EDUCATION BEYOND POLITICS
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criteria for teaching were attacked as expressions of bourgeois cultural
imperialism. The result of the Moynihan Report debate was that open
discussion of the debilitating decline of the black family was shut down
for two decades. The crusade for political correctness was in significant
measure an attempt to maintain silence on the subject of ghetto culture
at a time when the accuracy of the Moynihan Report could no longer
be doubted.
Similarly, much of what has gone by the name of multiculturalism is
an elaboration and intensification of the themes that first emerged in the
wake of the Moynihan Report and Ocean-Hill Brownsville. Andrew
Billingsley's widely read book-length rejoinder to Moynihan argued that
the black family was ailing only by Eurocentric standards. At the same
time, Joyce Ladner's influential late sixties attack on integrationist liber–
alism,
The Death oj White Sociology,
denounced the Enlightenment and
white rationality as the sources of black oppression. For both the mystics
of the counterculture and those ideologically insistent on denying the
ugly impact of underclass culture, reason and its rules on the one hand
and the conventional family on the other became the enemy. Rule-based
reason meant that there were standards of propriety by which actions and
individuals could be measured. Propriety and its cousin property meant
that there were bounadries to be maintained, something denied in the
sixties by those - whether counterculturalists or black powerites - who
insisted, in anticipation of the blood-and-soil leftist multiculturalism of
the nineties, that truth could be measured only against myth. Yet as we
should have learned from both fascist and communist myth-making,
myth-making is rarely self-correcting.
What was for a while alarming about the multiculturalism of the
early 1990s was that its influence had spread so far as to encompass an in–
creasingly politically correct
New York Times.
In an extraordinary edito–
rial,
the
Times
defended the multicultural emphasis on racial differences on
the grounds that culture is simply an extension of biology. David Duke
would have no doubt agreed. Yet the impact of economic reality is
again likely to restrain some of these excesses. Most Americans under–
stand that on his recent trip to Japan, President Bush was in effect asking
for affirmative action on behalf of American imports. The public, in–
creasingly aware of international competition, is beginning to see what
the real costs are of subsidizing failure at home by lowering standards
that should be leveled up instead of down.
Wilson
Moses: One comment about the Moynihan report. Remember
that Muhammad Speaks supported it. The opposition came from the left,
it did not come from grass-roots black people. It did not come from
