scannerRussell Jacoby

The Myth of Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism, cultural diversity, cultural pluralism: in the United States few causes have won such widespread enthusiasm. These phrases kick off a thousand speeches and articles; they appear in hundreds of essays and books. Government officials, college administrators, corpor- ate executives, museum curators, high-school principals—to name just a few—declare their commitment to multiculturalism. One sign of the times: the American Council of Education published a guide to programmes and publications on cultural diversity that runs to four hundred pages.

Even conservatives, who might be expected to resist a liberal steamroller, often join in, confining their objections to fringe formations, not the thing itself. Publicly at least, they hesitate to protest a larger multicultura- lism. To establish its credentials, a conservative foundation puts out a magazine called Diversity edited by an African-American with a Jewish name, David S. Bernstein.

These causes were not always so popular. Horace M. Kallen, who virtually copyrighted the term ‘cultural pluralism’, stated in 1924 that the idea was ‘popular nowhere in the United States’. He knew why. Vast immigration and the First World War aggravated fears of foreigners; Americanization and assimilation, not pluralism and diversity, became the watchwords. For Kallen the revived Ku Klux Klan exemplified a repressive American conformity: ‘The alternative before Americans is Kultur Klux Klan or Cultural Pluralism.’

Seventy years later everyone has joined Kallen in celebrating ‘cultural pluralism’. Why? Is this a case of victorious liberalism? Has a dissenting programme supported by Kallen and a few other intellectuals won over everyone? Has a new and varied immigration forced recognition of cultural diversity? Have Americans become more tolerant, liberal and cosmopolitan? Perhaps, but this is hardly the whole story—and perhaps none of it.

Let me put my cards on the table: multiculturalism and the kindred terms of cultural diversity and cultural pluralism are a new cant. Incessantlyinvoked, they signify anything and everything. This is not simply an

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example of sloppy terms; these phrases have become a new ideology. To put it provocatively: multiculturalism flourishes as a programme while it weakens as a reality. The drumbeat of cultural diversity covers an unwelcome truth: cultural differences are diminishing, not increasing. For better or worse only one culture thrives in the United States, the culture of business, work and consuming.

The difficulty of arguing, even stating this, derives from the confusion that besets the terms. ‘Multiculturalism’, ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘cultural pluralism’ all contain a protean word: culture. What is a culture? A small library could be assembled with books that address this question. If shelved by date, however, such books might roughly reflect a conceptual shift. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a notion that ‘culture’ meant ‘cultivating’ art, philosophy and spirit dwindled. From Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) to T.S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) some works sought to preserve ‘culture’ as the turf of education and art, contrasting it to a more material ‘civilization’. The effort was futile: liberals, Marxists, Freudians, anthro- pologists—among others—rejected as elitist and reactionary any distinc- tion between the two concepts. Arnold’s book opened by quoting a liberal politician who denounced ‘culture’ as meaning ‘a smattering of the two dead languages of Greek and Latin’. This idea became common currency: culture reeked of aristocratic irrelevancies. Neither Marxists nor Freudians saw any justification in making a separation. ‘I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization,’ stated Freud.

Yet it was less socialist or Freudian materialism than anthropological relativism which carried the day. In the name of liberalism, anthropolo- gists effectively dispatched as prejudiced the idea of culture as learning or cultivation. The key work may have been a twentieth-century anthro- pological bestseller, Ruth Benedict’s 1934 Patterns of Culture. Benedict surveyed three peoples—the American Indians of the southwestern Pueblos and the Northwest Coast, and the Dobu of Melanesia—and argued succinctly not only against biological determinism, but for the relativity of cultural standards. ‘Social thinking at the present time,’ she concluded, ‘has no more important task before it than that of taking adequate account of cultural relativity.’

Benedict drew upon other anthropologists like Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber who also sought to undercut cultural chauvinism. Cultures vary around the globe, all people have a culture, and all cultures are roughly equal: this was the drift of much of their thought. ‘The comparative study of culture,’ stated Kroeber, has diminished ‘ethnocentrism—the paro- chial conviction of the superiority of one’s own culture—from which so much intolerance springs . . . Anthropologists now agree that each culture must be examined in terms of its own structure and values.’

The problem with this anthropological relativism is not its tolerance and liberalism; rather it obscures what constitutes distinct cultures. When ‘culture’ is defined as an ‘ensemble of tools, codes, rituals, behaviours’, not simply every people, but every group and subgroup has a ‘culture’. The cultures Benedict studied differed dramatically. At least no one would confuse the Dobuan growing practices with those of present-day

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farmers or suburban gardeners. ‘Yams are conceived as persons,’ Benedict wrote of Dobu farming, ‘and are believed to wander nightly from garden to garden . . . Incantations lure the roaming yams to remain in one’s own garden at the expense of the garden in which they were planted.’

Once this anthropological relativism shifts from wandering yams or Zuni marriage rituals to American society, things get trickier. For what constitutes a ‘culture’ within American society? To judge some group behaviour as not comprising a culture—as uncultured—appears ethno- centric or biased; rather, many anthropologists, sociologists and observers conclude that anything and everything might be a culture. It is then a short step to talking of a ‘culture’ of the poor, drug addicts, dog fanciers, sports fans, computer hackers, suburbanites and so on. Each has its rituals, codes and language that constitute a culture.

Of course, cultural diversity or multiculturalism does not usually encompass the ‘culture’ of drug addicts or dog fanciers; it refers to the ‘culture’ of African-Americans or Korean-Americans or Latinos. Yet the relativizing of culture guts multiculturalism, which supposes that every group has a distinct culture. In a premodern world, separate groups might develop singular cultures, but in highly organized American society the maintenance of unique cultures is improbable; neither the means nor the requisite isolation exist. To talk of distinct American ‘cultures’ denotes something very different from the culture of the Dobus. The American cultures partake of a larger American industrial society; they carry its signature in their souls and their wallets.

To put this sharply: America’s multiple ‘cultures’ exist within a single consumer society. Professional sports, Hollywood movies, automobiles, designer clothes, name-brand sneakers, television and videos, commer- cial music and CDs pervade America’s multiculturalism. These ‘cultures’ live, work and dream in the same society. Chicanos, like Chinese- Americans, want to hold good jobs, live in the suburbs, and drive well- engineered cars. This is fine—so does almost everyone—but how do these activities or aspirations compose unique cultures?

Amid the interminable discussions on multiculturalism virtually no one admits that the diverse ‘cultures’ do not offer any real alternative to American life, leisure or business. A section of the Left may be the worst sinner or the most hypocritical; it jabbers about diversity, hegemony and ‘the other’, but its vision is no different than anyone else’s. Heated disputes turn on curriculum, programmes and hiring; the implicit goal is always the same: what is the best way to enter and prosper in the American mainstream? Exceptions are small, insular communities like the Amish and Hasidic Jews, who stand outside of the mainstream—and largely outside of discussions of multiculturalism.

Obviously all groups do not participate in American society with the same success. Those excluded because of racial or ethnic injustice, however, do not necessarily constitute a distinct culture—far from it. In his provocative book on poor black children in Philadelphia, On the Edge,Carl H. Nightingale found that these kids increasingly have succumbed to consumer society, which targets them as vulnerable. Precisely because

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they are excluded and humiliated, they become fanatical devotees of name brands, gold chains, and pricey cars—insignias of American success.

‘As soon as they are able, the kids begin to demand the basic building blocks of the b-boy outfit. Already at five or six, many kids in the neighborhood,’ Nightingale reports, can recite the whole canon of adult luxury—from Gucci, Evan Piccone, and Pierre Cardin, to Mercedes and BMW . . . From the age of ten, kids become thoroughly engrossed in the Nike’s and Reebok’s cult of the sneaker . . .’ Then comes the fascination with rappers and drug dealers. The ‘ubiquitous rap tapes’ show ‘a preoccupation with consumption and acquisition that never character- ized the old soul and R&B hits.’ The lure of the local drug dealers arises from their ‘glorification of blackness . . . with virtuoso performances of conspicuous consumption’. Nightingale concludes that ‘the cult of consumption has permeated the emotional and cultural life of poor urban African-American kids’ with devastating consequences.

No group wants to hear that it lacks culture, but that is hardly the issue; rather the question is how different the various cultures are from each other and from the dominant American culture. For instance, scholars from Melville Herkovits to Sterling Stuckey have documented the persistence of African tales, songs, and language in the American black experience. This is a valid and valuable endeavour, but it does not mean that in the 1990s African-Americans constitute a distinct culture—any more than Italian-Americans or Polish-Americans.

To what degree have ethnic cultures survived or flourished in the United States? The argument has waxed and waned, but since the 1960s the cheerleaders have drowned out the sceptics. In his 1981 book The Ethnic Myth Steven Steinberg argued against the cultural and ethnic romantics. The ethnic revival, he stated, cannot undo the long-term ‘atrophy of ethnic cultures and the decline of ethnic communities’; the revival is really a ‘dying gasp’ of groups as they enter the mainstream. In a new edition of the book Steinberg comments on his ‘utter failure’ to slow the ethnic hype.

Yet the evidence for the loss of distinct ethnic cultures is strong. For instance, observers regularly cite the number of languages spoken by American children as proof of cultural diversity. Schools in Fairfax County, Virginia serve students from seventy different languages. While this presents enormous pedagogical problems, it does not challenge the domination of English. Most studies conclude that new immigrants acquire English as fast, if not faster, than previous generations. Second- and third-generation Korean-Americans or Haitian-Americans will speak English, and probably only English.

Indeed the United States is a relentlessly monolingual society—much more than other multicultural societies. Kallen’s favorite example of a harmonious and diverse society was Switzerland, where bi- and tri- lingualism are common. In his damning study of the American curriculum, Tourists in Our Own Land, Clifford Adelman of the US

Department of Education remarks on the minuscule number of serious students of foreign languages. ‘In all the contemporary discussions of

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“multiculturalism” and “cultural diversity”,’ he complains, ‘we hear little, if anything, about native language and language maintenance, let alone do we see native speakers of English reaching out to immerse themselves in another culture through second-language acquisition.’ Without studying another language, states Adelman, people ‘will never be more than tourists’. In different terms, learning about Africa through Kwanzaa, a popular holiday based on African ceremonies that was created by an American professor, is like learning about Germany through Oktoberfest.

Diversity as a Commodity

Good evidence exists for a counter-argument. The racial mix in schools and campuses; the alterations in curriculum; the spread of ethnic restaurants and eating; the new immigrants: all can be chalked up as proof of a certain multiculturalism. None of this can or should be dismissed. Confirmation of a new cultural heterogamy can be found in all corners of life. The friends of my daughter, who attends a Los Angeles public highschool, include a Korean-American, an Eritrean and a Japanese- African-American. We joke that they look like a little United Nations when they go out together.

Of course, they are going out shopping. While the face and faces of American society have unquestionably changed, the consuming heart has not skipped a beat. The new immigration has improved American eating or, at least, widened the spectrum of restaurants. But can anyone claim that Thai, Mexican, Chinese, Italian and Middle Eastern food bars in the local mall illustrate multiculturalism and not the great leveller, consumer- ism? Does the fact that salsa sales surpassed ketchup sales signify that the United States has become culturally diverse or just that more people eat Mexican-American food?

Indeed the most devoted multiculturalists might be American corpor- ations, a point which David Rieff has recently argued. ‘Are the multiculturalists truly unaware,’ he asked, ‘of how closely their treasured catchphrases—“cultural diversity”, “difference”, the need to “do away with boundaries”—resemble the stock phrases of the modern corpor- ation: “product diversification”, “the global market”, and “the bound- ary-less company”?’ AT&T sponsors ads aimed at thirty different groups. Time magazine in a special issue on ‘The New Face of America’ quotes an AT&T manager with the revealing title, Director of Multicultural Marketing. ‘Marketing today,’ she states, ‘is part of anthropology.’

If marketing and consumerism call the shots, why are the issues of cultural identity so charged? Why is America obsessed with cultural diversity? I offer two reasons. For starters, ‘cultural diversity’ is a genteel phrase for ethnic and racial parity and sometimes for affirmative action. Instead of saying we need more African-Americans or Latinos in a foundation, corporation or school, the preferred phrase is we need more ‘cultural diversity’. This sounds ethereal and elevating.

Proportional representation of racial groups can be argued on other grounds, however. To read racial and ethnic inequalities as cultural

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differences is not only inaccurate, but makes a bad situation worse. It fosters group chauvinism and enmities; it infers every group has a special perspective and intelligence, which each member represents. An African- American is hired, then, not from simple justice but for cultural reasons; he or she carries a distinctive sensibility.

To be sure, cultural diversity is more than a bureaucratic nicety. It taps into the emotional dimensions of self and community, which today are as fragile as the rain forest. Cultural loss may be inevitable for productive citizens of an advanced industrial society. The cost, and the loss, give rise to regrets, pain, and sometimes anger; few embrace a vision of self and society stripped of a personal history and community. As people willingly or unwillingly surrender their past, they make gestures towards it. The ‘uprooted’, the title of Oscar Handlin’s classic work on immigration, search for ‘roots’, the title of Alex Haley’s book. The rooted don’t have to search.

The quest for roots and cultural identity may be laudable, benign or hostile—or all three. It may involve real learning about the past, and perhaps real self-transformation; it usually settles on flags, bumper stickers or T-shirts (‘Kiss me, I’m Italian’), now conveniently available from a new apparel chain, ‘Nationalities’, catering to the ethnically proud; it may become prickly and aggressive. Belligerent affirmations of cultural identity may be most frequent where the loss is most striking. At elite universities Chicano or African-American students are on the path from the barrios and ghettos to the working and consuming mainstream. They are buying in and being bought out. They know it; they want it, and they half hate it.

Little suggests that any group except the most marginal and stubborn can maintain, or even wants to maintain, a distinct culture amid American society. This is not a new proposition. ‘Cultural pluralism’, as Kallen formulated it, may have been a brave effort to preserve cultural identity in the face of a repressive Americanization. It was this, and something more—or less; it was also a half-step in cultural accommodation. Kallen, born in Silesia, was brought to the United States by his father, an orthodox rabbi; the father’s implacable religious world repelled the son. ‘He was the last of the old school of Jews,’ Kallen wrote of his father, ‘who made absolutely no concession to their environment.’

Kallen wanted Judaism to move towards the mainstream, to make it ‘secular, humanist, scientific, conditioned on the industrial economy, without having ceased to be livingly Jewish’. Kallen and others who joined him in the programme of ‘cultural pluralism’, like the African- American Alain Locke, may have been more successful than they wished. Today the terms ‘cultural pluralism’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘cultural diversity’ summon up less different lives in different cultures than different lifestyles in American society. The ‘diverse’ cultures all dream of, plan for and sometimes enjoy the same American success. Only the ideologues of multiculturalism have not heard the news.

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