Slouching Towards Gomorrah (49 page)

Americans of Asian extraction had seemed to be immune to this rejectionist impulse. They had, after all, produced startling rates of achievement in academic endeavors, science, and business. Yet, perhaps feeling that ethnic grievance is necessary to ones self-respect, Asian-American university students are beginning to act like an ethnic pressure group, demanding the paraphernalia—separate dormitories, courses, etc.—of campus tribalism.

Ethnic separatism and hostility to other ethnic groups may be inbred in mankind, requiring no explanation peculiar to any particular society. Thus, it is possible to question historian Arthur Schlesinger’s proposition that “The rising cult of ethnicity was a symptom of decreasing confidence in the American future.”
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If the cult of ethnicity is a universal phenomenon—running from Bosnia to Sri Lanka to Liberia to Indonesia, and a dozen or so other places—surely the cause is more general than decreasing confidence in the American future. It seems far more likely that the causal arrow runs the other way: decreasing confidence in the American future is a symptom of the rising cult of ethnicity.

The natural centrifugal tendencies of ethnicity were once counteracted by a public school system that stressed indoctrinating immigrants to be Americans. The schools were agents of cultural unification. They taught patriotism and standards derived from European cultures. Part of our national lore, and glory, is the fact that youngsters speaking not a word of English were placed in public schools where only English was used and very shortly were
proficient in the language. That was crucial to the formation of an American identity. Now, however, the educational system has become the weapon of choice for modern liberals in their project of dismantling American culture. Our egalitarians view every culture (other than European) as equal. They resent and resist attempts to Americanize immigrants, and the crucial battleground is language.

That is the reason for bilingual education. Initially, some well-meaning souls saw bilingual education as a way of easing the immigrant child’s entry into American culture. The child would take courses in English but learn many subjects in his native tongue, usually Spanish. Within two or three years, the argument ran, the child would be able to take all of his courses in English. It is now clear, however, that the program is designed not to facilitate but to delay entry into American culture, and, to the degree possible, make certain that assimilation is never complete.

So many languages are spoken by immigrants that it is impossible to provide bilingual education for all. That is why bilingual education is so often in Spanish, the language most immigrants speak. But that fact gives away the real reason for the programs. Vietnamese and Polish children were put into English-speaking classes and were competent into English long before the Hispanics in bilingual schools.
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That leaves the partisans of bilingualism only the choice of saying that Hispanic children are not as capable as others or admitting that they, the educators, are driven by hostility to American culture, and the rewards to be had by teachers’ unions and educational bureaucrats. The rewards would not be there, however, if ideology had not created the situation.

Often, the bilingualists do not care whether immigrant children learn English. The key to success for the students is “self-esteem…. Children do badly in school because of their feelings of ‘shame’ at belonging to a minority group rather than the ‘dominant group.’ For the children to do better, teachers must ’consciously challenge the power structure both in their classrooms and schools and in the society at large.”
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As Richard Bernstein writes, “Bilingual education … is an act of rebellion against white, Anglo cultural domination.” And the “animus against assimilation, is not an implicit part of the emerging educational philosophy. It is explicit, open, out there, a standard belief. ’The psychological cost
of assimilation has been and continues to be high for many U.S. citizens,’ declares the National Council of Social Studies (NCSS), in Washington, D.C., in its 1992 ’Curriculum Guidelines for Multicultural Education.’ ‘It too often demands self-denial, self-hatred, and rejection of family and ethnic ties.’”
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This pathetic whine is not insignificant since the NCSS is the country’s largest organization devoted to social studies education.

Public dissatisfaction with the linguistic fracturing of society has led to calls for an English-only amendment to the Constitution. The frustration is understandable, but there is no need to amend the Constitution to achieve an English-speaking nation. All that need be done is the abolition of bilingual education and the repeal of the Voting Rights Act’s requirement of different language ballots. Children from other countries will learn English in public schools as they used to do. Their parents will accept the change once they begin to see its results. Immigrant parents want their children to learn English and become Americans. The opposition to that, manifested in bilingual education, comes from American elites who form an adversarial culture, alienated from the culture of the West and wishing to weaken it.

In 1989, the Commissioner’s Task Force on Minorities in New York 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.” All young people were being “miseducated” because of a “systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives.” Bernstein asks, rhetorically, “Could the multicultural animus against ‘European culture and its derivatives’ emerge more clearly than that? Here we have a direct statement that the Western culture is harmful to nonwhite children.”
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Despite the evidence and the frankness of its advocates, most people, including very astute people, tend to accept the beneficent view of multiculturalism put forth by its less candid partisans. Thus, one can find diametrically opposed views of the phenomenon, one put forward, for example, by Richard Bernstein and another articulated by Conor Cruise O’Brien. Bernstein writes, “Multiculturalism is a movement of the left, emerging from the counterculture of the 1960s…. It is a code word for a political
ambition, a yearning for more power, combined with a genuine, earnest, zealous, self-righteous craving for social improvement….” He says we are “likely to end up in a simmering sort of mutual dislike on the level of everyday unpleasantness…”
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O’Brien, on the other hand, thinks that multiculturalism and diversity are “actually both a mask for, and perhaps an unconscious mode for achieving, a unity which would be broader-based and to that extent stronger.… The real agenda is the enlargement of the American national elite to include groups of persons who have traditionally been excluded from the same, mainly for reasons associated with race and gender. What is in view is the enlargement and diversification of the composition of the future governing class of the United States of America.”

I am afraid it is clear that Bernstein has it right and O’Brien has it wrong. Multiculturalism is advertised by its less candid practitioners as opening students to the perspectives and accomplishments of groups that have been largely ignored and undervalued in conventional curriculums. The goal, it is said, is to enrich the student’s understanding of the world and to teach him respect for and tolerance of others who are different. It substitutes an ethic of inclusion for the older ethic of exclusion. This is the movement’s self-portrait, and O’Brien seems to have accepted it at face value. If there were truth in that advertising, if that were what the goal really is, no one could legitimately object to what is taking place in the American educational system. Unfortunately, there appears to be very little truth in the pretensions of the multiculturalists.

Bernstein took a two-year leave of absence from the
New York Times
to gather the facts of the multicultural ideology and its opponents. His is not an impressionistic book or one based on an ideological predisposition; it is a report of empirical findings. He points, for example, to the remarkable change in attitude towards Christopher Columbus between 1892 and 1992. Though not a single new fact about Columbus’s life and exploits had been uncovered, the country’s mood swung from one of uncritical adulation to one of loathing and condemnation, at least among the members of the “intellectual” class. The change was accomplished by the aggressive ideology of multiculturalism. The Columbus turnaround is merely a specific instance of more general alterations in our moral landscape.

What it signifies, and what becomes increasingly obvious, is that multiculturalism is a philosophy of antagonism to America and the West. The hostility of the multiculturalists to this nation and its achievements can hardly be overstated. Lynne Cheney, the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, quotes a professor who is pleased that multiculturalism has the “potential for ideologically disuniting the nation” by stressing America’s faults so that students will not think this country deserves their special support.
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That multiculturalism is essentially an attack on America, the European-American culture, and the white race, with special emphasis on white males, may be seen from the curriculum it favors. A curriculum designed to foster understanding of other cultures would study those cultures. Multiculturalism does not. Courses are not offered on the cultures of China or India or Brazil or Nigeria, nor does the curriculum require the study of languages without which foreign cultures cannot be fully understood. Instead the focus is on groups that, allegedly, have been subjected to oppression by American and Western civilization—homosexuals, American Indians, blacks, Hispanics, women, and so on. The message is not that all cultures are to be respected but that European culture, which created the dominance of white males, is uniquely evil. Multiculturalism follows the agenda of modern liberalism, and it comes straight from the Sixties counterculture. But now, in American education, it is the dominant culture.

Bernstein catalogues the basic changes multiculturalism has made in the nature of public discourse.

Hence it is that multiculturalists have turned Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream into a nightmare. He asked that his children “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” which, as Bernstein says, is the “essential ideal of liberalism.” But multiculturalists say, “Judge me by the color of my skin for therein lies my identity and my place in the world.”
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Multiculturalism requires the quotas or affirmative action that create group dislike of other groups and self-segregation. There is no other way to ensure that each valued ethnic group is represented in the student body and on the faculty. Of late, educators have begun to speak of diversity instead of multiculturalism, but it is the same thing. University presidents and faculties, secondary and primary school principals and teachers, all chant the diversity mantra. So powerful has this harmful notion become that it not only dictates who is admitted to a school but sometimes determines who may leave.

Students of Asian ancestry, for example, have tried to transfer to public schools whose curriculum was better suited to their ambitions but been denied the transfer on the grounds that their departure would lessen diversity. One father complained that his adopted Korean daughter could contribute no non-western perspective to the school she sought to leave because she had been brought to this country at the age of five months. No matter; she was of the requisite racial group. When the controversy was reported in the newspapers, she was allowed to transfer. But the episode demonstrates that the multiculturalists are sometimes willing to force a person into a cultural identity that person does not have on the grounds of ancestry alone.

The quality of education must necessarily decline as students turn from substantive subjects to ideologically driven resentments, in the case of non-whites, or guilt, in the case of whites. Although white students are often required to study America’s “oppressed” subcultures and their allegedly superior qualities, it is regarded as racist to require that non-whites study Western culture. That was
the meaning of the radicals’ attack on Stanford’s Western Culture program in which students were required to sample the writings of men who had helped shape Western culture—Shakespeare, Dante, Locke, etc. A black student who objected to the program said its message was “Nigger, go home.”
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That exclusionary interpretation is precisely the opposite of the real message of the program, which was “Let us study what we have in common as inheritors of a tradition.” The black student’s objection follows from the perverse teaching of multiculturalism that those who have been “traditionally excluded” must now reject inclusion.

This has the odd effect of damaging all groups. The insistence on separate ethnic identities means that persons in each group can study their own culture, often in highly flattering and historically inaccurate form. Multiculturalism then means not the study of others but of oneself. The student who immerses himself in multicultural studies, who lives in a dormitory where admission is defined by ethnicity, who socializes only with members of his ethnic group, does not acquire the knowledge and discipline that he might have and does not learn how to deal comfortably with those of other ethnicities. One of the ways in which cultures improve is by borrowing from other cultures. Europe borrowed important aspects of mathematics, for example, from the Arab world. But the essence of multiculturalism is the isolation of groups so that they do not borrow from one another. The result is the relative cultural impoverishment of all groups.