Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.
particular religious or ethnic or racial, or gender group. It remains a vital
part of America for people to cherish their own traditions, observances, organizations,
rituals, customs, holidays, parades, cuisines. It is these strands
of particularity that lend richness and texture to our society.
Cultural diversity within the frame of civic unity is what the Continental
Congress must have had in mind when it adopted E PLURIBUS
UNUM as the national motto in 1777. It is a delicate balance, and for a
long time it was tilted too far in favor of unum at the expense of pluribus.
Multiculturalism began as an overdue and healthy movement to rectify
the balance. It has done great good in redirecting public and educational
attention to neglected and forgotten groups, themes and viewpoints in history
and culture. It has brought about a beneficial new openness to diverse
perspectives: imagining the arrival of Columbus, for example, from the
viewpoint of those who met him as well as of those who sent him.
But in time multiculturalism developed an ideological thrust. A cult
of ethnicity arose. The post-war civil rights movement struck chord among
non-Anglo-Saxon white minorities aggrieved by the idea of the melting
pot, which they regarded as a sinister Anglo-Saxon conspiracy to boil out
their East and South European traditions and identities. Soon ethnicity
acquired a doctrine. Michael Novak, an influential multicultural ideologue
before he became an influential right wing ideologue wrote a quarter century
ago a book defiantly entitled The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics.
“Growing up in America,” Novak said, “has been an assault upon my
sense of worthiness,” and to improve his self-esteem he promoted the idea
of the ethnic community. Against the conception of America as a nation
of individuals, Novak hailed what he called “the new ethnic politics,”
which, he said, “asserts that groups can structure the rules and goals and
procedures of American life.”
Thus identity politics found its ideology. Where the old ethnic politics
put together ‘balanced tickets’ in order to create majority coalitions for
common objectives, the new ethnic politics goes in for separatimism for
what Todd Gitlin calls “the obsession with group difference” and the consequent
“go-it-alone mood.” Militant multiculturalists, white and non-white,
reject the idea of a common American nationality, denounce the goals
of assimilation and integration and celebrate the virtue of distinct and
indelible ethnic and racial groups. The promotion of minority self-esteem
by gloryfying each minority’s past distorts the teaching of history and literature,
transforming disciplines into therapies. Education is corrupted by
ethnic cheerleading. America is presented not as a nation of individuals
but as a nation of groups with the division into ethnic communities as the
basic structure of American society and the basic meaning of American
history once embraced by the slave owners of the old South.
Is all this really such a good idea There is no empirical evidence
• HOMINES • Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 119