Slouching Towards Gomorrah

by Robert H. Bork

  That is the reason for bilingual education. Initially, some well-meaning souls saw bilingual education as a way of easing the immigrant child’s entry into American culture. The child would take courses in English but learn many subjects in his native tongue, usually Spanish. Within two or three years, the argument ran, the child would be able to take all of his courses in English. It is now clear, however, that the program is designed not to facilitate but to delay entry into American culture, and, to the degree possible, make certain that assimilation is never complete.

  So many languages are spoken by immigrants that it is impossible to provide bilingual education for all. That is why bilingual education is so often in Spanish, the language most immigrants speak. But that fact gives away the real reason for the programs. Vietnamese and Polish children were put into English-speaking classes and were competent into English long before the Hispanics in bilingual schools.4 That leaves the partisans of bilingualism only the choice of saying that Hispanic children are not as capable as others or admitting that they, the educators, are driven by hostility to American culture, and the rewards to be had by teachers’ unions and educational bureaucrats. The rewards would not be there, however, if ideology had not created the situation.

  Often, the bilingualists do not care whether immigrant children learn English. The key to success for the students is “self-esteem…. Children do badly in school because of their feelings of ‘shame’ at belonging to a minority group rather than the ‘dominant group.’ For the children to do better, teachers must ’consciously challenge the power structure both in their classrooms and schools and in the society at large.”5 As Richard Bernstein writes, “Bilingual education … is an act of rebellion against white, Anglo cultural domination.” And the “animus against assimilation, is not an implicit part of the emerging educational philosophy. It is explicit, open, out there, a standard belief. ’The psychological cost of assimilation has been and continues to be high for many U.S. citizens,’ declares the National Council of Social Studies (NCSS), in Washington, D.C., in its 1992 ’Curriculum Guidelines for Multicultural Education.’ ‘It too often demands self-denial, self-hatred, and rejection of family and ethnic ties.’”6 This pathetic whine is not insignificant since the NCSS is the country’s largest organization devoted to social studies education.

  Public dissatisfaction with the linguistic fracturing of society has led to calls for an English-only amendment to the Constitution. The frustration is understandable, but there is no need to amend the Constitution to achieve an English-speaking nation. All that need be done is the abolition of bilingual education and the repeal of the Voting Rights Act’s requirement of different language ballots. Children from other countries will learn English in public schools as they used to do. Their parents will accept the change once they begin to see its results. Immigrant parents want their children to learn English and become Americans. The opposition to that, manifested in bilingual education, comes from American elites who form an adversarial culture, alienated from the culture of the West and wishing to weaken it.

  In 1989, the Commissioner’s Task Force on Minorities in New York concluded: “African Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto Ricans/Latinos, and Native Americans have all been the victims of an intellectual and educational oppression that has characterized the culture and institutions of the United States and the European American world for centuries.” All young people were being “miseducated” because of a “systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives.” Bernstein asks, rhetorically, “Could the multicultural animus against ‘European culture and its derivatives’ emerge more clearly than that? Here we have a direct statement that the Western culture is harmful to nonwhite children.”7

  Despite the evidence and the frankness of its advocates, most people, including very astute people, tend to accept the beneficent view of multiculturalism put forth by its less candid partisans. Thus, one can find diametrically opposed views of the phenomenon, one put forward, for example, by Richard Bernstein and another articulated by Conor Cruise O’Brien. Bernstein writes, “Multiculturalism is a movement of the left, emerging from the counterculture of the 1960s…. It is a code word for a political ambition, a yearning for more power, combined with a genuine, earnest, zealous, self-righteous craving for social improvement….” He says we are “likely to end up in a simmering sort of mutual dislike on the level of everyday unpleasantness…”8

  O’Brien, on the other hand, thinks that multiculturalism and diversity are “actually both a mask for, and perhaps an unconscious mode for achieving, a unity which would be broader-based and to that extent stronger.… The real agenda is the enlargement of the American national elite to include groups of persons who have traditionally been excluded from the same, mainly for reasons associated with race and gender. What is in view is the enlargement and diversification of the composition of the future governing class of the United States of America.”

  I am afraid it is clear that Bernstein has it right and O’Brien has it wrong. Multiculturalism is advertised by its less candid practitioners as opening students to the perspectives and accomplishments of groups that have been largely ignored and undervalued in conventional curriculums. The goal, it is said, is to enrich the student’s understanding of the world and to teach him respect for and tolerance of others who are different. It substitutes an ethic of inclusion for the older ethic of exclusion. This is the movement’s self-portrait, and O’Brien seems to have accepted it at face value. If there were truth in that advertising, if that were what the goal really is, no one could legitimately object to what is taking place in the American educational system. Unfortunately, there appears to be very little truth in the pretensions of the multiculturalists.

  Bernstein took a two-year leave of absence from the New York Times to gather the facts of the multicultural ideology and its opponents. His is not an impressionistic book or one based on an ideological predisposition; it is a report of empirical findings. He points, for example, to the remarkable change in attitude towards Christopher Columbus between 1892 and 1992. Though not a single new fact about Columbus’s life and exploits had been uncovered, the country’s mood swung from one of uncritical adulation to one of loathing and condemnation, at least among the members of the “intellectual” class. The change was accomplished by the aggressive ideology of multiculturalism. The Columbus turnaround is merely a specific instance of more general alterations in our moral landscape.

  What it signifies, and what becomes increasingly obvious, is that multiculturalism is a philosophy of antagonism to America and the West. The hostility of the multiculturalists to this nation and its achievements can hardly be overstated. Lynne Cheney, the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, quotes a professor who is pleased that multiculturalism has the “potential for ideologically disuniting the nation” by stressing America’s faults so that students will not think this country deserves their special support.9

  That multiculturalism is essentially an attack on America, the European-American culture, and the white race, with special emphasis on white males, may be seen from the curriculum it favors. A curriculum designed to foster understanding of other cultures would study those cultures. Multiculturalism does not. Courses are not offered on the cultures of China or India or Brazil or Nigeria, nor does the curriculum require the study of languages without which foreign cultures cannot be fully understood. Instead the focus is on groups that, allegedly, have been subjected to oppression by American and Western civilization—homosexuals, American Indians, blacks, Hispanics, women, and so on. The message is not that all cultures are to be respected but that European culture, which created the dominance of white males, is uniquely evil. Multiculturalism follows the agenda of modern liberalism, and it comes straight from the Sixties counterculture. But now, in American education, it is the dominant culture.

  Bernstein catalogues the basic changes multiculturalism has made in the nature of public discourse.

  Firs
t is the elimination from acceptable discourse of any claim of superiority or even special status for Europe, or any definition of the United States as derived primarily from European civilization.

  Second is the attack on the very notion of the individual and the concomitant paramount status accorded group identification….

  Third is the triumph of the politics of difference over the politics of equality, that great and still-visionary goal of the civil rights movement. Multiculturalism here is the indictment of one group and the exculpation of all the others….

  This obsession with the themes of cultural domination and oppression [by whites] justifies one of the most important departures from the principal and essential goal of the civil rights movement, equality of opportunity. Multiculturalism insists on equality of results.10

  Hence it is that multiculturalists have turned Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream into a nightmare. He asked that his children “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” which, as Bernstein says, is the “essential ideal of liberalism.” But multiculturalists say, “Judge me by the color of my skin for therein lies my identity and my place in the world.”11

  Multiculturalism requires the quotas or affirmative action that create group dislike of other groups and self-segregation. There is no other way to ensure that each valued ethnic group is represented in the student body and on the faculty. Of late, educators have begun to speak of diversity instead of multiculturalism, but it is the same thing. University presidents and faculties, secondary and primary school principals and teachers, all chant the diversity mantra. So powerful has this harmful notion become that it not only dictates who is admitted to a school but sometimes determines who may leave.

  Students of Asian ancestry, for example, have tried to transfer to public schools whose curriculum was better suited to their ambitions but been denied the transfer on the grounds that their departure would lessen diversity. One father complained that his adopted Korean daughter could contribute no non-western perspective to the school she sought to leave because she had been brought to this country at the age of five months. No matter; she was of the requisite racial group. When the controversy was reported in the newspapers, she was allowed to transfer. But the episode demonstrates that the multiculturalists are sometimes willing to force a person into a cultural identity that person does not have on the grounds of ancestry alone.

  The quality of education must necessarily decline as students turn from substantive subjects to ideologically driven resentments, in the case of non-whites, or guilt, in the case of whites. Although white students are often required to study America’s “oppressed” subcultures and their allegedly superior qualities, it is regarded as racist to require that non-whites study Western culture. That was the meaning of the radicals’ attack on Stanford’s Western Culture program in which students were required to sample the writings of men who had helped shape Western culture—Shakespeare, Dante, Locke, etc. A black student who objected to the program said its message was “Nigger, go home.”12 That exclusionary interpretation is precisely the opposite of the real message of the program, which was “Let us study what we have in common as inheritors of a tradition.” The black student’s objection follows from the perverse teaching of multiculturalism that those who have been “traditionally excluded” must now reject inclusion.

  This has the odd effect of damaging all groups. The insistence on separate ethnic identities means that persons in each group can study their own culture, often in highly flattering and historically inaccurate form. Multiculturalism then means not the study of others but of oneself. The student who immerses himself in multicultural studies, who lives in a dormitory where admission is defined by ethnicity, who socializes only with members of his ethnic group, does not acquire the knowledge and discipline that he might have and does not learn how to deal comfortably with those of other ethnicities. One of the ways in which cultures improve is by borrowing from other cultures. Europe borrowed important aspects of mathematics, for example, from the Arab world. But the essence of multiculturalism is the isolation of groups so that they do not borrow from one another. The result is the relative cultural impoverishment of all groups.

  In education at all levels, the substance of the curriculum changes to accommodate multiculturalist pressures. We have already seen this in feminist and Afrocentric studies, but it is everywhere. In New York state it is official educational doctrine that the United States Constitution was heavily influenced by the political arrangements of the Iroquois Confederacy. The official promulgation of this idea was not due to any research that disclosed its truth. Nor has any other state adopted this nonsensical idea. New York adopted it because the Iroquois mounted an intensive lobbying campaign directed at the State Department of Education. Far from this being a beneficial borrowing from another culture, it was a detrimental forcing of a false notion by one culture on another. John Leo notes that the decision “shows that some school authorities, eager to avoid minority group pressure and rage, are now willing to treat the curriculum as a prize in an ethnic spoils system.”13 That it is ideologcally driven by guilt and not an attempt to pacify a large bloc of voters is clear from the fact that there are only a little more than 38,000 Indians in New York state, most of whom probably have no interest in the myth of the Iroquois and the Constitution.

  This sort of thing is happening across the country as various ethnic groups and feminists demand that history be rewritten according to their party lines. This not only debases history but pits the various groups against one another as they struggle for space in the textbooks. New York’s “interest in history is not as an intellectual discipline,” Schlesinger writes, “but rather as social and psychological therapy whose primary purpose is to raise the self-esteem of children from minority groups.”14

  Those who have traditionally been excluded because of race or gender are not helped by multiculturalists who teach them that European culture and standards are the cause of their difficulties and may be jettisoned, that history has no content aside from its ideological usefulness, that there are different ways of knowing, that linear thinking is a white male stratagem to oppress those who are not white or male, that standard English is no better than a variety of dialects such as “black English “To the extent the traditionally excluded believe any of this, they are additionally handicapped in life, and further excluded. To the extent they are taught that self-esteem comes before achievement and leads to achievement, they are lied to and held back.

  In confidence games, there is a strategy called “cooling out the mark.” One of the con men, not known to be such by the victim, stays behind to sympathize, to point out that being taken wasn’t his fault, and generally to console and calm him so that he will be less likely to go to the police or pursue those who cheated him. Intentionally or not, multiculturalism is like that. It consoles low achievers by telling them that achievement has been falsely defined by white male, Eurocentric standards so that there is really no need to try to meet those standards. The result will be more failure, but the cooled-out minority student will have the consolation of knowing it was not his fault. There could be no strategy better suited to prevent what O’Brien thinks is the purpose of multiculturalism: “the enlargement and diversification of the composition of the future governing class of the United States of America.” If there were a conspiracy by white males to consolidate their hegemony, they would find multiculturalism one of their best methods of oppression.

  The adverse consequences of the multiculturalist relativism do not end there. If members of one ethnic group succeed more often in particular lines of work than members of other cultures, then, according to the multiculturalist philosophy, the reason must be discrimination; it could not be that some cultures are superior to others in preparing people for success in the modern world. If overt discrimination cannot be found, as is often the case because it does not exist, then discrimination must be built into our institutions and standard
s. These are said to be Eurocentric, as indeed they are. They are also said to be designed to buttress the hegemony of white, heterosexual males. Multiculturalism, therefore, necessarily requires affirmative action. If the standards are rigged against some groups, the solution is to use group membership as the basis for advancement. Thus, the multiculturalists have arranged matters so that our diversity does not enrich but festers.

  Multiculturalism, or diversity, also requires “sensitivity.” We cannot, after all, value another person’s culture and outlook equally with our own unless we are sensitive to that which might offend him. Sensitivity, in turn, requires small tyrannies and personal humiliations, or worse. Worse is the destruction of careers and reputations. The only people ordered to take sensitivity training, so far as I am aware, are whites.

  If anyone accused of insensitivity objects that he does not have racist or sexist attitudes, the sensitivity guru, sometimes genially, sometimes accusingly, is likely to respond that everyone, himself included, is a racist and a sexist. There is no way to argue with that. If someone insists that you have attitudes that you yourself are not aware of, it will be impossible for you to prove a negative. You might as well tell a psychoanalyst that you are sure you have no Oedipus complex. He knows better. “By its very nature,” Bernstein writes, sensitivity training “thrusts the concepts of ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ and the various other isms to the forefront, turning them from ugly aberrations into the central elements of American life and implicitly branding anyone who does not share that assumption to be guilty of the very isms that he feels do not lie in his heart.”15 It is as if a prisoner pleading not guilty to a charge of armed robbery merely by denying his guilt became eligible for five to ten years in the penitentiary.