0.2 Crevecoeur ruminated over the astonishing diversity of the settlers--"a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes," a "strange mixture of blood" that you could find in no other country. "From this promiscuous breed," he wrote, "that race now called Americans has arisen."
0.3 What, Crevecoeur mused, were the characteristics of this suddenly emergent American race? He provided a classic answer to his own question: "He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles.... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men."
0.4 Crevecoeur's conception was of a brand-new nationality created by individuals who, in repudiating their homelands and joining to make new lives, melted away ancient ethnic differences. Most of those intrepid Europeans who had torn up their roots to brave the wild Atlantic saw America as a transforming nation, banishing old loyalties and forging a new national identity based on common political ideals.
0.5 This conception prevailed through most of the two centuries of the history of the United States. But lately a new conception has arisen. The escape from origins has given way to the search for roots. The "ancient prejudices and manners " disclaimed by Crevecoeur have made a surprising comeback. Questions
0.6 The new gospel condemns Crevecoeur's vision of individuals of all nations melted into a new race in favor of an opposite vision: a nation of groups, differentiated in their ancestries, inviolable in their diverse identities. The contemporary ideal is shifting from assimilation to ethnicity, from integration to separatism. Questions
0.7 The ethnic upsurge has had some healthy consequences. The republic has at last begun to give long-overdue recognition to the role and achievements of groups subordinated and ignored during the high noon of male Anglo-Saxon dominance--women, Americans of South and East European ancestry, black Americans, Indians, Hispanics, Asians. There is far better understanding today of the indispensable contributions minorities have made to American civilization. Questions
0.8 But the cult of ethnicity, pressed too far, exacts costs. Instead of a transformative nation with an identity all its own, America increasingly sees itself as preservative of old identities. Instead of a nation composed of individuals making their own free choices, America increasingly sees itself as composed of groups more or less indelible in their ethnic character. The national ideal had once been pluribus unum. Are we now to belittle unum and glorify pluribus? Will the center hold? Or will the melting pot yield to the Tower of Babel? Questions
0.9 A struggle to redefine the national identity is taking place in many arenas--in our politics, our voluntary organizations, our churches, our language--and in no arena more crucial than our system of education. The schools and colleges of the republic train the citizens of the future. They have always been battlegrounds for debates over beliefs, philosophies, values.
0.10 What students learn in schools vitally affects other arenas of American life--the way we see and treat other Americans, the way we conceive the purpose of the republic. The debate about the curriculum is a debate about what it means to be an American. What is ultimately at stake is the shape of the American future. Questions
1.1 HOW COULD Crevecoeur's "promiscuous breed" be transformed into a "new race"? This question preoccupied another young Frenchman who arrived in America three quarters of a century after Crevecoeur. "Imagine, my dear friend, if you can," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote back to France, "a society formed of all the nations of the world . . . people having different languages, beliefs, opinions: in a word, a society without roots, without memories, without prejudices, without routines, without common ideas, without a national character, yet a hundred times happier than our own." What alchemy could make this miscellany into a single society?
1.2 The answer, Tocqueville concluded, lay in the commitment of Americans to democracy and self-government. Civic participation, Tocqueville argued in Democracy in America, was the great educator and the great unifier. Immigrants, Tocqueville said, become Americans through the exercise of the political rights and civic responsibilities bestowed on them by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Questions
1.3 Half a century later, when the next great foreign commentator on American democracy James Bryce wrote The American Commonwealth, immigration had vastly increased and diversified. What struck Bryce was what had struck Tocqueville: "the amazing solvent power which American institutions, habits, and ideas exercise upon newcomers of all races . . . quickly dissolving and assimilating the foreign bodies that are poured into her mass." Note:
1.4 A century after Tocqueville, another foreign visitor, Gunnar Myrdal of Sweden, called the cluster of ideas, institutions, and habits "the American Creed." Americans of all national origins, regions, creeds, and colors," Myrdal wrote in 1944, hold in common "the most explicitly expressed system of general ideals" of any country in the West: the ideals of the essential dignity and equality of all human beings, of inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity.
1.5 The schools teach the principles of the Creed, Myrdal said; the churches preach them; the courts hand down judgments in their terms. Myrdal saw the Creed as the bond that links all Americans, including nonwhite minorities, and as the spur forever goading Americans to live up to their principles. "America," Myrdal said, "is continuously struggling for its soul."
1.6 The new race received its most celebrated metaphor in 1908 in a play by Israel Zangwill, an English writer of Russian Jewish origin. The Melting-Pot tells the story of a young Russian Jewish composer in New York. David Quixano's artistic ambition is to write a symphony expressing the vast, harmonious interweaving of races in America, and his personal hope is to overcome racial barriers and marry Vera, a beautiful Christian girl. "America," David cries, "is God's crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! . . . God is making the American." Note:
1.7 Yet even as audiences cheered The Melting-Pot, Zangwill's metaphor raised doubts. One had only to stroll around the great cities to see that the melting process was incomplete. Ethnic minorities were forming their own quarters in which they lived in their own way--not quite that of the lands they had left but not that of Anglocentric America either: Little Italy, Chinatown, Yorkville, Harlem, and so on. Questions
1.8 In having his drama turn on marriage between people of different races and religions, Zangwill, who had himself married a Christian, emphasized where the melting pot must inexorably lead: to the submergence of separate ethnic identities in the new American race. Soon ethnic spokesmen began to appear, moved by real concern for distinctive ethnic values and also by real if unconscious vested interest in the preservation of ethnic constituencies. Even some Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent deplored the obliteration of picturesque foreign strains for the sake of insipid Anglocentric conformity. The impression grew that the melting pot was a device to impose Anglocentric images and values upon hapless immigrants--an impression reinforced by the rise of the "Americanization" movement in response to the new polyglot immigration. Questions
1.9 GUNNAR MYRDAL in 1944 showed no hesitation in declaring the American Creed the common possession of all Americans, even as his great book, An American Dilemma, provided a magistral analysis of America's most conspicuous failure to live up to the Creed: the treatment by white Americans of black Americans.
1.10 Noble ideals had been pronounced as if for all Americans, yet in practice they applied only to white people. White settlers had systematically pushed the American Indians back, killed their braves, seized their lands, and sequestered their tribes. They had brought Africans to America to work their plantations and Chinese to build their railroads. They had enunciated glittering generalities of freedom and withheld them from people of color. Their Constitution protected slavery, and their laws made distinctions on the basis of race. Though they eventually emancipated the slaves, they conspired in the reduction of the freedmen to third-class citizenship. Their Chinese Exclusion acts culminated in the total prohibition of Asian immigration in the Immigration Act of 1924. It occurred to damned few white Americans in these years that Americans of color were also entitled to the rights and liberties promised by the Constitution.
1.11 Yet what Bryce had called "the amazing solvent power" of American institutions and ideas retained its force, even among those most cruelly oppressed and excluded. Myrdal's polls of Afro-America showed the "determination" of blacks "to hold to the American Creed." Ralph Bunche, one of Myrdal's collaborators, observed that every man in the street--black, red, and yellow as well as white--regarded America as the "land of the free" and the "cradle of liberty." The American Creed, Myrdal surmised, meant even more to blacks than to whites, since it was the great means of pleading their unfulfilled rights.
1.12 The second world war gave the Creed new bite. Hitler's racism forced Americans to look hard at their own racial assumptions. Emboldened by the Creed, blacks organized for equal opportunities in employment, opposed segregation in the armed forces, and fought in their own units on many fronts. After the war, the civil rights revolution, so long deferred, accelerated black self reliance. So did the collapse of white colonialism around the world and the appearance of independent black states.
1.13 Across America minorities proclaimed their pride and demanded their rights. Women, the one "minority" that in America constituted a numerical majority, sought political and economic equality. Jews gained new solidarity from the Holocaust and then from the establishment ol a Jewish state in Israel. Changes in the immigration law dramatically increased the number arriving from Hispanic and Asian lands, and, following the general example, they asserted their own prerogatives. American Indians mobilized to reclaim their rights and lands long since appropriated by the white man; their spokesmen even rejected the historic designation in which Indians had taken deserved pride and named themselves Native Americans. The civil rights revolution provoked new expressions of ethnic identity by the now long-resident "new migration" from southern and eastern Europe- Italians, Greeks, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians. Question
1.14 The pressure for the new cult of ethnicity came less from the minorities en masse than from their often self-appointed spokesmen. Most ethnics, white and nonwhite, saw themselves primarily as Americans. Still, ideologues, with sufficient publicity and time, could create audiences. Spokesmen with a vested interest in ethnic identification turned against the ideal of assimilation. The melting pot, it was said, injured people by undermining their self-esteem. It denied them heroes-"role models," in the jargon-from their own ethnic ancestries. Praise now went to the "unmeltable ethnics."
1.15 In 1974, after testimony from ethnic spokesmen denouncing the melting pot as a conspiracy to homogenize America, Congress passed the Ethnic Heritage Studies Program Act-a statute that, by applying the ethnic ideology to all Americans, compromised the historic right of Americans to decide their ethnic identities for themselves. The act ignored those millions of Americans- surely a majority-who refused identification with any particular ethnic group.
1.16 The ethnic upsurge (it can hardly be called a revival because it was unprecedented) began as a gesture of protest against the Anglocentric culture. It became a cult, and today.it threatens to become a counter-revolution against the original theory of America as "one people," a common culture, a single nation. Question
2.1 WRITING HISTORY is an old and honorable profession with distinctive standards and purposes. The historian's goals are accuracy, analysis, and objectivity in the reconstruction of the past. But history is more than an academic discipline up there in the stratosphere. It also has its own role in the future of nations. For history is to the nation rather as memory is to the individual. As an individual deprived of memory becomes disoriented and lost, not knowing where he has been or where he is going, so a nation denied a conception of its past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future. As the means of defining national identity, history becomes a means of shaping history. The writing of history then turns from a meditation into a weapon. "Who controls the past controls the future," runs the Party slogan in George Orwell's 1984; "who controls the present controls the past."
2.2 Historians do their damnedest to maintain the standards of their trade. Heaven knows how dismally we fall short of our ideals, how sadly our interpretations are dominated and distorted by unconscious preconceptions, how obsessions of race and nation blind us to our own bias.
2.3 The spotlight we flash into the darkness of the past is guided by our own concerns in the present. When new preoccupations arise in our own times and lives, the spotlight shifts, throwing into sharp relief things that were always there but that earlier historians had casually excised from the collective memory.
2.4 Historians must always strive toward the unattainable ideal of objectivity. But as we respond to contemporary urgencies, we sometimes exploit the past for nonhistorical purposes, taking from the past, or projecting upon it, what suits our own society or ideology. History thus manipulated becomes an instrument less of disinterested intellectual inquiry than of social cohesion and political purpose.
2.5 OFTEN HISTORY is invoked to justify the ruling class. This is top-dog history, designed to show how noble, virtuous, and inevitable existing power arrangements are. Other times history is invoked to justify the victims of power, to vindicate those who reject the status quo. This is underdog history, designed to demonstrate what Bertrand Russell called the "superior virtue of the oppressed" by inventing or exaggerating past glories and purposes. It may be called compensatory history.
2.6 America's ethnic enclaves typically have developed such a compensatory literature. Professor John Kelleher, Harvard's distinguished Irish-American scholar, provided gently satiric testimony about the Irish case:
2.7 "My earliest acquaintance with Irish-American history of the written variety was gained from the sort of articles that used to appear in minor Catholic magazines or in the Boston Sunday papers. They were turgid little essays on the fact that the Continental Army was 76 percent Irish or that many of George Washington's closest friends were nuns or priests, or that Lincoln got the major ideas for the Second Inaugural Address from the Hon. Francis P. Mageghegan of Alpaca New York, a pioneer manufacturer of cast-iron rosary beads."
2.8 This is what Professor Kelleher called the there's-always-an-Irishman-at-the-bottom-of-it-doing-the-real-work approach to American history.
2.9 Such ethnic chauvinism was largely confined, however, to tribal celebration. Even in Boston and environs where the Irish dominated school and library boards, they made no effort to impose their compensatory history on the public school curriculum.
2.10 But the situation of the Irish and other European ethnics was radically different from that of nonwhite minorities who faced not snobbism but racism. Most white Americans through most of American history simply considered colored Americans inferior and unassimilable. Not until the 1960s did integration become a widely accepted national objective. Even then, even after legal obstacles to integration fell, social, economic, and psychological obstacles remained. Both black Americans and red Americans have every reason to seek redressing of the historical balance. And indeed the cruelty with which white Americans have dealt with black Americans has been compounded by the callousness with which white historians have dealt with black history.
2.11 Even the best historians: Frederick Jackson Turner, dismissing the slavery question as a mere "incident" when American history is "rightly viewed"; Charles and Mary Beard in their famous The Rise of American Civilization, describing blacks as passive in slavery and ludicrous in Reconstruction and acknowledging only one black achievement--the invention of ragtime; Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, writing about childlike and improvident Sambo on the old plantation. One can sympathize with W.E.B. Du Bois's rage after reading white histories of slavery and Reconstruction; he was, he wrote, "literally aghast at what American historians have done to this field . . . one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings...."
2.12 The job of redressing the balance has been splendidly undertaken in recent years by both white and black historians. Meticulous and convincing scholarship has reversed conventional judgments on slavery, on Reconstruction, on the role of blacks in American life. Question
3.1 BUT SCHOLARLY responsibility was only one factor behind the campaign of historical correction. History remains a weapon. "History's potency is mighty," Herbert Aptheker, the polemical chronicler of slave rebellions, has written. "The oppressed need it for identity and inspiration." (Aptheker, a faithful Stalinist, was an old hand at the manipulation of history.) For blacks the American dream has been pretty much of a nightmare, and, far more than white ethnics, they are driven by a desperate need to vindicate their own identity. "The academic and social rescue and reconstruction of Black history," as Maulana Karenga put it in his influential Introduction to Black Studies ("a landmark in the intellectual history of African Americans," according to Molefi Kete Asante of Temple University), "is . . . [an] indispensable part of the rescue and reconstruction of Black humanity. For history is the substance and mirror of a people's humanity in others' eyes as well as in their own eyes . . . not only what they have done, but also a reflection of who they are, what they can do, and equally important what they can become...."
3.2 One can hardly be surprised at the emergence of a there's-always-a-black-man-at-the-bottom-of-it-doing-the real-work approach to American history. Question "The extent to which the past of a people is regarded as praiseworthy," the white anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits wrote in his study of the African antecedents of American blacks, "their own self-esteem would be high and the opinion of others will be favorable."
3.3 White domination of American schools and colleges, some black academics say, results in Eurocentric, racist, elitist, imperialist indoctrination and in systematic denigration of black values and achievements. "In the public school system," writes Felix Boateng of Eastern Washington University, "the orientation is so Eurocentric that white students take their identity for granted, and African-American students are totally deculturalized"--deculturalization being the "process by which the individual is deprived of his or her culture and then conditioned to other cultural values." "In a sense," says Molefi Kete Asante, the Eurocentric curriculum is "killing our children, killing their minds." Question
3.4 In history, Western-civilization courses are seen as cultural imperialism designed to disparage non-Western traditions and to impress the Western stamp on people of all races. In literature, the "canon," the accepted list of essential books, is seen as an instrumentality of the white power structure. Nowhere can blacks discover adequate reflection or representation of the black self.
3.5 Some black educators even argue ultimate biological and mental differences, asserting that black students do not learn the way white students do and that the black mind works in a genetically distinctive way. Black children are said, in the jargon of the educationist, to "process information differently" "There are scientific studies that show, at early ages, the difference between Caucasian infants and African infants," says Clare Jacobs, a teacher in Washington, D.C. "Our African children are very expressive. Every thought we have has an emotional dimension to it, and Western education has historically subordinated the feelings." Charles Willie of Harvard finds several distinct "intelligences" of which the "communication and calculation" valued by whites constitute only two. Other kinds of "intelligence" are singing and dancing, in both of which blacks excel.
3.6 Salvation thus lies, the argument goes, in breaking the white, Eurocentric, racist grip on the curriculum and providing education that responds to colored races, colored histories, colored ways of learning and behaving. Europe has reigned long enough; it is the source of most of the evil in the world anyway; and the time is overdue to honor the African contributions to civilization so purposefully suppressed in Eurocentric curricula. Children from nonwhite minorities, so long persuaded of their inferiority by the white hegemony, need the support and inspiration that identification with role models of the same color will give them.
3.7 The answer, for some at least, is "Afrocentricity," described by Asante in his book of that title as "the centerpiece of human regeneration." There is, Asante contends, a single "African Cultural System." Wherever people of African descent are, "we respond to the same rhythms of the universe, the same cosmological sensibilities.... Our Africanity is our ultimate reality."
3.8 THE BELATED recognition of the pluralistic character of American society has had a bracing impact on the teaching and writing of history. Scholars now explore such long-neglected fields as the history of women, of immigration, of blacks, Indians, Hispanics, and other minorities. Voices long silent ring out of the darkness of history.
3.9 The result has been a reconstruction of American history, partly on the merits and partly in response to ethnic pressures. In 1987, the two states with both the greatest and the most diversified populations--California and New York--adopted new curricula for grades one to twelve. Both state curricula materially increased the time allotted to non-European cultures.
3.10 The New York curriculum went further in minimizing Western traditions. A two-year global-studies course divided the world into seven regions--Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe--with each region given equal time. The history of Western Europe was cut back from a full year to one quarter of the second year. American history was reduced to a section on the Constitution; then a leap across Jefferson, Jackson, the Civil War, and Reconstruction to 1877.
3.11 In spite of the multiculturalization of the New York state history curriculum in 1987-a revision approved by such scholars as Eric Foner of Columbia and Christopher Lasch of Rochester--a newly appointed commissioner of education yielded to pressures from minority interests to consider still further revision. In 1989, the Task Force on Minorities: Equity and Excellence (not one historian among its seventeen members) brought in a report that argued: the "systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives" has a terribly damaging effect on the psyche of young people of African, Asian, Latino, and Native American descent." The dominance of the European-American monocultural perspective" explains why large numbers of children of non-European descent are not doing as well as expected."
3.12 Dr. Leonard Jeffries, the task force's consultant on African-American culture and a leading author of the report, discerns "deep-seated pathologies of racial hatred" even in the 1987 curriculum. The consultant on Asian American culture called for more pictures of Asian-Americans. The consultant on Latino culture found damning evidence of ethnocentric bias in such usages as the Mexican War" and the "Spanish-American War."The ethnically correct designations should be the American-Mexican War" and the "Spanish-Cuban-American War." The consultant on Native American culture wanted more space for Indians and for bilingual education in Iroquois.
3.13 A new curriculum giving the four other cultures equitable treatment, the report concluded, would provide "children from Native American, Puerto Rican/Latino, Asian-American, and African-American cultures . . . higher self-esteem and self-respect, while children from European cultures will have a less arrogant perspective."
3.14 The report views division into racial groups as the basic analytical framework for an understanding of American history. Its interest in history is not as an intellectual discipline but rather as social and psychological therapy whose primary function is to raise the self-esteem of children from minority groups. Nor does the report regard the Constitution or the American Creed as means of improvement.
3.15 Jeffries scorns the Constitution, finding "something vulgar and revolting in glorifying a process that heaped undeserved rewards on a segment of the population while oppressing the majority." The belief in the unifying force of democratic ideals finds no echo in the report. Indeed, the report takes no interest in the problem of holding a diverse republic together. Its impact is rather to sanction and deepen racial tensions.
3.16 THE RECENT spread of Afrocentric programs to public schools represents an extension of the New York task force ideology. These programs are, in most cases, based on a series of "African-American Baseline Essays" conceived by the educational psychologist Asa Hilliard.
3.17 Hilliard's narration for the slide show "Free Your Mind, Return to the Source: The African Origin of Civilization" suggests his approach. "Africa," he writes, "is the mother of Western civilization"--an argument turning on the contention that Egypt was a black African country and the real source of the science and philosophy Western historians attribute to Greece. Africans, Hilliard continues, also invented birth control and carbon steel. They brought science, medicine, and the arts to Europe; indeed, many European artists, such as Browning and Beethoven, were, in fact, "Afro-European." They also discovered America long before Columbus, and the original name of the Atlantic Ocean was the Ethiopian Ocean.
3.18 Hilliard's African-American Baseline Essays were introduced into the school system of Portland, Oregon, in 1987. They have subsequently been the inspiration for Afrocentric curricula in Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Camden, and other cities and continue at this writing to be urged on school boards and administrators anxious to do the right thing.
3.19 John Henrik Clarke's Baseline Essay on Social Studies begins with the proposition that "African scholars are the final authority on Africa." Egypt, he continues, "gave birth to what later became known as Western civilization, long before the greatness of Greece and Rome." "Great civilizations" existed throughout Africa, where "great kings" ruled "in might and wisdom over vast empires." After Egypt declined, magnificent empires arose in West Africa, in Ghana, Mali, Song hay--all marked by the brilliance and enlightenment of their administrations and the high quality of their libraries and universities.
3.20 Other Baseline Essays argue in a similar vein that Africa was the birthplace of science, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and art and that Europe stole its civilization from Africa and then engaged in "malicious misrepresentation of African society and people . . . to support the enormous profitability of slavery. "The coordinator of multicultural/multi-ethnic education in Portland even says that Napoleon deliberately shot off the nose of the Sphinx so that the Sphinx would not be recognized as African.
3.21 Like other excluded groups before them, black Americans invoke supposed past glories to compensate for real past and present injustices. Because their exclusion has been more tragic and terrible than that of white immigrants, their quest for self-affirmation is more intense and passionate. In seeking to impose Afrocentric curricula on public schools, for example, they go further than their white predecessors. And belated recognition by white America of the wrongs so viciously inflicted on black Americans has created the phenomenon of white guilt--not a bad thing in many respects, but still a vulnerability that invites cynical exploitation and manipulation.
4.1 I AM CONSTRAINED to feel that the cult of ethnicity in general and the Afrocentric campaign in particular do not bode well either for American education or for the future of the republic. Cultural pluralism is not the issue. Nor is the teaching of Afro-American or African history the issue; of course these are legitimate subjects. The issue is the kind of history that the New York task force, the Portland Baseline essayists, and other Afrocentric ideologues propose for American children. The issue is the teaching of bad history under whatever ethnic banner.Question
4.2 One argument for organizing a school curriculum around Africa is that black Africa is the birthplace of science, philosophy, religion, medicine, technology, of the great achievements that have been wrongly ascribed to Western civilization. But is this, in fact, true? Many historians and anthropologists regard Mesopotamia as the cradle of civilization; for a recent discussion, see Charles Keith Maisels' The Emergence of Civilization. 4.3 The Afrocentrist case rests largely on the proposition that ancient Egypt was essentially a black African country. I am far from being an expert on Egyptian history, but neither, one must add, are the educators and psychologists who push Afrocentrism. A book they often cite is Martin Bernal's Black Athena, a vigorous effort by a Cornell professor to document Egyptian influence on ancient Greece. In fact, Bernal makes no very strong claims about Egyptian pigmentation; but, citing Herodotus, he does argue that several Egyptian dynasties were made up of pharaohs whom one can usefully call black."
4.4 Frank M. Snowden Jr., the distinguished black classicist at Howard University and author of Blacks in Antiquity, is most doubtful about painting ancient Egypt black. Bernal's assumption that Herodotus meant black in the 20th-century sense is contradicted, Snowden demonstrates, "by Herodotus himself and the copious evidence of other classical authors."
4.5 Frank J. Yurco, an Egyptologist at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, after examining the evidence derivable from mummies, paintings, statues, and reliefs, concludes in the Biblical Archaeological Review that ancient Egyptians, like their modern descendants, varied in color from the light Mediterranean type to the darker brown of upper Egypt to the still darker shade of the Nubians around Aswan. He adds that ancient Egyptians would have found the question meaningless and wonders at our presumption in assigning "our primitive racial labels" to so impressive a culture.
4.6 After Egypt, Afrocentrists teach children about the glorious West African emperors, the vast lands they ruled, the civilization they achieved; not, however, about the tyrannous authority they exercised, the ferocity of their wars, the tribal massacres, the squalid lot of the common people, the captives sold into slavery, the complicity with the Atlantic slave trade, the persistence of slavery in Africa after it was abolished in the West. As for tribalism, the word tribe hardly occurs in the Afrocentric lexicon; but who can hope to understand African history without understanding it.
4.7 The Baseline Essay on science and technology contains biographies of black American scientists, among them Charles R. Drew, who first developed the process for the preservation of blood plasma. In 1950 Drew, grievously injured in an automobile accident in North Carolina, lost quantities of blood. "Not one of several nearby white hospitals," according to the Baseline Essay, "would provide the blood transfusions he so desperately needed, and on the way to a hospital that treated black people, he died." It is a hell of a story--the inventor of blood-plasma storage dead because racist whites denied him his own invention. Only it is not true. According to the biographical entry for Drew written by the eminent black scholar Rayford Logan of Howard for the Dictionary of American Negro Biography, "Conflicting versions to the contrary, Drew received prompt medical attention."
4.8 Is it really a good idea to teach minority children myths--at least to teach myths as facts?
4.9 THE DEEPER reason for the Afrocentric campaign lies in the theory that the purpose of history in the schools is essentially therapeutic: to build a sense of self-worth among minority children. Eurocentrism, by denying nonwhite children any past in which they can take pride, is held to be the cause of poor academic performance. Race consciousness and group pride are supposed to strengthen a sense of identity and self-respect among nonwhite students.
4.10 Why does anyone suppose that pride and inspiration are available only from people of the same ethnicity? Plainly this is not the case. At the age of twelve, Frederick Douglass encountered a book entitled The Columbian Orator containing speeches by Burke, Sheridan, Pitt, and Fox. "Every opportunity I got," Douglass later said, "I used to read this book." The orations "gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance.... What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation of slavery and a powerful vindication of human rights. The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts." Douglass did not find the fact that the orators were white an insuperable obstacle.
4.11 Or hear Ralph Ellison: "In Macon County, Alabama, I read Marx, Freud, T. S. Eliot, Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway. Books that seldom, if ever, mentioned Negroes were to release me from whatever 'segregated' idea I might have had of my human possibilities." He was freed, Ellison continued, not by the example of Richard Wright and other black writers but by artists who offered a broader sense of life and possibility. "It requires real poverty of the imagination to think that this can come to a Negro only through the example of other Negroes."
4.12 Martin Luther King, Jr. did pretty well with Thoreau Gandhi, and Reinhold Niebuhr as models--and remember, after all, whom King (and his father) were named for. Is Lincoln to be a hero only for those of English ancestry? Jackson only for Scotch-Irish? Douglass only for blacks? Great artists, thinkers, leaders are the possession not just of their own racial clan but of all humanity. Question
4.13 As for self-esteem, is this really the product of ethnic role models and fantasies of a glorious past? Or does it not result from the belief in oneself that springs from achievement, from personal rather than from racial pride?
4.14 Columnist William Raspberry notes that Afrocentric education will make black children "less competent in the culture in which they have to compete." After all, what good will it do young black Americans to hear that, because their minds work differently, a first-class education is not for them? Will such training help them to understand democracy better? Help them to fit better into American life?"
4.15 Will it increase their self-esteem when black children grow up and learn that many of the things the Afrocentrists taught them are not true? Black scholars have tried for years to rescue black history from chauvinistic hyperbole. A. A. Schomburg, the noted archivist of black history, expressed his scorn long ago for those who "glibly tried to prove that half of the world's geniuses have been Negroes and to trace the pedigree of nineteenth-century Americans from the Queen of Sheba."
4.16 The dean of black historians in America today is John Hope Franklin. "While a black scholar," Franklin writes, "has a clear responsibility to join in improving the society in which he lives, he must understand the difference between hard-hitting advocacy on the one hand and the highest standards of scholarship on the other."
5.1 THE USE of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history. All major races, cultures, nations have committed crimes, atrocities, horrors at one time or another. Every civilization has skeletons in its closet. Honest history calls for the unexpurgated record. How much would a full account of African despotism, massacre, and slavery increase the self-esteem of black students? Yet what kind of history do you have if you leave out all the bad things?
5.2 "Once ethnic pride and self-esteem become the criterion for teaching history," historian Diane Ravitch points out, "certain things cannot be taught." Skeletons must stay in the closet lest outing displease descendants.
5.3 No history curriculum in the country is more carefully wrought and better balanced in its cultural pluralism than California's. But hearings before the State Board of Education show what happens when ethnicity is unleashed at the expense of scholarship. At issue were textbooks responsive to the new curriculum. Polish-Americans demanded that any reference to Hitler's Holocaust be accompanied by accounts of equivalent genocide suffered by Polish Christians. Armenian-Americans sought coverage of Turkish massacres; Turkish-Americans objected. Though black historians testified that the treatment of black history was exemplary, Afrocentrists said the schoolbooks would lead to "textbook genocide." Moslems complained that an illustration of an Islamic warrior with a raised scimitar stereotyped Moslems as "terrorists."
5.4 "The single theme that persistently ran through the hearings," Ravitch writes, "was that the critics did not want anything taught if it offended members of their group."
5.5 In New York the curriculum guide for eleventh-grade American history tells students that there were three "foundations" for the Constitution: the European Enlightenment, the "Haudenosaunee political system," and the antecedent colonial experience. Only the Haudenosaunee political system receives explanatory subheadings: "a. Influence upon colonial leadership and European intellectuals (Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau); b. Impact on Albany Plan of Union, Articles of Confederation, and U. S. Constitution."
5.6 How many experts on the American Constitution would endorse this stirring tribute to the "Haudenosaunee political system"? How many have heard of that system? Whatever influence the Iroquois confederation may have had on the framers of the Constitution was marginal; on European intellectuals it was marginal to the point of invisibility. No other state curriculum offers this analysis of the making of the Constitution. But then no other state has so effective an Iroquois lobby.
5.7 President Franklin Jenifer of Howard University, while saying that "historical black institutions" like his own have a responsibility to teach young people about their particular history and culture, adds, "One has to be very careful when one is talking about public schools....There should be no creation of nonexistent history."
5.8 Let us by all means teach black history, African history, women's history, Hispanic history, Asian history. But let us teach them as history, not as filiopietistic commemoration. When every ethnic and religious group claims a right to approve or veto anything that is taught in public schools, the fatal line is crossed between cultural pluralism and ethnocentrism. An evident casualty is the old idea that whatever our ethnic base, we are all Americans together.
6.1 THE ETHNICITY rage in general and Afrocentricity in particular not only divert attention from the real needs but exacerbate the problems. The cult of ethnicity exaggerates differences, intensifies resentments and antagonisms, drives ever deeper the awful wedges between races and nationalities. The end game is self-pity and self-ghettoization. Afrocentricity as expounded by ethnic ideologues implies Europhobia, separatism, emotions of alienation, victimization, paranoia.
6.2 If any educational institution should bring people together as individuals in friendly and civil association, it should be the university. But the fragmentation of campuses in recent years into a multitude of ethnic organizations is spectacular-and disconcerting.
6.3 Stanford University, writer Dinesh D'Souza reports in his book Illiberal Education, has "ethnic theme houses." The University of Pennsylvania gives blacks--6 percent of the enrollment--their own yearbook. Campuses today, according to one University of Pennsylvania professor, have "the cultural diversity of Beirut. There are separate armed camps. The black kids don't mix with the white kids. The Asians are off by themselves. Oppression is the great status symbol."
6.4 Oberlin was for a century and a half the model of a racially integrated college. "Increasingly," Jacob Weisberg, an editor at The New Republic, reports, "Oberlin students think, act, study, and live apart." Asians live in Asia House, Jews in "J" House, Latinos in Spanish House, blacks in African-Heritage House, foreign students in Third World House. Even the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Union has broken up into racial and gender factions. "The result is separate worlds."
6.5 Huddling is an understandable reaction for any minority group faced with new and scary challenges. But institutionalized separatism only crystallizes racial differences and magnifies racial tensions. "Certain activities are labeled white and black," says a black student at Central Michigan University. "If you don't just participate in black activities, you are shunned."
6.6 Militants further argue that because only blacks can comprehend the black experience, only blacks should teach black history and literature, as, in the view of some feminists, only women should teach women's history and literature. "True diversity," according to the faculty's Budget Committee at the University of California at Berkeley, requires that courses match the ethnic and gender identities of the professors.
6.7 The doctrine that only blacks can teach and write black history leads inexorably to the doctrine that blacks can teach and write only black history as well as to inescapable corollaries: Chinese must be restricted to Chinese history, women to women's history, and so on. Henry Louis Gates of Duke University criticizes "ghettoized programs where students and members of the faculty sit around and argue about whether a white person can think a black thought." As for the notion that there is a "mystique" about black studies that requires a person to have black skin in order to pursue them--that, John Hope Franklin observes succinctly, is "voodoo."
6.8 The separatist impulse is by no means confined to the black community. Another salient expression is the bilingualism movement. The presumed purpose of bilingualism is transitional: to move non-English-speaking children as quickly as possible from bilingual into all-English classes.
6.9 Alas, bilingualism has not worked out as planned: rather the contrary. Testimony is mixed, but indications are that bilingual education retards rather than expedites the movement of Hispanic children into the English-speaking world and that it promotes segregation more than it does integration. Bilingualism "encourages concentrations of Hispanics to stay together and not be integrated," says Alfredo Mathew Jr., a Hispanic civic leader, and it may well foster "a type of apartheid that will generate animosities with others, such as Blacks, in the competition for scarce resources and further alienate the Hispanic from the larger society."
6.10 "The era that began with the dream of integration," author Richard Rodriguez has observed, "ended up with scorn for assimilation." The cult of ethnicity has reversed the movement of American history, producing a nation of minorities--or at least of minority spokesmen--less interested in joining with the majority in common endeavor than in declaring their alienation from an oppressive, white, patriarchal, racist, sexist, classist society. The ethnic ideology inculcates the illusion that membership in one or another ethnic group is the basic American experience.
6.11 The contemporary sanctification of the group puts the old idea of a coherent society at stake. Multicultural zealots reject as hegemonic the notion of a shared commitment to common ideals. How far the discourse has come from Crevecoeur's "new race," from Tocqueville's civic participation, from Bryce's "amazing solvent," from Myrdal's "American Creed" !
6.12 Yet what has held the American people together in the absence of a common ethnic origin has been precisely a common adherence to ideals of democracy and human rights that, too often transgressed in practice, forever goad us to narrow the gap between practice and principle.
6.13 America is an experiment in creating a common identity for people of diverse races, religions, languages, cultures. If the republic now turns away from its old goal of "one people," what is its future?--disintegration of the national community, apartheid, Balkanization, tribalization?
7.1 SELF-STYLED "multiculturalists" are very often ethno-centric separatists who see little in the Western heritage beyond Western crimes. The Western tradition, in this view, is inherently racist, sexist, "classist," hegemonic; irredeemably repressive, irredeemably oppressive. Such animus toward Europe lay behind the well known crusade against the Western civilization course at Stanford ("Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western culture's got to go! ").
7.2 According to the National Endowment for the Humanities, students can graduate from 78 percent of American colleges and universities without taking a course in the history of Western civilization . A number of institutions- among them Dartmouth, Wisconsin, Mt. Holyoke--require courses in Third World or ethnic studies but not in Western civilization. The mood is one of divesting Americans of the sinful European inheritance and seeking redemptive infusions from non-Western cultures.
7.3 When Irving Howe [the editor of the democratic socialist Dissent magazine], hardly a notorious conservative, dared write, "The Bible, Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Shakespeare are central to our culture," an outraged reader wrote, "Where on Howe's list is the Quran, the Gita, Confucius, and other central cultural artifacts of the peoples of our nation?" No one can doubt the importance of these works nor the influence they have had on other societies. But on American society? It may be too bad that dead white European males have played so large a role in shaping our culture. But that's the way it is. One cannot erase history. Would anyone seriously argue that teachers should conceal the European origins of American civilization?
7.4 Radical academics denounce the literary "canon" as an instrument of European oppression enforcing the hegemony of the white race, the male sex, and the capitalist class, designed, in the words of one professor, "to rewrite the past and construct the present from the perspective of the privileged and the powerful."
7.5 The poor old canon is seen not only as conspiratorial but as static. Yet nothing changes more regularly and reliably than the canon: compare, for example, the canon in American poetry as defined by Edmund Clarence Stedman in the Poets of America (1885) with the canon of 1935 or of 1985 (whatever happened to Longfellow and Whittier?); or recall the changes that have overtaken the canonical literature of American history in the last half-century (who reads Beard and Parrington now?). And the critics clearly have no principled objection to the idea of the canon. They simply wish to replace an old gang by a new gang. After all, a canon means only that because you can't read everything, you give some books priority over others.
7.6 Oddly enough, serious Marxists--Marx and Engels, Lukacs, Trotsky, Gramsci--had the greatest respect for what Lukacs called "the classical heritage of mankind." Well they should have, for most great literature and much good history are deeply subversive in their impact on orthodoxies. Consider the present-day American literary canon: Emerson, Jefferson, Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Lincoln, Twain, Dickinson, William and Henry James, Henry Adams, Holmes, Dreiser, Faulkner, O'Neill. Lackeys of the ruling class? Apologists for the privileged and the powerful? Agents of American imperialism? Come on!
7.7 IS THE Western tradition a bar to progress and a curse on humanity? Would it really do America and the world good to get rid of the European legacy?
7.8 No doubt Europe has done terrible things, not least to itself. But what culture has not? The sins of the West are no worse than the sins of Asia or of the Middle East or of Africa.
7.9 There remains, however, a crucial difference between the Western traditions and the others. The crimes of the West have produced their own antidotes. They have provoked great movements to end slavery, to raise the status of women, to abolish torture, to combat racism, to defend freedom of inquiry and expression, to advance personal liberty and human rights.
7.10 Whatever the particular crimes of Europe, that continent is also the source--the unique source--of those liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom that constitute our most precious legacy and to which most of the world today aspires.
7.11 It was the French, not the Algerians, who freed Algerian women from the veil (much to the irritation of Frantz Fanon, who regarded deveiling as symbolic rape); as in India it was the British, not the Indians, who ended (or did their best to end) the horrible custom of suttee--widows burning themselves alive on their husbands' funeral pyres. And it was the West, not the non-Western cultures, that launched the crusade to abolish slavery--and in doing so encountered mighty resistance, especially in the Islamic world (where Moslems, with fine impartiality enslaved whites as well as blacks).
7.12 The Western commitment to human rights has unquestionably been intermittent and imperfect. Yet the ideal remains--and movement toward it has been real, if sporadic. Today it is the Western democratic tradition that attracts and empowers people of all continents, creeds, and colors. When the Chinese students cried and died for democracy in Tiananmen Square, they brought with them not representations of Confucius or Buddha but a model of the Statue of Liberty.
7.13 THE GREAT American asylum, as Crevecoeur called it, open, as George Washington said, to the oppressed and persecuted of all nations, has been from the start an experiment in a multi-ethnic society. This is a bolder experiment than we sometimes remember. History is littered with the wreck of states that tried to combine diverse ethnic or linguistic or religious groups within a single sovereignty. Today's headlines tell of imminent crisis or impending dissolution in one or another multi-ethnic polity--the Soviet Union, India, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, Belgium, Canada, Lebanon, Cyprus, Israel, Ceylon, Spain, Nigeria, Kenya, Angola, Trinidad, Guyana. . . . The list is almost endless.
7.14 The ethnic revolt against the melting pot has reached the point, in rhetoric at least, though not I think in reality, of a denial of the idea of a common culture and a single society. If large numbers of people really accept this, the republic would be in serious trouble. The question poses itself: how to restore the balance between unum and pluribus? 7.15 The old American homogeneity disappeared well over a century ago, never to return. Ever since, we have been preoccupied in one way or another with the problem, as Herbert Croly phrased it eighty years back in The Promise of American Life, "of keeping a highly differentiated society fundamentally sound and whole."
7.16 The genius of America lies in its capacity to forge a single nation from peoples of remarkably diverse racial, religious, and ethnic origins. It has done so because democratic principles provide both the philosophical bond of union and practical experience in civic participation. The American Creed envisages a nation composed of individuals making their own choices and accountable to themselves, not a nation based on inviolable ethnic communities. The Constitution turns on individual rights, not on group rights. Law, in order to rectify past wrongs, has from time to time (and in my view often properly so) acknowledged the claims of groups; but this is the exception, not the rule.
7.18 Our democratic principles contemplate an open society founded on tolerance of differences and on mutual respect. In practice, America has been more open to some than to others. But it is more open to all today than it was yesterday and is likely to be even more open tomorrow than today. The steady movement of American life has been from exclusion to inclusion.
7.19 Historically and culturally this republic has an Anglo-Saxon base; but from the start the base has been modified, enriched, and reconstituted by transfusions from other continents and civilizations. The movement from exclusion to inclusion causes a constant revision in the texture of our culture. The ethnic transfusions affect all aspects of American life-our politics, our literature, our music, our painting, our movies, our cuisine, our customs, our dreams.
7.20 Black Americans in particular have influenced the ever-changing national culture in many ways. They have lived here for centuries, and, unless one believes in racist mysticism, they belong far more to American culture than to the culture of Africa. Their history is part of the Western democratic tradition, not an alternative to it. No one does black Americans more disservice than those Afrocentric ideologues who would define them out of the West.
7.21 The interplay of diverse traditions produces the America we know. "Paradoxical though it may seem," Diane Ravitch has well said, "the United States has a common culture that is multicultural." That is why unifying political ideals coexist so easily and cheerfully with diversity in social and cultural values. Within the overarching political commitment, people are free to live as they choose, ethnically and otherwise. Differences will remain; some are reinvented; some are used to drive us apart. But as we renew our allegiance to the unifying ideals, we provide the solvents that will prevent differences from escalating into antagonism and hatred.
7.22 One powerful reason for the continuing movement in America from exclusion to inclusion is that the American Creed facilitates the appeal from the actual to the ideal. When we talk of the American democratic faith, we must understand it in its true dimensions. It is not an impervious, final, and complacent orthodoxy, intolerant of deviation and dissent, fulfilled in flag salutes, oaths of allegiance, and hands over the heart. It is an ever-evolving philosophy, fulfilling its ideals through debate, self-criticism, protest, disrespect, and irreverence; a tradition in which all have rights of heterodoxy and opportunities for self-assertion. The Creed has been the means by which Americans have haltingly but persistently narrowed the gap between performance and principle. It is what all Americans should learn, because it is what binds all Americans together.
7.23 Americans of whatever origin should take pride in the distinctive inheritance to which they have all contributed, as other nations take pride in their distinctive inheritances.
7.24 Our schools and colleges have a responsibility to teach history for its own sake-as part of the intellectual equipment of civilized persons-and not to degrade history by allowing its contents to be dictated by pressure groups, whether political, economic, religious, or ethnic. The past may sometimes give offense to one or another minority; that is no reason for rewriting history. Properly taught, history will convey a sense of the variety, continuity, and adaptability of culture, of the need for understanding other cultures, of the ability of individuals and peoples to overcome obstacles, of the importance of critical analysis and dispassionate judgment in every area of life.
7.25 IT HAS taken time to make our values real for all our citizens, and we still have a good distance to go, but we have made progress. If we now repudiate the quite marvelous inheritance that history bestows on us, we invite the fragmentation of the national community into a quarrelsome spatter of enclaves, ghettos, tribes. The bonds of cohesion in our society are sufficiently fragile, or so it seems to me, that it makes no sense to strain them by encouraging and exalting cultural and linguistic apartheid.
7.26 The question America confronts as a pluralistic society is how to vindicate cherished cultures and traditions without breaking the bonds of cohesion--common ideals, common political institutions, common language, common culture, common fate--that hold the republic together. Our task is to combine due appreciation of the splendid diversity of the nation with due emphasis on the great unifying Western ideas of individual freedom, political democracy, and human rights. These are the ideas that define the American nationality and that today empower people of all continents, races, and creeds. Question
0.5 Crevecoeur emigrated from France to Canada around 1755 and settled in Orange Co., New York in 1864. In 1880 he moved to England and began publishing writing he had done from 1869 to 1880. Letters from an American Farmer, published in England, France, and Germany, was designed to explain America to a highly interested European audience. There had, after all, just been a war between England and America with France helping the American side. Schlesinger is setting up a contrast between the way things used to be (as explained by Crevecoeur) and the way they are becoming (multiculturalism). You need to read carefully and critically. Was Crevecoeur accurate in his description? Did immigrants to this country back then really forget their "ancient prejudices and manners," their customary ways of life when they came here? Think about the Amish, the Mennonites of Pennsylvania, or the later immigrants from Italy. Was there one American people? Think about the New England factory town, the Southern plantation, all the Western movies you have seen. Schlesinger mentions (0.2) the astonishing diversity of the settlers--English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. Does this strike you as diversity? If one were to group today's Americans by places of origin, these would all fall into the category of Anglos as opposed to Southern and Eastern Europeans, Hispanics, African Americans, Asians, Indians, Native Americans. Is the contrast Schlesinger wants to set up a real one?
0.6 As Schlesinger sets up his contrast between the old vision and the new, you need to watch the way he develops his argument. He will not argue that the old vision of assimilation and integration reflected the way it actually was. Rather that as something to strive for, it is a better ideal than the new ideal of differentiated groups, ethnicity, separation. You should ask yourself if his characterization of Multiculturalism is fair and accurate.
0.7 In all discussions of ethnicity in this country there is a tendency for speakers to start using "we" and "they." It is important to figure out who they are talking about. For instance, if someone says, "We must recognize the contributions of African Americans to this country," who is the "We?" Does that "we" include African Americans? So, who is included in this "republic" that has begun to give "long-overdue recognition?" And what can you buy with recognition?
0.8 What effect is produced by characterizing Multiculturalism with the metaphor, Tower of Babel? Does this strike you as fair?
0.10 What 0.9 and 0.10 say about the importance of education is true enough, but back to the "we/they" business. Would the sentence in 0.10 be different if it said "the way we see and treat ourselves"?
1.3 When Bryce uses the word "races" he is using it differently than we usually do today. He would refer to the English, Scotch, and Irish as different races.
1.6 Note that in the play the American is to be made from all the races (read nationalities) of Europe, not the world.
1.7 Note the way Schlesinger alternates between a statement of the ideal of the melting pot and description of instances of the failure to live up to that ideal. Is this a rhetorical strategy? A rhetorical strategy is a technique for winning arguments, for being persuasive. If he didn't mention these obvious failures of the ideal, what effect would that omission have on his argument?
1.8 This Anglocentric business raises a question: If all immigrants were to assimilate to a common American culture, whose culture was it? What does he mean by "Anglocentric" anyway?
1.16 Note that before presenting the arguments of his opponents, Schlesinger characterizes them as "self-appointed spokesmen" with a "vested interest in ethnic identification" and "ideologues." Why does he do this? He says that the "historic right of Americans to decide their ethnic identities for themselves" has been compromised. Do African American and Asian Americans get to decide their ethnic identity for themselves? Who is "we"?
2.12 This section on History is important for his argument. Read it over carefully to see if it really makes sense. He is going to attack the efforts of some he characterizes as Afrocentrists as bad history so he needs to show what good history is first. He characterizes the task of the historian as a disinterested objective analysis of the past, but also says that history is a means of "defining national identity" and thus shaping the future. Historians are also blinded by unconscious preconceptions and their own bias. He gives two examples of "bad history," top-dog and underdog history. Does 2.12 imply that all the failures of past histories have been corrected by the "meticulous and convincing scholarship" of both white and black historians? Is objective history possible? If not, in whose interest is history done?
3.2 Is this a fair characterization of the quote from Asante that ends the previous paragraph?
3.3 Schlesinger uses this characterization of education as an example of obvious bias on the part of Afrocentrists. What would bell hooks say about this?
4.1 What is good History?
4.12 Is this point that some famous African Americans were influenced by white writers a persuasive argument against the question of teaching African American writers? Why were these men influenced so strongly by white writers?
7.26 Make a list of all the arguments Schlesinger makes against Multiculturalism in these last sections of this article and explain why they are or are not persuasive.