Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA: A SECOND LOOK
that ancestor worship improves the self-esteem or academic performance
of children. I have never noticed that study of the glory that was Greece
or the grandeur that was Rome elevated the grades of Greek-American
and Italian-American kids. The most academically successful of minority
children—Asian-Americans and Jewish-Americans—do not depend
on Asian-centric or Judeo-centric curricula. Self-esteem comes, not from
exhortation, but from achievement.
Nor does ethnic cheerleading enlarge opportunities for minority children
or prepare them for effective entry into American society. As the Ghanian
scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah, now professor of African-American
Studies at Harvard, observes: “There are things that we surely all believe
should be taught American children, namely, the history of the American
political system”—and this goes for children of every color and creed. It
does a good deal more for our children to instruct them in the historical
foundations of democracy and of the American polity than to tell them
how wonderful their ancestors were.
The cult of ethnicity can be pressed too far. “The one absolutely certain
way of bringing this nation to ruin,” Theodore Roosevelt once said,
“of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would
be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate
knot of German-Americans, Irish Americans, English-Americans,
French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each
preserving its separate nationality.”
Three quarters of a century later, we must add a few more nationalities
to TR’s brew. This only strengthens his point. And what was a nightmare
for Theodore Roosevelt is the dream of multicultural ideologues today—a
project that they call on our educational system to promote and implement.
When militant multiculturalists assign the public schools the mission
of protecting and perpetuating separate ancestral cultures, they reject
the historic role of public schools as incubators of a common American
culture—and may reject what David Hollinger calls that “Freedom of
individual affiliation” which has been central to American self definition
and American mobility. Read “the Great Gatsby”!
Does anyone really suppose that the republic would be better off today
if in the 19th century it had subscribed to the multicultural agenda
and encouraged the German-Americans who came here to retain their
language, their customs, their political principles and practices; and the
Italian-Americans the same; and the French-Americans the same; and so
on down the line, each group herded into its own linguistic, cultural, ethnic
enclave Does anyone really think that this would have built an equable,
happy, peaceful, strong, united nation
What is fatal to the politics of identity is the simple fact that most
Americans are of mixed ethnic ancestry and do not see themselves as
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Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 • HOMINES •