Subject: The Tragedy of Multiculturalism Date: Published: 7/31/91 (176 lines) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. Board of Contributors: The Tragedy of Multiculturalism ---- By Irving Kristol It is difficult, and even dangerous, to talk candidly about "multiculturalism" these days. Such candor is bound to provoke accusations of "insensitivity" at least, "racism" at worst. Even some of the sharpest criticisms of multiculturalism are content to limit themselves to demonstrating how "illiberal" it is, how it violates traditional ideas about the substance of liberal education, and how it represents a deplorable deviation in the way our young Americans, so heterogeneous in their origins, are to be educated to live together. This criticism is certainly valid and welcome. But it also implicitly concedes too much by going along with the assumption that there really is such a thing as multiculturalism -- i.e., a sincere if overzealous effort by well-meaning educators to broaden the horizons of the conventional curriculum. Such educators doubtless exist, but their efforts end up being the victims of a far more aggressive mode of multiculturalism. Though the educational establishment would rather die than admit it, multiculturalism is a desperate -- and surely self-defeating -- strategy for coping with the educational deficiencies, and associated social pathologies, of young blacks. Did these black students and their problems not exist, we would hear little of multiculturalism. There is no evidence that a substantial number of Hispanic parents would like their children to know more about Simon Bolivar and less about George Washington, or that Oriental parents feel that their children are being educationally deprived because their textbooks teach them more about ancient Greece than about ancient China. To the degree that there is any such sentiment in these minority groups, it can be coped with in the traditional way -- by a few hours a week of after-school instruction for their children, privately arranged. (At the college level, of course, instruction in the relevant languages, literature, and history has always been available.) But most adult Hispanics and Orientals do not have any such concern. They are fully preoccupied with the process of "Americanization." The "roots" these groups seek are right here in the U. S., not among the Aztecs or in the Ming dynasty. Most Hispanics are behaving very much like the Italians of yesteryear; most Orientals, like the Jews of yesteryear. Because of differences in cultural background, their integration into American society proceeds at different rates -- but it does proceed. The process is not without pain and turmoil, but it works. Ironically, and sadly, it has not worked so well for American blacks, among the earliest arrivals. Hence, out of desperation, the turn to multiculturalism. Multiculturalism comes in varying kinds and varying degrees of intensity. A child may come home from elementary school knowing more about Harriet Tubman than about Abraham Lincoln. This can be disconcerting to white parents and baffling to Hispanics or Orientals, but presumably they can shrug it off as a transient phenomenon. The question is: Do such trivial pursuits of worthy but relatively obscure racial ancestors really help black students? There is no evidence that it does. In theory, it is supposed to elevate their sense of "self-esteem," as individuals and as blacks. But genuine self-esteem comes from real-life experiences, not from the flattering attention of textbooks. In fact, as is well known by now, the problems of young blacks do not arise in our schools, nor are they remediable there. They are the product of their homes and environments -- a terrible social problem, not an educational problem. But this does not prevent our overly ambitious educational establishment from engaging in a pretense of offering "solutions." In addition to promoting self-esteem among young blacks -- our white students already have a wildly inflated notion of their academic capabilities, as researchers have demonstrated -- it seeks to promote appropriate "role models" in the school. "Role models" and "self-esteem" are now crucial terms in the psychobabble of the educational world. Actually, hiring more black male teachers is a good idea. But it has nothing to do with the provision of role models. Just as fathers in the home are very important as a source of moral authority, so black male teachers can be a useful source of authority in the school -- especially when the home has no father. They can help make a school a more orderly and decent place. But just as fathers play their part without a thought of being role models, so do black male teachers play an equivalent part. Role models are largely a sociological fantasy. We all, when young, have known (or have known of) adults whom we respected and admired -- until, with time, their images fade as our interests shift. Very few of us have gone through life gazing at role models we have known. And, unfortunately, there is as yet little evidence that black teachers have a significant, differential effect on the academic achievements of black students. It is in its most intense and extreme form, however, that multiculturalism is on its way to being a major educational, social and eventually political problem. This version is propagated on our college campuses by a coalition of nationalist-racist blacks, radical feminists, "gays" and lesbians, and a handful of aspiring demagogues who claim to represent various ethnic minorities. In this coalition, it is the blacks who provide the hard core of energy, because it is they who can intimidate the faculty and the administration, fearful of being branded "racist." This coalition's multiculturalism is an ideology whose educational program is subordinated to a political program that is, above all, anti-American and anti-Western. It is no exaggeration to say that these campus radicals (professors as well as students), having given up on the "class struggle" -- the American workers all being conscientious objectors -- have now moved to an agenda of ethnic-racial conflict. The agenda, in its educational dimension, has as its explicit purpose to induce in the minds and sensibilities of minority students a "Third World consciousness" -- that is the very phrase they use. In practice, this means an effort to persuade minority students to be contemptuous of and hostile to America and Western civilization as a whole, interpreted as an age-old system of oppression, colonialism and exploitation. What these radicals blandly call multiculturalism is as much a "war against the West" as Nazism and Stalinism ever were. Under the guise of multiculturalism, their ideas -- whose radical substance often goes beyond the bounds of the political into sheer fantasy -- are infiltrating our educational system at all levels. (On this page yesterday, Michael Meyers explored -- and deplored -- the preaching of some of these ideas by the "Africanists.") Just as bad money drives out good, so the most intense versions of an ideology tend to color and shape the less intense. It is now becoming ever more common within the American educational system for increasing numbers of young blacks to learn that what we call "Western civilization" was invented by black Egyptians and feloniously appropriated by the Greeks, or that black Africa was a peaceful, technologically advanced continent before the white Europeans devastated it. Such instruction can only inflame an already common belief among blacks that "white America" and its government are deliberately fostering drug addiction and diabolically tolerating the AIDS virus in the black community. Multiculturalism, as its most ardent proponents well understand, is a technique for "consciousness raising" by deliberately stroking this kind of paranoia. One does not wish to be apocalyptic -- though thoughtful and honest teachers may be forgiven for thinking their world is coming to an end. Most of those who tolerate or even advocate multiculturalism in our schools and colleges have educational, not ideological, intentions. But the force is with the extremists, who ride roughshod over the opposition by intimidating it with accusations of "racism." So the opposition timidly makes concession after concession, while seeking shelter in anonymity. Recently, a journalist telephoned five leading professors of Egyptology, asking them what they thought about the claim of a black Egyptian provenance for Western civilization. They all said it is nonsense. At the same time, they all withheld permission for their names to be attached to this risky, "politically incorrect" position. There is no doubt that today, multiculturalism is beclouding and disorienting the minds of tens of thousands of our students -- mainly black students. It is not an educational reform. It is an educational -- and an American -- tragedy. --- Mr. Kristol, an American Enterprise Institute fellow, co-edits The Public Interest and publishes The National Interest. [This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]