The Power of Vulnerability

...The bashing of white male civilization (a dubious conceptual entity in itself) goes on daily in much of our educational system...

...affirmative action is briefly mentioned, then dropped precipitously without comment pro or con...

...Among other things, Hughes criticizes many conservatives for turning a blind eye to the obvious fact that our society draws water from many roots...

...Jesse Helms and the most radical feminists hold nearly identical views about the power of art to determine social attitudes and the consequent need to suppress anything that embodies (or seems to embody) the wrong ideology...

...Complaint itself may indeed be the most multicultural glue binding America together today...

...In the wake of last year's Los Angeles riots, Takaki believes, Americans are asking each other, "What does our diversity mean, and where is it leading us...

...It would be possible to make allowances for the ideology if the book faced more squarely such difficult issues as affirmative action, the real causes of the Los Angeles riot, crime and poverty in general, and what it would take (beyond a recognition of all nonwhites as victims) to make our society livable again...

...For a great number of them, the term is synonymous with separatism: "It alleges that European institutions and mental structures are inherently oppressive, and that non-Eurocentric ones are not—a dubious idea, to say the least...

...Native American" may be an objectionable term in implying that other Americans are somehow foreigners, but a Patrick Buchanan who objects, say, to large-scale immigration from Africa is voicing an uglier nativism of the Old Right...

...No informed person doubts that until recently black Americans were nearly always the victims of a peculiarly virulent racial prejudice, or that people of other ethnic backgrounds (not all of them nonwhite) have suffered in varying degrees...

...and Oscar Handlin for their pioneer service during the 1940s and '50s in "paving the way for the study of common people rather than princes and presidents...

...And he hopes the peace dividend will solve all our problems: "The end of the Cold War has given us the opportunity to shift our resources from nuclear weapons development to the production of consumer goods, which could help revitalize the American economy, making it more competitive...

...Instead, Takaki mostly offers sentimentality...

...His chapter on the Jews is heavily indebted to Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers...

...Never before had they seen such people...

...To seem strong may only conceal a rickety scaffolding of denial, but to be vulnerable is to be invincible...

...In academic and journalistic usage the word has become little more than a token of benign intentions toward any group considering itself oppressed by, or merely distinct from, the white European-descended majority (made up, in turn, of other minorities...

...Culture of Complaintisajoyto read: Hughes is stylish, opinionated, usually well-informed, and does not hesitate to engage controversial issues...

...27.95...

...Lest anyone misunderstand that, he quotes an anonymous 19th-century Mexican as saying, "It is very natural that the history written by the victim does not altogether chime with the story of the victor...

...The book is structured as an extended survey of victims (blacks, American Indians, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans) in the context of white domination, but the Irish and the Jews get a chapter each, qualifying them as semi-victims in spite of their race...

...What is definite enough to quarrel with in such a concept...

...By contrast, the chapter on Asian-Americans is far more nuanced and benefits from the author's intimate knowledge...

...Throughout, it is misleadingly suggested that the nation is very similar in its makeup to California, a state where non-Hispanic whites are or soon will be a minority...

...their versions of it, however, are miles apart...

...In anatomizing the present overpoliticization of the art world Hughes notes that here, again, the sins of the Left and the Right bear a fearful symmetry...

...Still, if one man's multicultural America is another man's culture of complaint, there must be more to it than that...

...The high-water mark of what might be called Yugoslavian-style multiculturalism is Afrocentrism, an influential movement whose questionable scholarship and often demonstrably false preconceptions Hughes exposes more thoroughly than previous writers for a wide audience...

...It was all too predictable, given the national climate he describes, that certain minority, female and homosexual artists would denounce artistic quality as a standard imposed by heterosexual white males (dead or alive) to maintain their control...

...one can even detect between the lines some sympathy for meritocratic criteria in employment and education...

...that someone—who?—would find it profitable to put factories back in the inner cities...

...These days every university administrator is fearlessly committed to multicultural-ism, secure in the knowledge that nobody will ever ask what it means...

...Hughes is uncomfortably aware that his reasonable definition would be rejected by many self-proclaimed multi-culturalists...

...The bigger surprise was the alacrity with which such major museums as the Smithsonian and the Whitney granted legitimacy to victimology as art...

...576 pp...

...Conservative defenders of the "canon" of Western literature and philosophy frequently subscribe to the same fallacy as its radical attackers: belief in the existence of a unitary body of works conveying a uniform "European" view of the world...

...Generally speaking his history, which jumps back and forth between ethnic groups, is second-hand...

...Reviewed by Christopher Clausen Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University MuLTicuLTURAliSM is one of those words that seem to have been coined overnight by an advertising agency to sell a particular product, but filled so many other needs that soon everybody was using it—albeit no two people the same way...

...In these and a dozen other ways we create an infantilized culture of complaint, in which Big Daddy is always to blame and the expansion of rights goes on without the other half of citizenship?attachment to duties and obligations...

...One can imagine, while reading A Different Mirror, the unease of a Japanese-American professor watching poor blacks take out their hostility on Korean-American shopkeepers...

...How do we work it out in the post-Rodney King era...

...and on and on...

...He calls America, as others have before him, a "mosaic" in many hues...

...Takaki's acquaintance with historiography is limited: He congratulates Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr...

...The title of Hughes' book—begun as a series of lectures at the New York Public Library—is drawn from the posture of its targets: "The all-pervasive claim to victimhood tops off America's long-cherished culture of therapeutics...

...A host of unstated—and in some cases untenable—assumptions lurks behind Takaki's pieties: that the development of nuclear weapons was the main expenditure in the Cold War economy...

...Complaint gives you power—even when it's only the power of emotional bribery, of creating previously unnoticed levels of social guilt...

...As for his style, it is typified by the opening of Part One: "From the shore, the small band of Indians saw the floating island pulled by billowy clouds and the landing of the strangers...

...Takaki's thoughts regarding what we can look forward to are equally unhelpful...

...A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America By Ronald Takaki Little, Brown...

...But the direct expression of those feelings would violate the precepts of academic multiculturalism today, so the book denounces "Eurocen-trism" and leaves us with a multitude of unresolved questions...

...What is needed," he says in explaining his task, "is a fresh angle, a study of the American past from a comparative perspective...

...Everybody can get in on this sad little act...

...It proposes—modestly enough—that some of the most interesting things in history and culture happen at the interface between cultures...

...The problem, rather, is the piggyback effect of innumerable groups adopting the black struggle's most extreme rhetoric to gain moral and material advantage...

...Perhaps that is why, though sometimes instructive, he is essentially bland and evasive on the fundamental questions raised by the idea of a multicultural America...

...his treatment of Shakespeare's Tempest as a parable of white imperialism, de rigueur in such a book these days, reflects the commonplaces of Left-wing literary criticism...

...His intention, apparently, was to write a textbook for courses (required at more and more universities) in "cultural diversity...

...Although anti-white multiculturalism is a feature of the Left's political correctness, Hughes points out that "the Right is as corroded by defunct ideology as the academic Left...

...How do you spell relief...

...The two books under review both endorse multiculturalism...

...He refers several more times to "the post-Rodney King era" yet never really probes the implications of his term...

...Meanwhile, these multi-culturalists fail to stand up for Salman Rushdie, preferring to blame tyranny or failure in Iran or any Third World country on Western colonialism...

...Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror is another sort of book entirely...

...In Culture of Complaint Robert Hughes, an Australian who is Time magazine's art critic and a well-known historian, defines multiculturalism as the assertion "that people with different roots can coexist, that they can learn to read the image banks of others, that they can and should look across the frontiers of race, language, gender and age without prejudice or illusion, and learn to think against the background of a hybridized society...

...If this is the best "multicultural history" can do, it will contribute little toward overcoming the real obstacles to our getting along with each other...

...He quotes Alice Walker saying about a multiethnic society: "If that's not the future reality of the United States, there won't be any United States, because that's who we are...

...The riot, for example, is presented in entirely superficial terms...

...A professor of "ethnic studies" at Berkeley, Takaki's voice is more like that of the university administrator described in my first paragraph...

...There are no ethnic requirements for being an American and never have been...

...that manufacturing more consumer goods would greatly increase the demand for labor...

...In addition, people who have experienced no obvious minority persecution now pursue the Inner Child?presumably repressed by myriad forms of abuse—to the point of obsession...

...As an art critic, Hughes has a good deal to say about the impact of this national malady on the creation, judgment and exhibition of art works...

...A growing demand for labor in a revitalized economy, combined with the rebuilding of the manufacturing base in inner cities as well as education and job training programs funded by the 'peace dividend,' could help to bring minority workers into the mainstream economy without making white laborers feel threatened...