of the new provincialism are those who have been most discriminated against...
...It stands for a new ideology that discourages—even punishes —critical analysis...
...Decisions about academic matters have to be made on scholarly, not political, grounds...
...Of course reality is socially constructed, and knowledge is power: what is produced and/or recorded at a given 10: 10 April 1992 Commonweal time is in part a function of who had the power, and reflects certain shared ideological biases...
Vol. 119 • April 1992 • No. 7
