R.ONALD RADOSH
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descent, which by definition forbids that he be allowed to evaluate the
merits of Afrocentrism.
The Baltimore story, however sad, seems sane compared to the re–
cent scandal surrounding the District of Columbia's attempt to join the
crowd in the march to Afrocentrism. The D .
C.
Board of Education
began a pilot progam for one hundred-thirty children of the Webb
Elementary School, in which the new Afrocentric curriculum would be
tested. They hired Abena Walker, a woman who had created her own
"university" and who promptly awarded herself a Master's Degree to
give herself credentials. The Superintendent of Schools approved the
program, on the basis of a skimpy study outline, and never examined the
worthiness of Ms. Walker's "Pan-African University," of whom she is
perhaps the only student, professor, and president.
Her outline promises "special programs in the arts, the martial arts,
and African languages," as well as "genuine love, concern for and identi–
fication with students." In other words, build up self-esteem through
Afrocentrism - supposedly a good substitute for a real curriculum of
learning. But of course, self-esteem - if indeed it is created via
Afrocentrism - bears little relationship to academic achievement in math
and English, or anything else. As usual, it was left to skeptical
Washington columnists, particularly William Raspberry and Richard
Cohen, to respectively raise the question few dared to ask. As Cohen put
it, " their self-esteem ... will be no compensation for not being compet–
itive." Jobs will not be available to them, "if they come out of school
pumped up with racial chauvinism but dismal basic skills." But in today's
world, it does seem that ideology regularly triumphs over education.
Some have proclaimed a new consensus. Diane Ravitch argues that
the real issue on the campus and the classroom is "not whether there will
be multiculturalism, but what kind of multiculturalism there will be."
She defines two kinds of advocates: pluralists, who know that our com–
mon culture has been shaped by the interaction of different cultural ele–
ments; and particularists, who seek to use history and literature in a
politi cized fashion to create self-esteem for oppressed minorities, or to
develop a new mythology to replace the one- sided approach to history
and literature of the early twentieth century.
I
fear that Ms. Ravitch's
distinction between good and bad multiculturalists, however well-mean–
ing, come too late as a corrective and has not had the effect she meant
it to have.
Recently, an effort has been made, by the likes of Robert Hughes,
Gerald Graff, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and others, to depict themselves as
moderates caught between two extremes - the nasty right whose mem–
bers cannot accept the reality of an ever-changing canon and equally
malleable standards of judging what should belong to it, and the de-
