Let Them Eat Multiculturalism

FOR OVER THIRTY YEARS, NATHAN GLAZER HAS OFFERED academic legitimation for abandoning the struggle for racial equality. His books and essays, most notably Affirmative Discrimination, offered a rationale that allowed the American mainstream of centrist liberal/neo-conservatives to reject government policies that directly challenged the invidious consequences -- on all our lives -- of historic and contemporary American racism. His most notable target has been affirmative action, but he has also criticized school busing and proactive policies to foster residential integration. He eschewed the blunt free-marketeering of Thomas Sowell as well as Charles Murray's and Richard Hernnstein's return to biological racism. Instead, Glazer provided a line of "conservative" argument more consistent with a postwar liberal imagination that accepted the semi-welfare state and prided itself on opposition to personal prejudice and de jure white supremacy.

Without denying the history of intense and longlasting racial subjugation, he confidently predicted that "blacks would follow the path of European immigrants, now that state-imposed restrictions were lifted and private discrimination in key areas was banned." Glazer's faith in the future did not rest on a denial of the many seamy and brutal faces of ethnoracial diversity in American history; it rested on his faith in the assimilative power of what Gunnar Myrdal called the "American Creed." Myth-history, sociology, social policy: for Glazer, they were all bound in a seamless rhetorical fabric.

Now in a short, occasionally redundant, reworking of essays,^* Glazer tells us he was dead "wrong." His sociological imagination had failed him -- and the nation. Looking back over the past twenty years, he writes, "The American blacks, it turns out, were not like the immigrants of yesterday, or like the immigrants of today who have become so numerous in the wake of immigration reform in 1965. . . [We] are still, in some key respects, two nations." To put it mildly, this admission is of more than passing interest. After all, the most prominent neo-conservative/liberal analyst of race and ethnicity is telling friend and foe that the theory he has been pushing for the past few decades cannot explain the "hard reality" of our still racially separate and unequal society. The significance of his admission appears even more striking when at the same time -- and at greater length -- he advises fellow-travelling defenders of the assimilative powers of our unifying civic culture to stop their overheated polemics and adjust to the institutionalization of multicultural education. While an upbeat saga of core values and dreams fulfilled might work for most of us, Glazer now argues that "the great majority of blacks are not immigrants or the children of immigrants, but are the descendants of slaves, and do not share the same experience or dreams." Of course he does not go so far as to refer to blacks' American "nightmare," as Malcolm X did. And he certainly avoids Malcolm's call for revolutionary nationalism. But in the context of our own times, he certainly concedes ground to an ideological current anathema to those who share Glazer's politics. He tells his readers that, like him, they must learn to live a bit more gracefully with "multiculturalism." At a minimum, they need to accept his basic proposition: "Multiculturalism is the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African Americans, in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many groups."

But in spite of his confession of error and challenge to overzealous crusaders against multiculturalism, Glazer's revisionism is, at best, partial. While he will probably receive criticism from cultural conservatives (and some democratic socialists) for being soft on multiculturalism, his own tolerance is at best grudging. It is after all a "price" to be paid, not a vision he has come to share. He is more tolerant of other contrarian voices, but he remains hooked on the confident Americanism he says he imbibed as a youth in the New York public schools. But even more important, it is the only "price" he is willing to pay. He is still opposed to any state action to lessen racial separation and subordination. He remains convinced that anything less than "color blind" social policy and legal reasoning is, even when not "reverse discrimination," bound to fail.

INDEED, RATHER THAN A TESTAMENT TO GLAZER'S OWN WILLINGNESS to change course or a sign of coming change in the loud majority's social policies and racial consciousness, the book is a morbid symptom of our political culture's ability to live with racial inequality. Glazer is certainly chastened. His faith in our common destiny across the color line has been weakened. But, unwilling to make a material and psychological investment in building a racially egalitarian democratic society, Glazer offers a relatively low cost solution for white Americans repelled by black rage and political mobilization: Let them eat multiculturalism!

The tone and structure of Glazer's argument suggests he believes he is demanding a good deal of his intended audience. He is probably right. These readers, on suspects, are convinced that multicultural education subverts historical "truth" and will shatter national unity, "Balkanizing" the republic. The book is intended to help this audience adjust to its current pervasiveness. As he rather glibly puts it, "multiculturalism in education . . . has, in a word, won." This alleged victory is not as bad as it seems. It does not warrant a kuturkampf. He points out that some forms of multiculturalism emphasize the unity in American diversity. But even in forms he cannot silently accede to, he takes pains to argue that curricula change is hardly a major threat to the republic. There is no need to exaggerate its likely consequences, conflating the curriculum wars with more substantive policy issues. Significantly, in the very first chapter, Glazer criticizes the neo-conservative Marc Gerson for turning multiculturalism into "an all embracing ideology encompassing every aspect of policy about race and ethnicity that he opposes." For Gerson, racial "quotas" for law school admissions and curricula units on African kings and queens are aspects of the same subversive "multicultural" crusade. But for Glazer, "when one finds affirmative action encompassed in multiculturalism, one feels that the malleability of words has been taken to a useless extreme." Maintaining this categorical distinction is crucial to his argument. Glazer has not adjusted to "affirmative discrimination" and he is not asking his readers to. But he is asking them to tolerate, even empathically understand the needs of many of multiculturalism's defenders.

To "live with" and "understand" does not mean to "agree with." While Glazer "would reject a curriculum that gives the same place to European history that it held in the 1940s" he still believes "a good part of the Eurocentric curriculum that the critics of multiculturalism want to hold on to is indeed crucially relevant to our world today." (My guess is, so do most "multiculturalists.") Even more important, he makes it clear that he remains loyal not so much to a particular slice of the curriculum, as to a specific ideological narrative:

I feel warmly attached to the old America that was acclaimed in school textbooks and that is now passing -- at least in textbooks. Despite all its faults and errors and prejudices and, if you will, crimes, it did after all, bring into its fold over time, though not without political conflict and even Civil War, the peoples and races it had rejected; it did offer them opportunities; it did correct its errors and faults and to some extant make reparation for the harm its laws and practices had imposed.

But his creed is no longer a fighting faith. Alternative less rosy accounts can have their place, even a more prominent place in the education of the young.

Given Glazer's personal preference, why does he differ from, for example, the notable spokesman for the "vital center," Arthur Schlesinger. As you may recall, Schlesinger had penned an equally skimpy book on multiculturalism. But his had been a fevered jeremiad predicting the "disuniting of America." On one level, as a sociologist of education, Glazer does not take debates over the content of the curriculum as seriously as the highbrow academic participants. Nor do most teachers and parents. They, according to Glazer, hope the kids in their charge learn to read -- anything. Given the widespread inadequacies of public education they are willing to try anything -- as long as change is not so frequent as to overwork or confuse all concerned. In any event, the polemical extremes will be muted in the normal local attempts of myriad districts to find something that works. At the higher levels of state or national policy, while he himself has confronted educators who object to what he sees as banal declarations of integrative American values, he is not so much taken with their potential to warp the minds of the young, as he is by the mere fact that they exist. Some Americans experience a different America and construct their own convincing narrative. In fact, unlike Schlesinger, for Glazer, "truth in history" is hardly the central issue. At best, he writes, "Truth is an uncertain and incomplete guide." He frankly acknowledges that children and adolescents "in the past, have been told stories that were not quite so, but they were nevertheless told the stories either for their own good or for the good of society. . . We are now told we should tell other stories with other moral lessons." Such relativism can be intellectually sloppy, but in the context of battles over the suppression of history in classrooms and the Smithsonian, Glazer's openness to other perspective is welcome.

Equally important to his capacity to live with other narratives is Glazer's continuing faith in the integrative power of American society for the overwhelming majority of its people. Ominous forecasts of the "disuniting of America" ring hollow to someone who believes that most kids, including those of ethnoracial minorities, will experience acceptance in society and an improvement in their condition. Frank accounts of the exploitation of Chinese workers or of Japanese internment will not, he predicts, "affect Chinese and Japanese students much." Indeed, he is in favor of a "balanced treatment" of the nation's "crimes" against many of its people:

We have to tell the story of slavery, discrimination, and prejudice, and how the United States annexed half of Mexico, and Puerto Rico. But in any scale of serious disaffection and disloyalty among minority ethnic groups -- let us say, on a scale from the Romansch in Switzerland to the Chechens in Russia -- I believe one would have to rate the propensity of our major minorities to disloyalty pretty far down, well below the Chechen level.

Indeed, he sees no evidence that, on the whole, the cultivation of "distinctive loyalty" undercuts a commitment to national unity. It may even do the opposite.

Glazer, of course, has his limits. There is no question," he argues, "that the emphasis on oppression, discrimination, prejudice, grievance would" stimulate "civic disharmony." Acknowledging that "the existence of discrimination and prejudice is also reality -- truth, if you will," he stresses that its meaning derives from its contextualization in the national narrative.

Ethnoracial oppression could not be ignored, but . . . if one looked at the larger picture of the history of the United States, one sees greater and greater inclusion, less and less discrimination, a steady increase in the protection of the rights of minorities, and constitutional protections and guarantees becoming more and more effective.

That is Glazer's truth, though he is willing to admit evidence to the contrary. But, more important, he argues that it is a useful story that, even if only partially true, induces "civic harmony" and individual advancement. He asks rhetorically,

What would it be better for young blacks to believe: That everyone is against them? That all their protections are shams? That whites will always stop them from getting ahead? . . . For their own good, their own progress, I believe that it would be better for young blacks to believe that there has been improvement in their situation, that their opportunities are greater than before, rather than the reverse.

(For a different answer, keep reading.) But as much as he opposes the disruptive consequences of a focus on racial subjugation, he is not eager to search it out and exorcise it.

We cannot be certain how Glazer came to hold his benign view of multiculturalism, seemingly so out of keeping with his other positions and the stance of his neo-conservative allies. But his own explanation, if arrogant and self-serving, is certainly revealing -- and probably accurate to a degree. At a minimum, it provides a crucial argumentative bridge between his essays on multiculturalism in education and his bold acknowledgment of his grand mistake. As he presents it, he, unlike all the other protagonists has a unique combination of historical knowledge and autobiographical insight. He understands the "murky prehistory" of the multicultural debate. According to Glazer, "Advocates of a multiculturalist curriculum, often do not know they have forebears, while opponents often do not realize that the education they experienced was the expression of an age singularly free of conflicts over issues of cultural pluralism or multiculturalism." In fact, the history he goes on to recount is, if not common knowledge, hardly arcane. As his own citations indicate, it is the common resource of numerous historians of ethnicity in America. As he tells his readers, the waves of European immigrants between 1840 and 1924 generated their own "school wars." In the 1840s, Catholic leaders attacked Protestant hegemony in public education. A half century later, German parents pressed for German language instruction. In each case, words, legislation, and bloody violence played a part. In the early 20th century, wary of the rapid increase in immigration, "hyphenated Americans" came under attack. The nativist triumphs during and after World War I are noteworthy in part because of the sophisticated defense of cultural pluralism made by Horace Kallen, Randolph Bourne, and the nation's preeminent philosopher, John Dewey. As Glazer correctly stresses, on both sides it remained a debate by Euro-Americans about Euro-Americans. For Glazer, the most important fact is that the pluralists lost. "In the public schools, Americanization was the order of the day and prevailed without check through the 1920s, '30s, and '40s while the children of the last great wave of European immigration were being educated." Glazer was one of those children. He recalls, "I attended the schools of New York City from 1929 to 1944 (I include the public City College in that stretch), and not a whiff of multiculturalism was to be found." The school population was at least two-thirds Jewish or Italian. "But no Jewish figure was to be found in our texts for reading or writing, for literature, for social studies, for history." Columbus, Garibaldi and Mazzini appeared, but not "to contribute to the self-esteem of Italian American schoolchildren." Then he makes the crucial point:

This background, which most of my generation has experienced, of a strong, unself-conscious, self-confident Americanization, in which all cultures but that of the founding English and its American variant were ignored, and in which students were left to assume that the cultures of their homes and parental homelands were inferior, is crucial to the current debates over multiculturalism.

But why? Unquestioned Americanism, Glazer observes, "deposited a uniform silt over our past, leaving only fossil remains of that earlier diversity." While there is a hint of multicultural outrage in his language, Glazer is hardly an ethnic revivalist. Americanization was unproblematic because assimilation occurred. But what is important to current debates and his own intellectual biography, is that in the crucible of a war affirming the common American creed a growing intercultural education movement began to preach tolerance across the color line. The promise of assimilation was extended as never before to blacks, Asian, and Latinos. Change did not occur overnight or without conflict, but looking back on the progression of liberalizing legislation from the McCarran Walter Act of 1952 (which eliminated the category of "alien ineligible for citizenship"), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act and Immigration Act of 1965, Glazer and other Americans "could believe that American blacks would follow the path of European immigrants." Like other "students of race and ethnicity" he "held that assimilation -- or, if one prefers the term, integration, was what happened to ethnic and racial groups in America . . ." To put it crudely, he was the product of the times in which assimilationist visions did not mask ethnoracial domination, but pointed toward egalitarian unity out of diversity.

The history of the past 20 years shattered confidence in this vision. In hindsight, black progress came to a halt in the 70s. Glazer minimizes the fact that he was already embroiled with critics who were quicker to question his teleology, but now he acknowledges he was "wrong." To drive home not simply the importance of the error but to impress upon us his intellectual integrity, he writes, "Nothing concentrates the mind on an issue more sharply than discovering one has been wrong about it."

Undoubtedly Glazer has thought a few things over. The optimistic integrationist of old would not have written,

. . . the difference that separates blacks from whites, and even from other groups "of color" that have undergone a history of discrimination and prejudice in this country is not to be denied. It is this separation which is the most powerful force arguing for multiculturalism and for resistance to the assimilatory trends of American education and American society.

But in spite of his admission and tone of concern, this thin book is hardly a concentrated reconsideration of the ideological convictions of an Americanized child and influential academic. It reads more like an effort at damage control.

RECALL, FOR EXAMPLE, THE LIMITED ALTERNATIVE VISIONS of history he offers to black youth. He gives them a stark choice: nihilistic disharmony or the passive acceptance of an unfolding American promise. Excluded from the available narratives is an engagement with close to four centuries of struggle. "Our" creed has been contested and, thereby, rewritten on plantations and city streets, in factories and schools, and at lunch counters with blood, sweat and tears. There have been smiles and laughter, and dancing too, at blessed moments of "Jubilee," such as the defeat of the slavocracy. Such victories have been hard won and incomplete -- and under constant threat. Glazer may mention the "assimilationist" vision of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, but he forgets that their rhetorical appeals asking Americans to live up to their creed demanded that Americans rewrite the texts of the white republic. They are not the slaveholder Jefferson's progeny (though others of dark hue may have been). In expropriating master Jefferson's intellectual property they created themselves, their brothers and sisters, and the nation anew. How about teaching those conflicts, encouraging students to enter the loud and hopefully not too bloody "conversations" of our culture. Their voices may yet change the terms of debate and the conditions of their lives. If that is "civic disharmony," so be it. All power to the discordant voices.

Or take another historical issue that has not been central to curricula battles but that is connected to his theoretical vision: the meaning of the experience of European immigrants and their children for African Americans. Glazer is willing to concede that the European immigrant experience did not foreshadow that of blacks. But he never alludes to the growing scholarship that explores the ways that Euro-American assimilation was predicated on gaining access to the material and psychological "wages of whiteness." There were recurring moments in which the struggles of white ethnics also benefitted black workers. Ideological challenges against the ethnocentric reasoning of Anglo-American nativists could, in the long run, contribute to challenges to racial oppression of "non-whites." But immigrants benefitted from the initial advantage of not being black and in a series of struggles and renegotiations parlayed their relative paleness into the profound advantage of becoming "white." During the years Glazer learned his American creed in the New York City schools his elders fought to put Ellis Island on a par with Plymouth Rock. At the same time, their votes built the welfare state and their actions forged the industrial union movement. They wrote a new American script by changing the rules of the market but not the rules of race. As Herbert Hill, Thomas Sugrue, and Arnold Hirsch have shown, these ethnic working-class Americans defended their turf -- jobs and neighborhoods -- with votes, epithets, and brickbats. During the 40s and 50s, the backdrop for Glazer's optimistic forecasts, this more inclusive liberal state helped build the "new ghettos" that exploded in the 60s and simmer to this day.

THE STULTIFYING WEIGHT OF GLAZER'S IDEOLOGICAL BAGGAGE also constricts his treatment of those Americans who are neither black nor white: Latinos, Asians, Amerindians. Glazer's newfound willingness to concede the distinctiveness of black experience, comes at the expense of "whitening" other "people of color." What does he mean when he writes, ". . . [T]he demands of Native American activists pose no challenge to any major tenet of American ideology and can be accommodated with little strain on the values of the traditional curriculum[?]" Of course "as less than one per cent of the population" their condition and protests have less capacity to disrupt the nation. Blacks may be the "storm troops in the battles over multiculturalism," but given the centrality of "Manifest Destiny" to the nation's myth-history, debates over the "invasion" of America and the resulting "genocide" have remained central to curriculum wars. By a variety of social indices -- rates of intermarriage, residential patterns, income, and occupation -- the unequal separation of African Americans stands out. But are Mexican garment workers and Korean factory owners in Los Angeles simply new American immigrants whose fate has been foreshadowed by Glazer's parents? Their varied pasts and present conditions remain invisible. They are bit players in Glazer's historical sociology, useful for validating the transhistoric significance of his father's generation. Nowhere does he entertain the possibility that in different ways, but no less than African Americans, they offer a "different mirror" on our past and present. It is one thing to accentuate the historically specific condition of African Americans; it is something altogether different to present them as the sole exception to an otherwise celebratory American saga. It is a theoretical and political dead end.

Especially for African Americans. Acknowledging their exceptional predicament, Glazer concedes the psycho-cultural value of their "stories" and is more tolerant of alternative histories. But he does not engage them, and remains tied to his "story" of gradual, voluntary, and individual advancement that, after all, worked for everyone else. This evasion makes it all the easier to reassert his longstanding political agenda. In spite of having admitted making a grave error, he concentrates on reaffirming his minimalist social policy. The causes of "our" failed expectations are "obscure," he says. He briefly lists the standard set of social pathologies, including the "disaster that encompassed the black family." He admits to "other factors of infinite regress, among them prejudice and discrimination which, while declining are still evident." He even euphemistically alludes to the firm resistance of whites to any change in the racial composition of their children's schools and their neighborhoods. But having conceded some empirical ground to scholars who have mapped persistent racial separation, he returns to the ideological trenches and digs in:

However wrong I was in expecting more rapid social change to result from the civil rights revolution, a greater measure of government effort to directly promote residential integration and school integration is not the answer. The forces that will produce the changes we are looking for are individual and voluntaristic, rather than governmental and authoritative.

Change, if it comes, will come "individual by individual, family by family, neighborhood by neighborhood. Slowly as these work, there is really no alternative." How slowly, he does not venture to say. But he is willing to wait. Then, accentuating his own empathic concession to those who must bear the brutality of "hard reality," he quickly adds, "In the meantime there is multiculturalism."

In other words, "Let them eat multiculturalism." Am I being uncharitable by translating his words into the callous condescending bark of someone living in safety and privilege? Perhaps. This tortured, at times meandering and repetitive, work does suggest a growing uncertainty. But he cannot let go of the confident Americanism of his youth. In the end he refurbishes the myth-history and policy he helped define. In the meantime, he will let his black fellow citizens tell their "stories." He and other Americans ca listen and empathize in the comfort of their neighborhoods -- on the cheap. After all, their "stories" will set policy.

---

* Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 179 pp., $19.95 return

Contents of No. 23