A Wise and Temperate Book
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
A Wise and Temperate Book We Are All Multiculturalists Now By Nathan Glazer Harvard. 179 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers; author, "A Democracy at...
...Afrocentrism, the most alarming feature of multiculturalism, is a direct result of the failure of assimilation where blacks are concerned...
...This was abody of well-known scholars and educators, including critics of multiculturalism, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education, among others...
...This fact has led Glazer to reconsider his original views on multiculturalism in the schools...
...except for blacks...
...who make up half of all immigrants...
...As history is the main battleground of the multicultural wars, Glazer reviews the controversy over the National Council for History Standards...
...Because Africa was believed to have been underrepresented in standard histories, the ancient and obscure societies of Nubia and Kush assumed center stage...
...This is seen not only in residential segregation, which has changed very little even for black families earning $50,000 a year and up, but in the low black intermarriage rate...
...It was based on the evolution of Europe and the United States, an approach he thinks was better for himself as a Jew, and better for the country...
...can strive to curb the excesses of multicultural education, but the battle over whether we are going to have it has been lost...
...Better than nothing, of course, yet it does seem strange that previously disparate and often hostile ethnic and religious groups...
...A 1993 survey found that while 90 per cent of American undergraduates knew who Rosa Parks was, only 25 per cent could identify the author of the phrase "government of the people, by the people, for the people...
...This brings Glazer to his main point: "Blacks are the storm troops in the battles over multiculturalism...
...the English language, national brands and advertising, the mass media, sports...
...The result has been that even the highly self-conscious Jewish community has an intermarriage rate of 50 per cent or more...
...Asians and Hispanics, although most are relatively recent immigrants, already have intermarriage rates of about 30 per cent...
...Powerful forces in this country bring people together...
...There are already plenty of laws on the books banning segregation and discrimination, to little avail it seems...
...Glazer doubts that there is much to be accomplished by means of legislation...
...This was his belief, expressed in a 1974 article for The Public Interest entitled "On 'Opening Up' the Suburbs," that blacks would assimilate into American culture and society as white minority groups had done...
...Glazer does not deny the progress some women and minority groups have made...
...Long known as a distinguished sociologist and the author of numerous books, Glazer sets out here to correct what he now regards as a personal error...
...Glazer prefers the "consensual" history he learned as a youth...
...The topic might seem marginal to the larger issue of integration, but in his eyes it is central...
...In the meantime, there is multiculturalism...
...But, although Glazer's committee included Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., among other critics of multiculturalism, its 1991 report was not radically different...
...It served both as a unifying force and as a counterweight to what one learned at home about being Jewish or Irish or Italian...
...Nor does he regard the multicultural curriculum as a purely token effort...
...By far the largest group involved, they feel most strongly about the issues and have the worst problems...
...The U. S. Senate denounced the standards unanimously...
...We shall have to wait for better times before government can begin to address the ghetto's overwhelming problems...
...The state commissioner of education had appointed a task force to make recommendations in this area, and its report denounced "Eurocentric" education in fiery words, arousing a storm of controversy...
...Conversely, in-marriage among women of Puerto Rican descent was 78.7 per cent, and among Mexican American women, 76 per cent...
...Although America never has been the melting pot that turn-of-the-century liberals hoped for, the degree of integration here is very high compared to that of other multiracial nations...
...If youngsters today seem ill-informed about Western civilization, here is one reason...
...Black separatism as a concept flows out of widespread rejection blacks continue to experience in many areas of American culture and society...
...Another curious feature of multiculturalism is that students today know more about previously obscure figures than they do about the great white men who used to be the subjects of history books...
...family by family, neighborhood by neighborhood...
...According to Glazer, the most penetrating critique of the revised standards was made by John Patrick Diggins, a leading historian of ideas, who pointed out that "its authors seek to inculcate political values characteristic of the Western World [democracy, tolerance] that cannot be derived from what they wouldhave students learn about the non-Western World...
...from A Curriculum of Inclusion, and met something of the same reception...
...Critics noted that such figures as Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Wright brothers were not mentioned at all, while Harriet Tubman received six citations, and Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism, 19...
...More knew that Tubman had run an underground railway than could name the commanding general of America's revolutionary army...
...author, "A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" In this short but important book, Nathan Glazer addresses one of the most controversial issues in American education...
...Still, he thinks, there is no going back...
...Glazer had, and still has, reservations about multiculturalism, but his work as an educator, and particularly his service on a New York State committee appointed to "repair the damage" caused by A Curriculum of Inchusion (1989), has changed his opinions...
...Although they emphasize conflict and discord, these are represented as stages on the road to greater inclusiveness...
...According to the 1980 census, now almost two decades out-of-date, 98.7 per cent of black native-born women married other blacks...
...Glazer unites his two themes in a single sentence: "Multiculturalism is the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African Americans in the same way, and to the same degree it has incorporated so many groups...
...and outside of it, for that matter...
...It was assisted by numerous scholarly and professional groups, including the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, and various racially oriented educational associations...
...The only hope, according to Glazer is that change will come incrementally, "one by one...
...Other European ethnics have much higher rates of intermarriage...
...To Glazer, the standards had many peculiarities...
...In 1986 Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn published the results of a national survey that discovered more students could identify Harriet Tubman than Winston Churchill or Joseph Stalin...
...By this he means "that we all accept a greater degree of attention to minorities and women and their role in American history and social studies and literature classes in schools...
...I find it hard to quarrel with this dour conclusion...
...even though there are Asian identity groups that feed into the multicultural mix...
...Native Americans pose no problem either...
...Still and all, it remains true that blacks occupy a caste-like status in America that is unlikely to change any time soon...
...Three volumes covering standards from kindergarten through high school were published in 1994, to the customary blizzard of abuse...
...They make up less than 1 per cent of the population, and the demands of Native American activists can easily be accommodated without straining traditional values...
...There is broad agreement that these previously excluded groups must be incorporated into all relevant textbooks and curricula, and by now this has already been done...
...I must admit my agreement with almost everything in this wise and temperate book...
...are not only disinterested in separatism, they are not very multicultural at all...
...despite the strain of Afrocentrism that runs through their curricula...
...except rhetorically...
...Fifth graders were expected to discuss gender roles in pre-Columbian societies, among other esoteric topics...
...On the bright side, Glazer notes, multiculturalists as a whole are not separatists...
...As in New York, attacks on the standards led to revisions which left the substance largely unchanged...
...Everyone knows that the attempt to desegregate public schools, despite decades of busing and other measures, has ended in failure too...
...There is another route, of course, which Glazer dismisses as impractical: a massive national effort to rebuild the ghettos and their schools, to make blacks, if still separate, equal, in hopes that equality will bring lower crime rates, stronger families, and finally, assimilation...
...should now fall under the same rubric...
...Jews and Christians, Irish and English, German and French, Poles and Russians...
...Another advantage is that Asians...
...Glazer is right that today's conservative political climate makes such a proposal hopelessly Utopian...
...Preliterate societies in Mexico and Africa, of which little is known, were emphasized, and introduced to very young students...
...Yet blacks remain about as ghettoized today as they were then, not at all what the coauthor (with his former colleague Daniel Patrick Moynihan) of the classic work on ethnicity, Beyond the Melting Pot, had expected...
...For example, as a result of white protests, the category "European" has sometimes been added to the list of groups that should be included in a multicultural curriculum...
...Asians seem satisfied with the education they get, and their main thrust has been against the quota system for admission to elite colleges that discriminates against them (and whites too) in favor of groups who are doing less well in school...
...Glazer agrees that this contradiction is basic to multiculturalism, which has a political agenda that cannot be promoted without doing violence to the historical record...
...Glazer cites a number of wellmeaning efforts to integrate specific neighborhoods, most of which met with failure...
...What is to be done...
...Glazer does not see how his committee could have quarreled with the fundamentals of the first report because, as his title says, we are all multiculturalists now...
Vol. 80 • May 1997 • No. 9
