Cover Stories: Whose America?

Exactly 215 years ago this week, some subjects of Britain’s King George III adopted a Declaration of Independence that asserted the necessity for a sovereign and free United States of America. The ground moved under that hall in steamy, summertime Philadelphia; an idea was proclaimed that would shake and reshape the world. Yet the entire world was hardly represented. All 56 of the signatories were white males of European descent, most of them wealthy property holders. Like some of his co-revolutionaries, Thomas Jefferson, who was primarily responsible for the soaring language of the document (“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . .”), owned black slaves. In this context, what could “equal” mean? And why were only “men” created that way?

Americans over 40 might be startled by a description of the Glorious Fourth that points out the racial, sexual and social characteristics of the Founding Fathers, never mind taking a swipe or two at Jefferson. But most of today’s schoolchildren would not be surprised. It is now fairly commonplace to learn American history in the context of who has oppressed, excluded or otherwise mistreated whom. All across the country, students are imbibing a version of the past and present that their parents would not recognize.

Some of the fundamental images of the American gallery of national icons have received a dramatic reworking. Gone, or going fast, is the concept of the melting pot, of the U.S. as the paramount place in the world where people came to shed their past in order to forge their future. Gone too is the emphasis on the twin ideals that form the basis of the American experiment: that rights reside in the individual rather than with social or ethnic classes and that all who come to these shores can be assimilated by an open society that transforms disparate peoples into Americans. Instead there is a new paradigm that emphasizes the racial and ethnic diversity of American citizens, of the many cultures that have converged here, each valuable in its own right and deserving of study and respect.

In the critical optic of this new “multicultural” perspective, American history as it was once written — those often tedious treks from Christopher Columbus to Dwight Eisenhower — leaves out too much, namely nearly everyone who was not a white male. Some adherents go further, questioning whether the Western ideas and ideals that gave birth to America discriminate against people from other traditions. A more radical school argues that those values are no more than the ethnic expression of “Eurocentric” culture and should be taught only as such.

The spread of new multicultural perspectives throughout America’s schools has taken place without much notice; curriculum revisions, even sweeping ones, do not appear on local ballots. But these are not merely academic disputes. Especially in diverse, secular societies such as the U.S., a shared sense of the past plays a pivotal role in the way values and vision are transmitted from one generation to the next. “History is part of a society’s attempt to structure a self-image and to communicate a common identity,” points out Eugen Weber, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “No community can exist as a community without common references. In a modern nation they come from a history.”

The issues now being raised — although they are presented under the bland guise of syllabus reform — are thus too important to be left to teachers, school administrators and social commentators alone. Everyone deserves a say, for the customs, beliefs and principles that have unified the U.S., however imperfectly, for more than two centuries are being challenged with a ferocity not seen since the Civil War.

Put bluntly: Do Americans still have faith in the vision of their country as a cradle of individual rights and liberties, or must they relinquish the teaching of some of these freedoms to further the goals of the ethnic and social groups to which they belong? Is America’s social contract — a vision of self-determination that continues to reverberate around the world — fatally tainted by its origins in Western European thought? What kind of people do Americans now think they are, and what will they tell their children about that?

The multicultural crusade has become part of a wider ferment on American campuses that includes the efforts to mandate a greater “diversity” within faculty and student bodies as well as the movement, derisively labeled “political correctness,” that seeks to suppress thoughts or statements deemed offensive to women, blacks or other groups. Some of this has provoked flare-ups, notably at Stanford University, which in 1988 decided to revamp its first-year course, Western Culture, in response to critical pressure. Some students and faculty members at the elite, ethnically diverse institution had complained that the course syllabus offered only the writings of white males. The prospect of one or more of these — Plato? Shakespeare? — being kicked out to make room for women and minorities caught traditionalists’ attention, as did a demonstration at which students chanted “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture’s got to go!” In the end, Stanford excised no one from the reading list; it added optional new assignments.

Now multiculturalism is again in the glare of public attention, thanks to the release of a report recommending changes in the way social studies are taught in New York State public schools. State Education Commissioner Thomas Sobol, responding to complaints from a number of minority groups, chose a panel of 24 educators to review the curriculums in history and related courses. One of their tasks was to suggest innovations that would improve students’ understanding of “the cultures, identities, and histories of the diverse groups which comprise American society today.” Some critics predicted that the report, a year in preparation, would be a hatchet job on existing academic standards.

They were right, although this report avoids the blistering tone of an earlier Task Force on Minorities, also commissioned by Sobol, that hit its controversial stride in the opening sentence: “African-Americans, Asian- Americans, Puerto Rican/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.”

By contrast, there is no inflammatory rhetoric in the new report. In fact the document is filled with soporific educationese (“Foundational to this end is the commitment to the development of intellectual competence in our students”). Perhaps to assuage those potential critics not put to sleep by the prose, the report throws in periodic tributes to the concept of national . unity: “With efforts to respect and honor the diverse and pluralistic elements in our nation, special attention will need to be given to those values, characteristics, and traditions which we share in common.”

But the document is curiously silent on what those shared values are. It even seems hesitant to acknowledge the fact of U.S. citizenship; wherever possible, it advocates an awareness of global “interdependence” as a fundamental educational concern. In its constant elevation of group and ethnic interests, it represents a radical departure from the way Americans have traditionally viewed the passing on of knowledge in the common school as a means of creating citizens out of a polyglot and diverse pool of young citizens-to-be.

This fact did not account for the report’s initial notoriety. A few easily isolated examples of suggested reforms got most of the attention. Among them:

— Students would be discouraged from calling Africans who were brought to the U.S. in bondage “slaves.” Instead they would be referred to as “enslaved persons,” which would “call forth the essential humanity of those enslaved, helping students to understand from the beginning the true meaning of slavery.”

— Thanksgiving would be discussed not only as a feast day for whites but as a less joyous occasion for Native Americans.

— The habit of looking at geography from a European point of view would cease. “The Far East” and “the Middle East” would disappear, replaced by “East Asia” and “Southwest Asia and North Africa.”

— Describing certain Americans as “minorities” would also be phased out: “If social studies is to be taught from a global perspective, many of the so-called minorities in America are more accurately described as part of the world’s majorities.”

All these proposals have the merit of being specific and thus open to debate. The improvement wrought by “enslaved person” over “slave” may not strike everyone as immediately apparent; to Americans who know their own history, “slave” is a word heavily charged with the connotations of brutal, involuntary degradation. As to the matter of Thanksgiving, Edmund Ladd, 65, a Zuni Pueblo Indian and an anthropologist in New Mexico, says, “We celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas and all the holidays that are Anglo-induced because that’s the day we don’t have to go to work. Thanksgiving is an excuse for us to get together.” The adoption of “East Asia” raises the question “East of where?” It is difficult to imagine what a “global perspective” might be, given the report’s vague prose.

The most revolutionary changes propounded by the Sobol panel are harder to identify, since they rest on a series of buried premises that are offered, sometimes glancingly, as assumptions shared by all Americans. But are they? Does everyone agree that “education should be a source of strength and pride” for diverse ethnic groups? How about the notion that teaching individuals to fulfill their own abilities is secondary to training them to participate in “cultural interdependence”? Or that U.S. children should view themselves as citizens of the world rather than of America? Are we all on the same page when it comes to the classroom as a training ground for “social action”?

And what of the following sentence: “Unlike earlier periods when one demonstrated one’s intellect by how much one knew, i.e., how many facts one has at her/his command, increasingly we recognize the mark of intellect to be the capacity independently to analyze, manipulate, synthesize and critically interpret information in the interest of problem solving.” In other words, it is now more important to know how to think than to have anything concrete to think about. Perhaps facts can be imported from Japan. Now, may we see a show of hands on all this?

We already have. Two members of the Sobol panel — Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia University and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. — inserted their dissents from the report’s conclusions within the report itself. Said Jackson: “I would argue that it is politically and intellectually unwise for us to attack the traditions, customs and values which attracted immigrants to these shores in the first place.” Also appended, somewhat jarringly in the prescribed context of racial and ethnic harmony, is a lengthy statement by Ali A. Mazrui, Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at the State University of New York, Binghamton, arguing that the word holocaust should not be reserved exclusively for the Jewish experience under the Nazis. American Indians and African Americans, the professor insists, have a right to that term as well.

How did things — not just in New York but in school systems across the nation — get to the muddy pass epitomized by the Sobol report? Principally because an abstract theory happened to catch and ride a new wave of actuality. The idea of multicultural education in its most extravagant current form was born during the 1960s amid the campus turbulence and intellectual stimulation provoked by the civil rights movement and, later, protests against the war in Vietnam. The established centers of authority in U.S. life were not holding; to defend traditional values in the teeth of outraged demonstrations by young people was somehow to condone genocide in Southeast Asia, not to mention racism in the American South. Many deans adopted a defensive policy of giving students whatever they wanted, if only to keep them quiet. And among the things they wanted were special programs in black studies, then similar enclaves of women’s studies, which were followed by successive demarcations of subject matter along racial or ethnic boundaries.

To the surprise of many doubters, the work and the students turned out by such programs were often first rate. These supposedly marginal areas of academic inquiry produced information — about the achievements of women, facets of life outside the U.S. mainstream, the work of minority artists, Americans whom history had ignored — that rattled the complacency of orthodox humanities departments. And many of the graduates of these programs remained in academe, either studying for advanced degrees or earning tenure as teachers.

While they moved up the rungs, something else was going on. The 1965 Immigration Act passed by Congress had reversed a policy, in place for four decades, of favoring Europeans and making things tough for other applicants. Suddenly people from throughout the Third World found it easier to enter the U.S., rapidly changing the demographics of the nation. Between 1980 and 1990, the white non-Hispanic majority in Los Angeles County turned into a minority. In the U.S. as a whole during the same decade, the number of Hispanics increased by 53% to 22.4 million, roughly 9% of the nation’s population. The Dade County, Fla., school district, the nation’s fourth largest, now includes students from 123 countries.

The new immigrants came for the same reasons that had propelled their predecessors: to escape poverty, hopelessness or oppression, to seek economic opportunities and to live in freedom. This huge influx of people can be seen as the latest affirmation of American values, of the global allure exercised by the ideals on which the nation was founded.

But that is not the vision conveyed by many of the multiculturalists, those veterans of the ’60s and their younger colleagues, who looked at the people ( arriving in their classrooms and noticed that many of them, in some cases nearly all of them, had no connection whatsoever with Europe. As Sobol himself has noted, “By the year 2000, 1 out of 3 children in New York public schools will be minority. In New York City, 1 out of 4 children under 10 has non- English-speaking immigrant parents. This is not the world of the 1950s.”

Why, then, were these children being forced to learn a history that derived almost exclusively from Western thought and examples? This was a good question that was probably answered too quickly by teachers and administrators on the front lines: No reason, no reason at all. In their defense, these educators faced formidable problems — students who did not speak English, classrooms disrupted by the clash of different mores and patterns of behavior confined in close quarters. Also, there was the troubling matter of school dropouts and of the persistent underperformance of some blacks and Hispanics, as compared to that of most Asians and whites. Blame for all this could not be placed on children who lacked the preparation or the motivation to learn, so the fault must lie with what they were being taught.

At this point the debate over multicultural viewpoints stumbled into a philosophical muddle from which it has yet to emerge. Broadening the base of available knowledge was one thing, and an admirable one at that. Thanks to the proddings and scholarship of the multiculturalists, histories of the U.S. have grown remarkably more inclusive, representative and accurate. Oldsters who spent time in school learning that Myles Standish was too bashful to propose to Priscilla Mullens and had to ask John Alden to do it for him (to which Priscilla is apocryphally said to have replied, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”) may now wonder why teachers never found a few minutes for Harriet Tubman or W.E.B. Du Bois.

In 1987 California adopted a new social-studies curriculum for its public schools, from kindergarten through the 12th grade, that is widely regarded as a model of its kind. The course of study pays great attention to the variety of world cultures; it also “recognizes the multiracial character of American society, now and in the past.” Yet the conceptual focus for all this information remains fixed on the challenge of becoming an educated American citizen. The syllabus “teaches democratic values and holds them up as a measure against which we may judge ourselves as well as others.”

But amplified histories did not satisfy some multiculturalists, including a number of influential African-American scholars, who objected that new wine was simply being poured into the same old bottle. The central narrative of the American saga was still white and European, as were most of the main characters; filling the background with a smattering of minorities did not remove this problem.

Inconveniently enough, this “problem” cannot be accurately erased. North America was populated by a number of indigenous peoples long before the Europeans arrived, but the society that evolved and that persists today was modeled on Western examples. More specifically, the influence of the British, who held and ruled the original 13 colonies, is inescapable. The language, the system of representative government, the structure of law and the emphasis on individual liberty were all adopted from the Enlightenment ideals being formulated in what was once known as the mother country. Other basic American principles, such as the idea of the separation of powers, which is fundamental to the American Constitution, derive from the French philosopher Montesquieu.

It is an article of faith among most multiculturalists that no system of values is innately superior to any other; all cultures are created equal. As a way of looking at the world, this notion has considerable merit. It is, among other things, a useful corrective to chauvinisms and insularities. But to describe the Western tradition as just one of many equally important contributors to the American identity is to make hash of history, and of one of history’s boldest experiments.

Faced with the pervasive traces of Western thought embodied in American life, some multiculturalists claim that this Eurocentric bias discriminates against those from different traditions. But for openers, Eurocentric is decidedly a fuzzy term, lumping together a vast diversity of nationalities and peoples, past and present. In what person or doctrine can Eurocentrism be embodied? Savonarola? Jane Austen? Deism? Communism? Insofar as it means anything specific, Eurocentric looks suspiciously like a code word for “white.” In attempting to combat racism, radical multiculturalists seem all too willing to resort to racism of another stripe.

Furthermore, the oppressive effects of Western thought on nonwhites is not as clear-cut as most multiculturalists assume. Certainly, many past immigrants were encouraged to ape their “betters,” as the parlance then called them — to model their speech and demeanor on the dominant examples of white Anglo- Saxon Protestants, some of whom, in turn, were trying to imitate the British aristocracy. But this imperative belongs to the transient domains of fashion and snobbery, and in any case sycophancy is not unique to America or to Western societies. Harder to grasp is the way in which Western principles discriminate against the non-Western or nonwhite. Who or what is the villain here? Galileo? Einstein? The Magna Carta? The Bill of Rights? Was Martin Luther King Jr. diminished, made to feel inferior, when he read Henry David Thoreau along with Gandhi on civil disobedience? Or for that matter when he contemplated the Reformation launched by his 16th century German namesake?

Ultimately, multicultural thinking, for all its nods toward pluralism and diversity, can lead to several regressive orthodoxies. One is the notion that truth is forever encapsulated within collective identities, that what white males or females or blacks or Hispanics or Asians know about their experiences can be communicated only imperfectly to people beyond their pales. Those without the experience can never really know its essential features. The authority of any statement is locked within the skin of the speaker.

Afrocentrism, a cult within the multicultural movement, displays some distressing signs of authoritarianism. A series of “baseline” essays, commissioned by the Portland, Ore., school district as a reference for teachers and now in widespread use elsewhere, contains some sweeping assertions: “Black literature is manipulated and controlled by white editors and publishers.” And: “Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color.” The claim that ancient Egypt, one of the cradles of Western civilization, was a black culture is a central tenet of Afrocentrism. Corroborating evidence is flimsy, but that is apparently not important. Writes John Henrik Clarke, professor emeritus of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at City University, New York: “African scholars are the final authority on Africa.”

The Western tradition contains a refutation of this take-my-word-for-it approach. It can be seen in the Greek and Roman philosophers, then again most vividly in the writers of the European Enlightenment — Voltaire, Locke, Berkeley, all DWEMs (dead white European males), but perhaps worth a hearing < in spite of this handicap. In one way or another, they argued that the validity of any statement can be tested independently of, and in no logical way depends upon, the person who makes it. This idea, totally color-blind, is one of the greatest instruments for human freedom ever conceived. It made democracy possible, since it enabled each citizen to reach reasoned judgments, and its spirit pervades the documents that established the U.S.

Perhaps most unsettling, radical multiculturalism turns upside down the principles that drew, and continue to draw, people to America: the freedom to create a new personal identity, and the chance to become part of a nation of people who have done the same thing. There is a contradiction between these commands to be oneself while also being part of a common culture, a creative tension that has produced a literature populated by loners, rebels and misfits. Also, come to think of it, a lot of stress and nervous breakdowns. No one ever said it was easy to be an American, to learn the rules anew each day, every day.

Whatever else it may accomplish, the current debate highlights the enduring volatility of the American experiment. There is no guarantee that the nation’s long test of trying to live together will not end in fragmentation and collapse, with groups gathered around the firelight, waiting for the attack at dawn. No guarantee, that is, except the examples its citizens have set — examples not as frequent as their ideals mandate, but precious nonetheless — of getting out of the skins of their prejudices and meeting each other as the equals they truly are.

And a very Happy 215th Birthday to us all, whoever we think we are.