The Cost of Ethnicity
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
The Cost of Ethnicity The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Norton. 160 pp. $14.95. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of...
...All three believed thatD'Souza, a young conservative with close ties to Ronald Reagan, had written truthfully, more or less, about theacademy's surrender to Left-wing dogma and minority demands...
...Furthermore, the relentless discrimination against black Americans seemed to mock our most cherished ideals-a sad fact that Myrdal himself described as "The American Dilemma...
...As political activism increased in the 1960s, minorities demanded their due...
...In remarkably blunt prose, Schlesinger accuses radical multiculturalists of dividing our population and distorting our past...
...The result, says Schlesinger, was the disuniting of American life...
...Schlesinger is sensitive to the emotional pull of Afrocentrist thought...
...For the first time, prominent faculty members from across the political spectrum are sounding off publicly about the problems of harassment, intolerance and self-censorship in modern academic life...
...What made America special, he argues, was its ability to forge "a single nation from peoples of remarkably diverse racial, religious and ethnic origins...
...In Genovese's words, "a new McCarthyism" was stalking the campus, "in some ways more effective and vicious than the old...
...For some multiculturalists, the craft of history became a vehicle for promoting ethnic differences and out-group "self-esteem...
...It relies on censorship, the idea that disturbing truths must not be told...
...As Schlesinger notes, "there is no evidence that feel-good history promotes ethnic self-esteem and equips students to grapple with their lives...
...Afrocentrism is based on self-segregation and sanitized history...
...On the contrary, it may embitter them to discover that much of what they learned is untrue...
...people having different languages, beliefs and opinions...
...yet a hundred times happier than our own...
...Much of Schlesinger's book is a celebration of the melting pot...
...It casts suspicion on the vital disciplines of African and African-American history...
...And it attempts to glorify Africa's rich and diverse history by removing such troublesome subjects as tyranny, slavery and war...
...One group after another insisted that its forebears had suffered more than anyone else in history," a spectator recalled...
...But the concept had a very fragile side...
...It is time to reflect upon our inheritance, he believes, and to recall the words of Tocqueville about our very special land: "Imagine a society formed of all nations...
...Moreover, as a practical matter, it is unlikely to make black students feel better about themselves...
...Thus, the problem facing America was "how to vindicate cherished cultures and traditions without breaking the bonds of cohesion -common ideals, common political institutions, common language, common culture, common fate-that hold the republic together...
...Assimilation was out...
...He is right on both counts...
...Civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, ethnic rights-each cause seemed worthy and too long ignored...
...It claims that white domination of the schools is responsible for the denigration of black culture...
...The burden to make this a unified country lies as much with the complacent majority as with the sullen and resentful minority...
...He also reminds us that assimilation is still a two-way street...
...In New York State, for example, the public school history curriculum was " multiculturalized" in 1987, and again in 1989, after a Task Force on Minorities- which drew on the expertise of the City College of New York's Leonard Jeffries-concluded: "African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Puerto Ricans/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...
...Are the multiculturalists solely responsible for this dismal state of affairs...
...He blames traditional historians like himself for their "belated recognition" that minority life is central to America's past...
...The Disuniting of America is a brave and angry response to the excesses of multiculturalism, PC's latest sacred cow...
...America," he said, "is continuously struggling for its soul...
...After 1880, most Asians were excluded from our shores, and late-arriving Europeans were less welcome than before...
...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of History, Rutgers...
...But what about the consequences...
...Pluralism was rejected, and Western traditions were debunked...
...The list goes on...
...Minorities were taught to see themselves as members of distinct, alienated, competing groups...
...victimization was in...
...But then no other state," says Schlesinger, "has so effective an Iroquois lobby...
...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy" IN RECENT MONTHS the battle over "political correctness" (PC) on our college campuses has taken a significant turn...
...It insists that only blacks are qualified to write and teach about black subjects...
...The book was favorably reviewed by historians William O'Neill in THE NEW LEADER, Eugene Genovese in the New Republic and C. Vann Woodward in the New York Review of Books...
...Pluralistic societies need a national identity in order to survive...
...Schlesinger is not entirely optimistic about America's future direction...
...No other state curriculum cares to make this preposterous claim...
...Most disturbing to Schlesinger is the spread of Afrocentrism, apseudoscholarly movement with outposts on many college campuses, including my own...
...Schlesinger thinks not...
...History," says Schlesinger, "is Uttered with the wreck of states that tried to combine diverse ethnic or linguistic or religious groups within a sovereignty...
...As our nation evolved, however, the melting pot did too...
...Afrocentrism is the ultimate in "feelgood" history...
...The process was so natural, so compelling, that it defined America's identity to the rest of the world...
...As a result, eleventh-grade students in New York now learn that the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) political system provided an important "foundation" for the U.S...
...Constitution...
...The single theme that ran persistently through the hearings was that the critics did not want anything taught if it offended members of their group...
...Because their exclusion has been more tragic and terrible than that of white immigrants, their quest for self-affirmation is more intense and passionate...
...One could foster the future without discarding the past...
...Yet there were limits to the melting pot, as Schlesinger carefully acknowledges . The concept worked better when the immigrants were Christian and white...
...It rejects the whole of Western civilization, while declaring, oddly, that almost everything of value in that civilization was "stolen" from Africa...
...Ethnic diversity became a symbol of America's strength...
...Like other excluded groups before them,' he writes, "black Americans invoke supposed past glories to compensate for real past and present injustices...
...This problem seemed to worsen over time...
...Those who want to join America," he writes, "must be received and welcomed by those who think they own America...
...No longer were all immigrants supposed to fit a single mold...
...Arthur Schlesinger would fully agree...
...The only people without representation were male WASPS, "who thus far have no spokesmen...
...The respectful treatment afforded Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education is but one example of this change...
...What purpose is served by hearing pleasant fictions about one's past...
...In radical hands, though, this activism became an all-out assault on our national core-a vision of America as repressive, imperialist, Eurocentric, and cruel...
...Truth suffered as well...
...The cult of ethnicity is growing and the common bonds are wearing thin...
...When the California Board of Education held open hearings on the content of its history textbooks, every imaginable group sent a representative to lobby and complain...
...France's Alexis de Tocqueville portrayed a country of astonishing heterogeneity and strength...
...The room was packed with Afrocentrists, American Indians, Chinese-Americans, Polish-Americans, Turkish-Americans, Hispanics, homosexuals, atheists, Catholics, born-again Christians, and Jews...
...England's James Bryce marveled at the "amazing solvent power" of American institutions to assimilate "the foreign bodies that are poured into her mass...
...Sweden's Gunnar Myrdal described an "American Creed" containing "the most explicitly expressed system of general ideals" in the Western world...
...In the 1900s, the idea of immigrant homogeneity gave way to the more tolerant concept of cultural pluralism...
Vol. 75 • March 1992 • No. 3
