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their language, their culture, their religions by an Anglo-American hege–
monic culture. And the counter-history insists all that must be made good
and must not be allowed to happen to the new immigrants. Their story too
must now be told, particularly the story of the Mexicans and other
Hispanics, and of the various Asian groups, who have their own history of
state and popular discrimination. Most disturbingly, in this counter-history
new candidates for inclusion keep on arising, under the ever more capa–
cious banner of "multiculturalism," such as the gays and lesbians.
The problem created by the rise of multiculturalism is that the story
of the building of the American nation will be told more as a series of fail–
ures than a series of successes. And that offends the majority of Americans
who believe ardently in the first story and become indignant when educa–
tors and minority advocates want to replace it with the second.
Three chief fears are evident in the general alarm over multicultural–
ism. The first fear is of national disunity, as expressed in the most widely
read critique of multiculturalism in the schools, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s
The Disuniting ofAmerica.
("Fraying" and similar terms are also popular in
the titles of books on multiculturalism. Todd Gitlin refers to
The Twilight
if
Common Dreams-though
his dreams refer more to the dream of a unit–
ed working class than of the nation as a whole. John Miller titles his book
The Unmaking
if
Americans.
And so on.)
Does the multiculturalism I have described, the kind dominant in the
schools, threaten national unity? I think most people will agree that cer–
tain kinds of disunity-the actual division of the United States into a
number of states, as occurred in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and as is
feared in Canada-is simply not in the cards. While the civil wars in
Lebanon or Bosnia are often referred to polemically as a warning of what
multiculturalism may lead us to, few sober minds think this kind of
extreme outcome is our problem. What new nation could possibly arise in
and divide the United States? The political separation of the areas of dense
Mexican-American population in the Southwest, for example, is proposed
by no one in the Mexican-American community-it was once a dream of
a few militants in the 1960s and 1970s-and is hardly thinkable, when one
considers the degree to which these populations are integrated into the
American economy, are active in American politics, become citizens,
intermarry, and the like.
But short of that, how -about the kind of disaffection which leads, for
example, to mutiny in war, to distinctive ethnic and separatist parties, to the
refusal to participate in patriotic ceremonies? One sees little or nothing of
this. Disaffection there is. Multiculturalism directs the attention of youths
of minority groups to their grievances rather than their successes, to the
degree of their separation rather than the degree of their integration, but
