Multicultural America: A Critical Re-Assessment Somdatta Mandal

The trouble with multiculturalism, said Alan Kors of the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, is that you cannot distinguish between the parody and the ‘real’ thing anymore. Ever since in 1988 the debate in Stanford University over the introduction of a new multicultural curriculum attracted the nation-wide attention of U.S. newspapers and networks, we have been confronted with a stream of books, articles, reports and conference papers on this issue, but it is still very hard to say what multiculturalism really is, where true diversity ends and self-segregation begins, and how we should evaluate this new current in America’s intellectual life. Some stress the educational motives for multiculturalism, others denounce it as a mere political manoeuvre of the radical left. Some agree in principle but deplore some of the results, other criticize the principles because of these results. The only thing all agree on is that muticulturalism and diversity are of the utmost importance for the future of American society. A major reason for the confusion surrounding the issue of multiculturalism may well be the fact that people are confronted with an inner paradox of Western civilization. On the one hand, Western civilization is characterized by a deep respect for, not just a toleration of, other cultures. Although some pretend that ethnocentricism is endemic to Western civilization, it is much more characteristic of Western culture to try to overcome this bias. Western civilization embodies certain values that are meaningful not just to people from the West, but also to people from other cultures. Western culture, after all, claims to be a universal culture, comprising a moral code that is valid for mankind at large, regardless of race, sex or religion. They hold that there are certain human rights that no particular culture can afford to abolish. Often enough, however, this universalism clashes with the respect for other cultures mentioned above, and at these moments there are no easy answers to the question who is right. The problem is that both parties are right. Multiculturalism affords an example of this dilemma. In any discussion of multicuturalism, especially in the American context, several questions emerge. Is it a mere take-off from the concept of pluralism? Does it simply describe diversity or does it advocate a particular response to that diversity? Is multiculturalism compatible with national identity? Does multiculturalism simply mean a tolerance of cultural diversity? Does globalization spell the end of multiculturalism? ‘Multicultural’ and ‘multiculturalism’ are words frequently used to describe the ethnic diversity existing in American society today, but there seems to be some confusion about what they signify. The established reading of the American national identity and its historical evolution has come under mounting pressure from ethnic minorities of nonEuropean origin. Leading universities have adjusted the Eurocentric canon of the Western literary and cultural tradition or are considering the need to do so. As a result, a fierce debate is taking place among American writers, intellectuals and educators. The complex range of tensions between (and within) the various subcultures and the cultural mainstream in the United States, as exemplified in intellectual debate, in politics, in religion, in higher education, and in literature, especially in recent American writing by

members of cultural minorities, all relate to this definition and debate regarding multiculturalism. Although multiculturalism is a post-World-War II phenomenon, the United States had been a multicultural society ever since colonial times with continued major diversification in race, ethnicity, and religion. The traditional means of adjusting to this diversity has been through the process of assimilation, by which minorities accept or merge with the majority culture, which until recently has been Anglo Saxon protestant. Way back in the nineteenth century, Emerson coined the metallic metaphor “smelting pot” to describe the mixing of races, and Israel Zangwill invented a variant, “the melting pot,” later in 1908 as the title of a play suggesting that intermarriage would bring about a new and thriving American breed. In simple terms, assimilation represented an effort to make all cultures adopt the norms of the mainstream, in the process the minorities would theoretically be fully accommodated into the essentially white, middle-class life styles that exist today. In such a model, there is no coherent conflict between cultural values as white, middle-class values would be accepted by all. There are several theories that explain how the term ‘multiculturalism” is constantly being redefined. The well-worn metaphor of the ‘melting pot’ (leading to catch phrases like ‘salad bowl,’ ‘martini cocktail,’ and so forth) actually signifies several competing theories about the dominant principles of social organizations in the United States that have governed debate on this topic since the eighteenth century. Special attention must be given to two alternatives, the concept of cultural pluralism and the concept of hegemony to indicate the directions currently taken by the debate over the paradox that finds its most telling expression on the back of the United States’ one dollar bill: emblazoned there is the familiar American bald eagle ornamented by a banner reading e pluribus unum – a motto that translates as “the one from the many.” Against this theory of assimilation, it has been argued that the concept of the melting pot is a myth, that in reality the history of the United States has been a record of the ethnic cleansing it condemns in other countries. Opponents of assimilation argue that the process seeks to destroy the distinctiveness or identity of minorities by forcing them to enter the mainstream in every regard, except religion and color. Thus the contrasting model to assimilation is cultural pluralism that does not attempt to cast all people into the same mould, but allows the minorities a cultural independence within the framework of social and political conformity. Scholars and social critics from the 1960’s onwards, and especially after the Stanford incident, have strenuously challenged this concept of the melting pot and turned the issue into a vast political ideology. They have point out, for example, that there are ingredients that the pot, so to speak, cannot, or indeed should not try to, melt. The dominant White Eurocentric worldview underwent radical transformation in the Kennedy-Johnson decade, and with each stunning, transformative episode of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, there began a turnaround from which there simply could no longer be any easy retreat. But as much as the 1960s led to a political change, be it in the realms of counterculture, women’s rights, gay redress, youth, Black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian American and other ethnic challenges, it also inspired a will to cultural reclamation. The Hyphenated American replaced the WASP. Again, since a

hyphen can also signify a minus sign, detracting from the Americanness of such identities, it was subsequently done away with. This emphasis upon dual citizenship and cultural pluralism gave rise to a whole new set of metaphors: the Mosaic, the Tapestry, the many Colored Quilt, the Rope of Many Strands, the Kaleidoscope, the Rainbow, the Salad Bowl, the Martini Cocktail. During the 1990s, the heat of the debate, from Stanford to Duke, far from diminishing, intensified further, becoming increasingly polarized and politicized, and moving beyond the pages of academic or intellectual journals like the New York Review of Books or Partisan Review to fill the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, to become the lead story in Time and Newsweek, and usurp the national attention of all kinds of Americans through debating sessions between teachers, writers and cultural theorists on prime-time TV. For a while, indeed, multiculturalism (as the media would have it) seemed to be hardening into a “cult” or “new orthodoxy,” with “the rising hegemony of the politically correct” being decried as the “new McCarthyism,” the “new fundamentalism,” or even the “new totalitarianism,” and conservative defenders of a unified notion of American culture and a universalist “American Creed” denouncing the multiculturalist disruption of the fundamentalist values of Western civilization. Opponents and proponents seemed to have dug in on opposite sides of an unbridgeable ideological divide. In her presidential address to the Modern Language Association meeting in 1990, Catherine R. Stimpson outlined the weaknesses and strengths of multiculturalism: Given the conflicts and passions of our moment, multiculturalism has inevitably provoked a spectrum of responses. For some, it connotes an effort to substitute emotion for reason, a thin many-other-worldism for a deep grasp of Western history, philosophy, literature and art. Others, although they find the concept of multiculturalism important, fear that the practitioners will satisfy themselves with academic reform and not take on the hard task of social change. For still others, with whom I am in much sympathy, multiculturalism promises to bring dignity to the dispossessed and self-empowerment to the disempowered, to recuperate the texts and traditions of ignored groups, to broaden cultural history (404).

The very next year, in October 1991, Alice Kessler-Harris put in her presidential address to the American Studies Association meeting the fact that at the core of the debate on multiculturalism lay (and lies) a “battle over the idea of America”: Those who attack what they call a politically correct stance seem to be supporting the idea of America as something fixed and given, deriving from Western civilization, while those who resist attach themselves to an idea of America that is more fluid and susceptible to change. One side constructs democratic culture as a tradition to be defended, a flag to be protected; the other as an ongoing process whose meanings are diffuse and changing. One side fears fragmentation of cultural unity; the other derides unity as a myth and protests loss of identity. The issue is joined: how do we preserve cultural unity and still do justice to the multiplicity of American cultures? (303)

It seemed not unlikely that the radical urgency of the debate may have owed something to the reactionary political-ideological atmosphere of the Reagan-Bush years and that a more tempered consideration of multiculturalism as an inescapable “reality” of American life became possible under the Clinton administration. Likewise, the effervescent anger roused among Native Americans by the 1992 Columbus

quincentennial gave way to a less militant and less foreclosing stance. There were signals that the Americans were entering a transitional moment in the debate, with the realization that it was time to “close ranks,” as Eugene D. Genovese put it as early as April 1991 in the New Republic, and to forge “a coalition that cuts across all the lines of politics, race, and gender”(35). In continuation with the earlier queries, in 1992, part Native American author Michael Dorris also struck a conciliatory pose, arguing that though it would not do to seek to assuage the pain of a history of brutalization and oppression, it was time to acknowledge multiculturalism as a “fact” of America, both historically and in terms of contemporary culture. His suggestion was to try and move “beyond cliché, beyond politics,” and beyond a polarizing anger, towards communication and compassion, even celebration: Our dynamic American landscape of fabulously interwoven ethnicities has struggled for generations to devise a workable definition of itself – … The task has consistently proved to be neither simple nor uncontroversial. ‘Multiculturalism,’ though the only catchall that accurately reflects this nation’s history of free-for-all migration and slippery assimilation, has become almost a cliché in political discourse – a bow to each federally recognized ethnic population, a dutiful list of its accomplishments and contributions to the modern world. As a concept, multiculturalism is amorphism without the sharp edges that traditionally mark boundaries, and it rarely pleases anyone…..Our diversity, as a species, has always been our salvation. Why do we struggle to deny and suppress it? (408)

In a similar vein the African American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who himself had fired some powerful shots in the canon and culture wars asked in 1993, “What is this crazy thing called multicuturalism?”(6) Gates has warned against exaggerating “claims of cultural novelty: for the multiculturalist debate, emphasizing its historical roots and “time-tested” underlying assumptions (“both the challenge of cultural pluralism and the varied forms of political resistance to it go back to the founding of our republic”), and has resisted any tendency towards ethnocentricism in favor of transcendence, interaction and hybridity as the basis of “a new, and vital, common American culture.” In the introduction to his book, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992: xiv-vii) he states: Ours is a late-twentieth century world profoundly fissured by nationality, ethnicity, race, class, and gender. And the only way to transcend those divisions – to forge, for once, a civic culture that respects both differences and commonalities – is through education that seeks to comprehend the diversity of human culture…..There is no tolerance without respect – and no respect without knowledge. Any human being sufficiently curious and motivated can fully possess another culture, no matter how ‘alien’ it may appear to be. …Pluralism sees culture as porous, dynamic, and interactive, rather than as the fixed property of particular ethnic groups. Thus the idea of a monolithic, homogeneous ‘West’ itself comes into question…..[W]hatever the outcome of the culture wars in the academy, the world we live in is multicultural already. Mixing and hybridity are the rule, not the exception.

The advocates of multiculturalism, then, unlike what its opponents claim, do not so much seek to challenge or subvert the possibility of a unified national culture per se, as to argue for a different sense of common culture, one which will recognize the reality of cultural difference(s), without imposing a hegemonic, dominant or supposedly universalist discourse on what it sees as “other,” but which rather gives free play to the

possibilities of change, interaction and hybridization. If as Alice Kessler-Harris has suggested, by the 1980s the search for the value of the culturally “different” had yielded “a fragmentation of subject that made a mockery of a single synthesis or interpretation of the American past” (or present), it does not follow that the concept of a common cultural identity is to be categorically rejected. Rather, it is still possible to argue the need for a new consensus by conceiving of “democratic culture as a continuing and unending process” and by replacing “a static and unitary notion of America” by a “processual” one. Thus, argues Kessler-Harris, “far from undermining the search for unity, identity and purpose, the multicultural enterprise has the potential to strengthen it….[and] opens the possibility of conceiving democratic culture as a process in whose transformation we are all invited to participate.”(307;311) It is interesting to note that though times are changing in the twenty-first century, the debate on American multiculturalism still continues. The highly complex and ambiguous dynamics of cultural unity and diversity, of fragmentation and synthesis, in a manner that suggests consonance with and confirmation of such thoughts, engulfs the critic, the scholar of American Studies even now. It is true that America’s culture is unique because people from every corner of the globe have contributed to it. The more diverse a culture, the richer it is. In tune with the poly-ethnic constitution of the American population now, no ethnic, racial or religious group is officially deemed superior to any other. The country’s immigrant experience is no longer seen in terms of trauma or pain, but as a process of transformation and net gain. Designed to foster tolerance and an acceptance of newcomers from all over the world, American multiculturalism includes issues of identity, self, migration, marginalization, ghettoization, ethnicity, nostalgia, expatriation, immigration, and assimilation into the new culture of the adopted land. With the gradual ‘browning’ of the country, we eagerly await the new metaphors that will further define twenty-first century multicultural America.

Works Cited Dorris, Michael. “Beyond Cliché, Beyond Politics: Multiculturalism and the Fact of America.” Georgia Review 46.3, Fall 1992. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Beyond the Culture Wars: Identities in Dialogue.” Profession 93. ------------.

Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Genovese, Eugene D. “Heresy, Yes---Sensitivity, No.” New Republic 204, April 15, 1991. Kessler-Harris, Alice. “Cultural Locations: Positioning American Studies in the Great Debate.” American Quarterly 44.3, September 1992. Kors, Alan. As cited in Fred Siegel, “The Cult of Multiculturalism,” New Republic 204.February 18, 1991:40. Stimpson, Catherine R. “Presidential Address 1990: ‘On Differences.’” PMLA 106, 1991.