It’s tempting to say that multiculturalism is dead in America, but that would imply that it was actually alive once.
Multiculturalism — the ideology that promotes equal status for different cultures in one nation — emerged circa 1970 when foreign-born residents made up the lowest percentage of the American population in US history. Although it came to encompass other minority groups, African-Americans gave the multicultural movement its initial moral impetus when black activists concluded that they no longer desired an entree into a mainstream culture that denied them full membership.
Since then, multiculturalist rhetoric has made tremendous gains in the United States, particularly in educational circles. In academia, the notion of assimilation has been rejected and the “melting pot” metaphor replaced with “mosaic” or “salad bowl” — images that underline the cultural distinctiveness of ethnic and racial minorities.
But rhetoric and reality are different things. Although multiculturalists have persuaded school boards to include the contributions of nonwhites in the nation’s history books, they’ve never gotten close to persuading the federal government to adopt a true multicultural system, in which minority groups would be provided with resources so that they could maintain distinct and permanent parallel universes, truly blacks-only or Chinese-only cultures.
Nor has the rhetoric of multiculturalism undermined the fundamental processes of cultural convergence and assimilation in America. Sure, the government has backed such “multiculti” programs as bilingual education for the children of immigrants and multilingual ballots for new citizens, but such measures are limited, they don’t preserve cultural difference in the long term or in any permanent way place foreign languages on a par with English. In the end, the formal ideology that began as a call for separate but equal cultures has gradually morphed into “multiculturalism lite” — an ideology that promotes diversity as a national strength and even a national definition.
“Multiculturalism was born of radicalism, but that kind is confined to the academy and marginal to the way Americans live,” says Gary Gerstle, a historian at the University of Maryland. “’Hard’ multiculturalism was defeated, tamed, domesticated and then absorbed. What we have now is a soft multiculturalism that has helped build broad acceptance for the idea that as long as you declare yourself to be an American, then celebrating your ethnicity is acceptable.”
So why then does “multiculturalism” strike so much fear in the hearts of critics? Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., has called the “cult of multiculturalism” “cultural suicide.” Former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm has predicted that multiculturalism will lead to the “destruction of America.”
Perhaps the best example of the undue fear of cultural separatism is the English-only movement. Despite incontrovertible data that immigrant families move inexorably toward English over time, activists insist that the primacy of English is threatened. Our nation’s educational system is geared almost exclusively for English, and US culture is one of the most influential in history, yet they still believe that coercion is needed to bring people into the fold.
In the meantime, each year the global economic value of English grows steadily. It is projected that by 2050 half the planet will speak it proficiently. It seems foolhardy to suggest that its power eludes families who put down roots within our borders. “There has probably never been a period in US history when English was so dominant,” says Richard Alba, one of the most distinguished scholars of assimilation.
And despite our fears, I suspect that, deep down, most Americans actually understand this. President Bush, who emphasizes assimilation to assuage the fearful as he seeks immigration reform, gets it: There is no serious cultural or linguistic separatist threat to national sovereignty.
Recently, Bush directed Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to create a “task force on new Americans” to expand local initiatives to help immigrants assimilate. Although not a bad idea, the funding he recommended to implement the plan reveals its real priority to the administration: Not one dollar was set aside.
The next day, the president gave an address, in English, to the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in Washington. In the end, he wasn’t afraid to employ his own brand of multiculturalism. “Que Dios les bendiga,” he said. May God bless you.
— Gregory Rodriguez is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
