Our Iroquois Fathers

...Thus his apparent defection to the multicultural camp would appear a serious reversal for conservatism in the ongoing culture wars...

...We are all Keynesians now," President Nixon is said to have conceded in 1971, less than a decade before Keynesian policies sent the U.S...

...These famous examples of premature consensus do not give Nathan Glazer pause...

...Although the committee included some critics of multiculturalism, such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...He came to recognize what he terms "the apparent inevitability of multicultur-alism" during his participation in a committee to review a controversial blueprint for the New York state public-school curriculum, prepared under the guidance of the notorious Afrocentrist Leonard Jeffries...

...What makes the new generation of immigrants all that different from its predecessors...

...What is new is that advocates of change have largely abandoned claims of merit and substituted claims of representation...

...Indeed, he has produced, for the most part, a thoughtful and sensible book that will reinforce his reputation as a voice of reason and moderation...

...Admittedly, many of the newcomers are non-white, yet their problems of language, lack of access to credit, and a feeling of displacement in a new land would be entirely familiar to the Irish, Italians, and Jews who came to the United States at the turn of the century...

...Is it true, as the New York state syllabus claims, that the Iroquois Indians were an important influence in shaping the ideas of the American founding...

...Glazer reluctantly goes along with all this...

...What gives a hint of outrage to Glazer's title—provocative enough for declaring an entirely open question closed—is that Glazer has the reputation of being a conservative on civil-rights issues...

...Glazer cites intermarriage data showing that whites intermarry at a high rate with Latinos and Asian Americans but that the exogamy rate for African Americans remains extremely low...

...Yet it is up to thoughtful educators to figure out how to respond to these new realities...

...It has evolved according to ongoing debates about literary and historical merit...

...Et tu, Professor...

...Glazer seems to regard all this as disagreeable realpolitik...

...He cites them to establish precedent for his own strange declaration, "We are all mul-ticulturalists now...

...The committee's final report, while eschewing denunciations of Western civilization, advocated the inclusion of "multiple perspectives"—specifically the perspectives of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans...

...He contends that "multiculturalism is the price America is paying for its inability to incorporate into its society African Americans in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many groups...

...economy into a tailspin...

...The book is marred, however, by a defeatist tone that has characterized Glazer's writing in recent years and must be recognized as a tired old warrior's plea not to be called a "racist" anymore and to be permitted to resume a normal life in the peculiar cultural milieu of Cambridge, Mass...

...This is the Harvard sociologist who bravely and eloquently questioned affirmative action in the 1970s, the one who, in so doing, earned the unforgiving enmity of the Left, including many of his colleagues...

...When Glazer evaluates Afrocen-tric myths with skepticism, I know whom he is arguing against...

...If many native-born African Americans see the American dream as nothing but a racist hoax, numberless immigrants—including black immigrants from the West Indies and Africa—view America as a success story...

...who dissented from the final report), Glazer was struck that virtually everyone assumed that something needed to be done to accommodate the black and brown faces in the public-school classroom...

...Alas, no...

...In this instance, Glazer's apparent generosity of spirit, and his pragmatic concession to the times, is a poor camouflage for cowardice...

...He admits that his personal preference is for a narrative of American history in which the promises of the Declaration of Independence become an unfolding reality for successive groups of immigrants...

...In fact, Glazer has not changed his name to Nathan Muhammad, nor has he surrendered to the other side...

...Glazer seems to agree, but counters with the most interesting point of his book: Multiculturalism, he says, is a rainbow coalition that has been assembled to give broad political cover for the specific grievances of one group—American blacks...

...Consider an example from his book...

...Perhaps all students in New York classrooms should be made familiar with black grievance, but why don't the West Indians and Nigerians share it...

...OuRlROQyois Fathers Nathan Glazer Declares Us All Multiculturalists By Dinesh D'Souza ??~T""\7"7"e are all socialists \X/ noW'" WiHiam v v Harcourt proclaimed in l889, a century before the greatest experiment in socialism imploded and ended global confidence in the idea...

...If black-studies advocate Cornel West (for example) made such a pronouncement, it would be dismissed Dinesh D'Souza's most recent book is The End of Racism (Free Press...

...Glazer does not answer his own questions, but he seems genuinely ambivalent, perhaps because he considers it inevitable that, whatever the historical facts, the Iroquois will find their way into the classroom...

...So what is Glazer trying to say...

...Glazer's wrongheaded conviction of inevitability arises from his failure to distinguish the fact of multiracial-ism from the ideology of multicultur-alism...

...as a case of thrasonical hype...

...He is willing to concede the triumph of multicul-turalism simply because virtually all parties in the contemporary debate agree that some changes are necessary to reflect ethnic diversity and to accommodate black grievance...

...No other group suffered enslavement and state-sponsored segregation...

...Moreover, nativist prejudice against today's Mexicans and Koreans is no greater, and arguably considerably less, than the prejudice directed against Southern and Central Europeans a century ago...

...The debates of the '90s have made clear that the multicultural agenda in education is highly controversial even within the liberal camp...

...This is doubtless correct...

...Here is where we need to draw the line—something Glazer will not do...

...Nothing will assure the triumph of the multicultural ideologues more than the despondent sense, on the part of thinkers like Glazer, that the ideologues' project is destined to prevail and therefore cannot and should not be resisted...

...Reassuringly, he declares that "we should not base the social studies curriculum . . . on pure fantasies about the role of Africa and blacks in world history," yet he "would reject a curriculum that gives the same place to European history that it held in the l940s...

...Yet after stating that the role of the Iroquois League was "insignificant, perhaps nonexistent," Glazer offers this astonishing observation: "But how important is it that students should know that...

...Yet he is convinced that the political reality has changed and that the old "melting pot" ideology does not command widespread assent anymore...

...Many immigrants are "perfectly content with a Eurocentric curriculum," but the case of American blacks is exceptional...

...And politically and culturally, blacks remain in many ways a distinctive population today...

...Maybe so...

...But I am not aware of anyone—not Bill Bennett, not Lynne Cheney—who insists that American public schools today teach exactly the same material they did half a century ago...

...They have shown themselves perfectly willing to subordinate truth to considerations of ethnic self-esteem...

...Plaintive acquiescence in unreasonable demands is not the only option available...

...No one can say that restrictive speech codes, ethnic "theme houses," Afrocentric curricula, and the like enjoy universal acclaim...

...If false beliefs about the Iroquois "raised Native Americans in the esteem of their fellow students, would that be a justification for teaching the story...

...The curriculum has always evolved...

...After all, they too are "persons of color" and ostensibly vulnerable to the depredations of American racism...

...Yes, new faces in the classroom mean new questions, and to some extent new perspectives...

...But Glazer's own analysis suggests a way out: Educators who perceive the flaws and dangers of multiculturalism can develop political strategies based on a recognition of the fragility and, to an extent, the falsity of the alliances that keep the system going...