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PARTISAN
REVIEW
behind multiculturalism is the notion that until the day before yesterday
the college curriculum was lily white, and so on. What is ignored in
all
this is that multiculturalism represents an attack on the curricula that
were established in response to the civil rights movement. New York's
infamous Sobol Report, for instance, was aimed at replacing a curricu–
lum put in place in 1987 by a group of respected liberal and leftist
scholars. Similarly, some of the prominent multiculturalists argue that
before their assault of reason, an absolutist conception of knowledge
reigned supreme on campuses. This is literally incredible, since for them it
is as ifJohn Dewey had never lived. In fact, as Richard Rotty has noted,
multiculturalism is epistemologically very much a continuation of what
James and Dewey had begun.
What lies at the political core of multiculturalism where it intersects
political correctness is an epistemological double game in which ordinary
knowledge claims are subjected to a withering Nietzschean scrutiny,
while brandishing an absolutist certainty about the epistemological and
political claims of those designated as oppressed. When this discrepancy is
noted, it usually is greeted with the intellectual equivalent of catcalls de–
scribing the speaker as racist, sexist, and so on. Once the personal became
reductively political, rational debate was short-circuited. The temptation
to dismiss a vexing argument in the terms of the person making it be–
came overwhelming for many. Intellectually, such reductionism just isn't
interesting, but socially it has coercive possibilities, since it leaves
individuals with only three options; to leave, to fight, or to ignore each
other.
It
leaves cooperation out of the question.
AI Shanker:
We should remember that there were certain predecessors
to Afrocentricity. In the sixties it was community control. The idea was
that the parents should control the school - they were interested in their
children, and the power structure was not. Shortly after that came the
idea that the reason black kids weren't doing well was because they were
speaking a different language that teachers didn't understand. So teachers
by court order were sent to take courses in black English.
Fred Siegel:
In essence what you are saying is that both political cor–
rectness and multiculturalism arc the bastard offspring of the late 1960s
marriage between the ethical tribalism of the black power movement and
the conceptual charity of guilt-ridden liberals unable to condemn even
the most self-destructive minority behavior. The two seminal events in
producing this disastrous coupling were the wrenching fight over black
nationalism occasioned by New York's Ocean-Hill Brownsville affair and
the bitter debate set off by the Moynihan Report on the debilitating de–
cline of the black family. In the Ocean-Hill Brownsville affair, trans-racial
