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PAJzTISAN
REVIEW
the guise of protecting diversity on the campus, the notion of free speech
was squandered. And at the same university, when a conservative student
writer wrote a column in the student paper attacking affirmative action,
black students responded by stealing and destroying all copies of the pa–
per's edition. Instead of protesting this blatant infringement on free
speech, President Sheldon Hackney, the NEH director designate, com–
mented that "two important university values now stand in conflict,"
freedom of the press and the need to make minority students
"comfortable." Hackney argued that while free expression was a
"supreme common value," a university must also be "a diverse and wel–
coming community." As columnist Richard Cohen pointed out,
Hackney took no action against students who seized the paper, and
Hackney's explanations actually patronized the black students "as people
and failed them as their teacher." Such failure, it seems, is becoming
more and more common as PC and multicultural concerns take over the
campus.
The evidence is strong that in elementary and secondary education,
the push for so-called multiculturalism comes from African-American po–
litical elites, employed as a convenient mechanism for gaining political
power and as an emotional scapegoat for the poor state of the black in–
ner city student body. In Baltimore County, for example, the Board of
Education paid Professor Molefi Asante of Temple University, one of
our leading Afrocentrists, to help develop a compulsory Afrocentric cur–
riculum for Maryland - albeit one that is improperly dubbed a multicul–
tural curriculum. What, one wonders, are they going to teach high
school students? That ancient Egypt was a black African culture which
shaped Western civilization? Is it true? Who knows? The assistant super–
intendent of education for the county, Evelyn Chatmont, explained:
"We know for a fact," she told the press, "that so much of history has
been distorted, that it's very, very difficult to determine what is true."
The answer? Simple. "Our responsibility is to present it all, and let the
children sort it out."
Having just hired Dr. Asante to develop their Afrocentric curricu–
lum, at great cost to the local taxpayers, the Board of Education per–
haps did not stop to consider that sixth through ninth graders have little
background by which to discern whether what they are being taught is
true, or whether it is regarded as a hoax by the vast majority of practic–
ing scholars. In his new best-selling book ,
Cllltllre of COII/piaillt: The
Fraying of America,
Robert Hughes puts it as bluntly as possible: "To
plow through the literature of Afrocentrism is to enter a world of
claims ... so absurd that they lie behind satire, like those made for
Soviet science in Stalin's time ." Of course, Hughes is of white Australian
