I remember an old story about a teacher who was trying to get the attention of the class. So, the teacher walked to the chalkboard and printed in large letters…S E X. The class immediately ceased talking and turned toward the teacher. “Good. Now that I have your attention, let’s get on with today’s math lesson. It’s an old trick, but it works every time.
So…
Multiculturalism and identity politics are a poisonous, addictive narcotics.
As with any virulent narcotic, they destroy the organism it infects. Multiculturalism and identity politics are infecting and destroying the very fabric of the American society.
The overarching goal of America has been, from the beginning, the creation of a society, a culture, based on equality and liberty. E Pluribus Unum is not simply a slogan to be bandied about. It that goal of out of many cultures, we create one unique and unified society which has the same national purpose. To be sure, we have struggled over time, with varying degrees of success and the occasional failure, but over that same period we have recognized and corrected many of our failures. We have fought our internal demons; fought a war to abolish slavery, marched and demonstrated to gain the right to vote for women, struggled to establish civil rights for all, demonstrated for fair wages an employment. Yes…challenges have arisen and continue to arise. We attack those needs with varying degrees of success. Yes…inequity still exists and we continue the struggle to solve those inequities with varying degrees of success. The point is, we still move forward as a united people…or we used to.
We have long presented ourselves as the “great melting pot”, where immigrants from every part of the world can come, live, work and become part of our unique endeavor. So many of us point with pride to our ancestry, our unique ethnicity. We would be hard pressed today to find many of us who are not of mixed ethnicity.
I am the descendant of immigrants. My great-grandfather on my father’s side left County Galway, Ireland in 1848 to escape the harsh conditions caused by the Great Famine. My grandfather on my mother’s side left Slovenia in 1905 to escape the unrest under the Austro-Hungarians. So, what does that make me? An Irish-American? A Slovenian-American. I respect, admire, and at times celebrate my Irish heritage. I do the same with my Slovenian heritage. But I am an American, not a hyphenated American.
My sister and I lived our formative years with our Slovenian grandparents. Slovenian was spoken in the home. We learned, in one way or another, interesting Slovenian phrases. We attended parties at a Slovenian Hall, where the elders talked about “the old country”. We saw interesting Slovenian customs. And, yes, Slovene families tended to live in close proximity to each other.
We did not go to a Slovene school or even a Slovene church. We went to the public school or the Catholic school where our classmates were Czech, Hungarian, Italian, English. We went to church with those same friends. We played sports and games, went to the park and the beach, went to the movies with those same children. Did we know our friends were of a different ethnicity? Kind of hard not to know. Imagine having an Irish last name in a Slovenian home. It really wasn’t unusual, nor did it matter.
Our grandmother would ask that we go grocery shopping with her. I was convinced it was just so we could carry the grocery bags home. Once we stepped out of the house, she stopped speaking Slovenian. She struggled with her English, and that’s where we came in. If she was at a “loss for words”, she would ask us to tell her the right words, and then she would use them.
The Slovenian we learned was just what we could pick up, mostly through repetition and association. When we would ask “how do you say such and such in Slovenian, our grandfather would admonish us. “We are in America; we speak English.”
Over the years I have given thought to the sort of contradiction between the “melting pot” and the desire, the need, to appreciate my origins. The conclusion I arrived at was that rather than a “melting pot” where the combined ingredients create one flavor, our society is more like a “salad bowl”, where we create a new “dish”, but each sampling exemplifies the varied flavors of the ingredients.
I’m an American, pure and simple. My unique character is flavored by my Irish ingredients and by Slovene ingredients. And, if my DNA report is correct, and I have no reason to believe it’s not, there are dashes of some ingredients from Scotland, England, Norway, and a few pinches of other places.
Yes, you could argue that that is multiculturalism. Yes, it’s multicultural, but not in the present context.
Multiculturalism is no longer the recognition of the varied personalities which have gone into making up the unique “salad bowl” of America. Instead, multiculturalism has become divisive, a means to separate us one from the other. Multiculturalism ostensibly resembles the “melting pot”, but where the “melting pot” empowers people from different backgrounds and traditions to assimilate and unify around a common identity as Americans, multiculturalism promotes fragmentation, division, suspicion, and hate. Multiculturalism is “identity politics” where Americans are encouraged to segregate themselves into competing social, political, racial groups according to their proffered “identities” based on ethnicity, language, political affiliation, culture, national origin, sexual orientation, or whatever line of distinction they can find.
The “melting pot” or “salad bowl” celebrated unity in the midst of diversity. Multiculturalism and identity politics pit culture against culture, ethnicity against ethnicity, generation against generation. Multiculturalism undermines American unity; identity politics leads to feuds and vengeance.
Multiculturalism and identity politics advance the notion that who you are is because of your race, ethnicity, or gender orientation. This leads to the conviction that some groups are “privileged” while others are ‘victims” because of the “privileged”.
Multiculturalism and identity politics promote the philosophy of the victim. This philosophy views people, not as individuals, but as a group, members of the “scapegoat” or victim class, incapable of doing well and making a good living because the “privileged” keep them oppressed. If you are doing well, making a good living, it’s because you a “racially privileged” and not because you worked hard, faced setbacks, and overcame.
Multiculturalism and identity politics blame Western civilization and, particularly, American society for fostering the “victim” or “grievance” class. Multiculturalism strives to remake American society into some Progressive utopia.
As Thomas Sowell noted, “What ‘multiculturalism’ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture—and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.”