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PARTISAN IliVLEW
immigrants, to create what in America used to be called a melting pot.
Gernuns and "strangers" as well appear to realize that this cannot hap–
pen at the expense of Western cultural traditions, either by rep lacing the
former communist enemy with fundamentalist Islam, by decree from
above, by turning the country into a vast counterculture, or by the
McDonaldization of the world. In 1813, the German writer Moritz
Arndt declared that "the German Fatherland is wherever the German
tongue is heard." N ow, however, other languages and other nationals
wi ll have to be granted equa l status. We can only hope that this will
happen before gangs of skinheads attack more innocent Turks and other
foreigners, before hatred engulfs a society that over the past forty-five
years has been building an exemplary democracy. But what the Germans
do not need is to import our version of political correctness.
MARY LEFKOWITZ
Multiculturalism, U niculturalism, or
Anticulturalism?
Not long ago a student I'd never seen before walked into my office and
said to me politely, " I hear you're against multiculturalism." It turned
out that she was working as an assistant to a local television producer,
who was eager to interview people who were opposed to Afro–
American studies. She had heard (though she hadn't read it herself) that
I'd published an article in
The New Repl/blic
that (as she put it) attacked
Afrocentric hi storians. I expla ined to her that in fact I fully supported
the idea of studying the history of Africa, ancient and modern, and had
voted for Wellesley's multicultural requirement, which asks students to
take one course of their choice about a non-European cu lture. After a
pleasant chat about her work with the television producer, I gave her a
copy of the
New Republic
article and never heard from her again.
At the time I didn't think much about this incident, but in retro–
spect it seems highly representative of the central issues in the multicul–
tural debate. What exactly do people mean by "multicultural?" The stu–
dent equated the terms "multicultura l" and "Afrocentric," whereas I un–
derstood "multicultural" to mean "learning about many different cul–
tures." For the student, at least, multiculturalism was not simply a gen-
