P.C. Pipe Dreams

...Why those who claim to be the intellectual representatives of the minority would do so is less apparent...

...According to this proposition "the single most important way to classify people is by race, ethnicity and gender," because those characteristics shape most of our behavior and values...

...Today, most Western countries are multicultural, and this is among the destabilizing influences of our era, for in Europe, as in the United States, important sections of nonwhite opinion resent the culture of the majority, and the majority returns that resentment in spades...

...In citing a Yale professor, John Stanfield, who says it is mere prejudice that makes whites regard scientific medicine as better than magic, Ravitch asks whether Stanfield would consult a shaman if he broke his leg...

...Each racial group in our society has a distinctive culture, it is said, but the white male culture has dominated the rest "by using terms like rationalism, humanism, universality, and literary merit to persuade other people of their own inferiority...

...PIPE DREAMS BY ROGER DRAPER A Although the term "political correctness" (PC) was apparently first coined by Left-wingers in the 1970s, I did not become aware of it until the middle of the next decade...

...American blacks often resent Caribbean blacks...

...In this country, only departments of literature have welcomed such conjectures...

...Subcategories like "blacks," "Hispanics" and "Asians" are to some extent unreal as well...

...Elsewhere in his essay, Asante seems to imply that a truly common culture would require the basis of our intellectual life to change fundamentally—that we would have to incorporate non-Western knowledge on an equal basis into our worldview...

...It is a part of the problem, not a part of the solution...

...The claim to victimhood is perfectly legitimate...

...For a generation now, we have been living in this country with a conservative ascendancy...

...Yet later he adds: "A common culture does not exist, but this nationis on the path toward it...

...People of color" are not a cohesive unit, as the struggles among blacks, His-panics and Asians in New York, the country's premier multicultural constituency, clearly show...

...As the largest and richest element, whites will remain the country's effective majority long after ceasing to be the statistical majority...

...The politically correct disagree among themselves as to the relative importance of these two influences...

...So far as I can tell, it asserts that our understanding of the external world reflects not reality, whose existence it doubts, but the tyrannical influence of language on thought...

...Laurel, 338 pp., paper, $8.00), a very interesting collection of 21 essays by a variety of authors, calls "identity politics...

...and Third World literary monuments, such as the Koran, the Tale of Genji and the Bhagavad Gita, are, as Dinesh D'Souza observes, even less suitable for radical literature courses...

...Third-generation Japanese-Americans have little in common with recent arrivals from mainland China...

...People go to shamans to be cured, exactly as we go to doctors...

...Be that as it may, the future envisioned by the radicals is further off—a lot further off—than 2050...

...In an essay responding to Ravitch, Asante does insist that "There is no common American culture as is claimed by the defenders of the status quo," but rather a "hegemonic culture...

...Puerto Ricans are sometimes astonishingly hostile to Dominicans...

...All indications are that in 2050 the three groups will be less inclined to unite politically than they are now, and that the category will be ever less real...

...You can obviously study shamanism without believing in its efficacy—the pluralistic approach—but you cannot incorporate it into your worldview unless you are prepared to take it more or less at face value...

...To Asante the real division is between, not pluralists and particularists, but "Euro-American hegemonists" masquerading as multiculturalists "and those who [like himself] truly believe in cultural pluralism without hierarchy...

...Such a belief must exist...

...At some points, he (and several other contributors) seem to imply that whites must simply acknowledge the importance of non-Western cultures and their contributions to the West...

...Changes in our population base are already noticeable...

...Indeed, the whole project of de-Europeanizing knowledge in the United States is a fantasy...

...Yet the moral argument is faulty because it is based on a sentimentalized misreading of history...

...And the majority does by and large accept the necessity of studying non-Western societies and literatures, revising our canons to include the achievements of racial minorities and women, and studying the unpleasant aspects of our national past...

...and most of the whites (D'Souza is a native of India) are positively eager to embrace what Diane Ravitch, in her excellent essay, calls "pluralistic multiculturalism": efforts to create "a richer common culture" that acknowledges contributions from many sources...

...Asante responds that Stanfield "is not writing about the uses of knowledge but about the ranking of knowledge...

...Multiculturalism, despite its radical pretensions, has strongly promoted that ascendancy...

...Granting all the difficulties we face in attaining this common culture, we are more likely to reach it when we allow the full participation of all ethnic groups in a quest for a usable curriculum...

...Elsewhere in American academia they have mutated into what Paul Berman, the editor of Debating P.C...

...That is hardly a satisfactory answer...

...Is this, notwithstanding, to be regretted...

...Slavery was endemic to West Africa long in advance of the white man's arrival in the 15th century, and the international slave trade prominently involved Arabs, Africans and Latin Americans, along with Europeans and North Americans...

...Some projections indicate that we will have a nonwhite majority by 2050...

...The heart of the radicals' case is a moral one that cannot be wholly conjured away by a practical argument...

...Perhaps, as they themselves believe, they are playing to the American majority of the not impossibly distant future...

...For centuries, they tell us, the West has murdered, dispossessed and exploited people of color, and it is now unworthy of its victims' cultural loyalty...

...In Berman's collection even Dinesh D'Souza, the author of Illiberal Education and a leading conservative scourge of political correctness, does not object...

...moreover, as Enrique Fernandez, an editor, notes in his fascinating essay in Debating P. C., Latin America is culturally European...

...Since Ravitch, and virtually all liberal whites, are perfectly willing to do so both in principle and practice, the dispute really centers less on disagreements about the theory of multiculturalism than on the sometimes nutty claims made in its name by politically correct academics...

...Some deconstructionists have argued that no one national culture or system for interpreting the external world—science, let us say, or magic—is superior to another...

...It also was linked, in a manner not outstandingly obvious, to a French philosophico-linguistic theory called "deconstructionism...

...pushed as if it were a common culture...

...The Council subsequently attempted to choose what some of its members, in exasperation, described as a politically correct dog...

...There is no reason to think, either, that white feminists (underrepresented in Berman's collection) would have much interest in joining an anti-white movement...

...Sorry, I don't know the outcome...

...And while identity politics depicts itself as a doctrine of the Left, it echoes the themes of the European far Right in its emphasis on race and its rejection of rationalism, humanism and universality...

...By imposing primarily racial and sexual agendas that ignore the majority when they do not bitterly attack it, the radicals have taken the Left out of serious politics...

...Patrick J. Buchanan, David Duke, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and others of their sort have evident incentives to encourage the racialization of politics...

...Before the inhabitants of what is today Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia were conquered and oppressed by the Spaniards, they were conquered and oppressed by the Inca...

...When its decision came to the notice of the City Council there were objections—to the breed, not to the expenditure...

...The Police Department in Berkeley, California, had resolved to buy a mastiff or a Doberman for use as a patrol dog...

...But if the white majority will continue to be a reality, so too will the large and growing body of nonwhites...

...Traditional societies in the Third World have been a good deal less egalitarian than traditional Western societies...

...Ravitch describes the radical position as "particularistic multiculturalism": the belief "that no common culture is possible or desirable...

...In effect, the role of language in the French theory is played in the American variant by race and sex...

...The Aztec empire in Mexico was so intensely hated by its subjects that they provided most of the soldiers Cortes led against Montezuma...

...Demographics, justice and prudence absolutely require some kind of accommodation...

...By then, of course, PC had become identified with the climate of intolerant rightmindedness that numerous writers, and not only conservatives, have claimed to detect at our leading universities...

...In fact, those who demand a more strenuous kind of mul-ticulturalism constitute the only significant opposition to the pluralistic ideal...

...The meaning of his own position is unclear...

...Until recent decades, the racial diversity that generated identity politics was found only on the American side of the Atlantic...

...Asante never tells us how we might attempt to do this...

...In the political as in the academic realm, the extreme multiculturalists have pursued delusions...

...Nevertheless, none of Berman's authors—including Molefi Kete Asante, chairman of Temple University's Black Studies Department, whom she appears to regard as a par-ticularist—actually takes that position, at least not in this volume...