Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.
belonging irrevocably to one or another ethnic group. And the mix is
growing every day. The most telling indicator is the rising rate of intermarriage—intermarriage
across ethnic lines, intermarriage across religious
lines, increasingly intermarriage across racial lines. Marriages between
blacks and whites have tripled in the last thirty years. More Japanese Americans
marry Caucasians more than marry other Japanese Americans. So
many Jewish Americans marry non-Jews that some fear for the future of
the Jewish community. In only about a quarter of marriages today, I am
told, are the partners from the same ethnic group. We may therefore, I
think, count on the primal power of sex—and of love—to defeat those
ideologues who would divide America up into separate ethnic and racial
communities.
But the burden to hold the country together does not rest primarily
on the minorities. Those who want to join America must be received
and welcomed by those who think they own America. Not only must the
minorities want assimilation and integration; the white majority must
want assimilation and integration too. Instead of slamming doors against
minorities and burning crosses on their lawns, thereby driving them into
defensive and embittered separatism, the majority must begin treating
them as if they were just as good and acceptable Americans as they deem
themselves to be. If we can do this, the United States will continue, in a
world increasingly torn apart by tribal antagonisms, as an example of how
a highly differentiated nation holds itself together.
The rising awareness of the fragility of nations everywhere is one reason,
I believe, why the understanding is growing in the United States that
the politics of identity carried too far leads on toward fragmentation and
Balkanization. Another reason for second thoughts about identity politics
is that the cult of ethnicity, carried too far, undermines the Bill of Rights
and especially that cornerstone of American liberties, the First Amendment
of the Constitution.
The Bill of Rights is once more in peril, especially its cornerstone,
the First Amendment, that cherished guardian of our freedoms of speech,
press, worship, assembly and petition. In the good old days the First
Amendment was a target of attack by the right. Conservatives and hyperpatriots
were the ardent advocates of repression and censorship. Many
still are, but today they are joined in the assault on the First Amendment
by identity groups on the left. Even more ironically, the rising demand for
repression and censorship is centered in our universities—the places above
all where unlimited freedom of expression had previously been deemed
sacred. And those who lead the assault on the Bill of Rights do so in the
name of the multicultural society.
We traditionally regard the Constitution as a document written for individuals
and the Bill of Rights as providing further specific protections for
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