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An Anatomy of Multiculturalism
The current debate over the canon is growing polarized between defense of tradition against “barbaric” innovations, and defense of change against the “tyranny” of received wisdom. At the risk of making both sides unhappy, the dean of Yale College argues for a more nuanced approach.
April 1994
by Richard Brodhead
Richard Brodhead, Dean of Yale College, is the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English.
There once was a time when literate culture—the things educated people know and believe other people should know—possessed certain well-marked features. The contents of literate culture were internally coherent; they were widely agreed to; and above all they were agreed to be universal in their interest or meaning. What happened in education, according to this understanding, was that we came out of whatever local, parochial origin we happened to have been born in to meet on the ground of the universally significant. In literature, we studied the work not of those who expressed themselves “like us,” but of writers who transcended such limits of time and place—writers with names like Homer and Shakespeare. In philosophy we read not those who thought the way people think where we came from, but thinkers of perennial, transcultural significance: Plato, for instance, or Rousseau.
A current caricature says that this model of education was only ever subscribed to by the elite, but historically this is quite untrue. During its long reign the concept of universal culture was often valued especially highly by outsiders. When W. E. B. DuBois, the great African American intellectual of the turn of the last century, looked for an image of a profound human unity to set against the racial segregations being perfected in his time, he turned to the literary classics: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not,” he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). You would recoil if I sat next to you at the whites-only lunch counter, DuBois implies, but Shakespeare doesn’t when I sit and read his plays. For DuBois, culture restores the common ground that local social arrangements deny.
The educational revolution for which multiculturalism is a shorthand name embodies an unravelling of this older consensus. Multiculturalism has arisen through the spreading of the idea that the so-called universal was in fact only partial: one side of the story pretending to be the whole story, the interests of some groups passing themselves off as the interests of all. “Tonto! Tonto! We are surrounded by Indians!&rdqip; the Lone Ranger said in an old joke; and like Tonto, many contemporary readers have come to respond: “What do you mean ‘we?’” So a line like “The Odyssey exemplifies the fundamental human desire to wander and adventure,” a classroom truism not long ago, would now provoke the quick retort: “‘Human’ to be sure, if humans are assumed to be men. But what about that wife who sat home while Odysseus got to wander?”
In recent years the growing suspicion of alleged universals has led to a heightened sense that there are always many parties to every human experience, and that their experiences of the same event are often profoundly divergent. In the wake of this realization, it has come to seem that real education is to be found not in the move from the local to the generalizedly “human,” but in the effort to hear and attend to all the different voices of human history—the voices of those who have dominated the official stories, but also those silenced or minimized by the official account. We know we are in the neighborhood of this new plan of education whenever history is given us in plural, contending versions: when the story of The Odyssey is also considered from Penelope’s point of view; when Columbus’s discovery of America is seen not just from the European but also from the Arawak or Taino vantage; when the history of the Pilgrim settlement takes into account the different history it produced for native populations; and so on.
We have all seen the profound educational shift that has taken place in this country as the second of these models has begun to displace the first in recent years. Having been taught in the older of these ways, but lived to teach and be reeducated in the newer one, I have had, by pure historical coincidence, an intimate experience of this great tectonic shift. Here I offer a few reflections on how this still-unfolding revolution looks to a person who has seen it from both sides.
There are, in truth, a great many things to say about this transformation. The first and most obvious is that it embodies a playing out in education of a contemporary social drama that ranges far beyond the sphere of education itself. When our successors look back on the second half of this century, the Civil Rights movement will surely strike them as one of the most decisive developments in the history of our time. As we know, this movement led a nation that had accepted legal segregation to become first embarrassed by, then to seek to reform, the practice of discrimination based on race. Having begun with this focus, the Civil Rights movement has extended itself by the force of analogy, creating the perception that many other forms of social differentiation—the different treatment of women, of other minorities, of the disabled, and so on—were as unjust and unjustifiable as racial discrimination. The modern sentiment that men and women should win advancement only on the grounds of individual ability, and not because of the groups they can be lumped into, has made for changes in college admissions, corporate hiring, professional recruitment, and virtually every other social practice in the United States. In the world of education, it has expressed itself as multiculturalism. Multiculturalism embodies the ideal of equal opportunity implemented at the level of the curriculum—the urge to open the field of study, like other places of visibility and prestige, to women, minorities, and others previously left out of account.
To its partisans, multicultural education is a matter of justice done at last. But there are many who are in sympathy with these social goals who still regard their educational effects as pernicious. One common cry is that this movement’s political ends are leading it to abandon a long-cherished heritage education has passed down from generation to generation. But to this it can be replied that the history of education is a history of change more than any of us like to admit. We all tend to share the sense that the things we studied in school had probably been taught there since time immemorial, and so should continue to be taught until the end of time. But our schoolings were themselves often products of reforms that had succeeded and then been forgotten. What subject could seem more timeless than English? But English wasn’t thought a fit matter for university study before the 19th century: it was a modern, vernacular literature, and education’s business was with the Classical. My own field, American literature, entered college curricula later still, not much earlier than 1940, having been dismissed as a mere colonial appendage of English after English got itself academically accepted. “What … at one time has been held in little estimation, and has hardly found place in a course in liberal instruction, has, under other circumstances, risen to repute, and received a proportional share of attention,” President Jeremiah Day wrote in the Yale Report of 1828. Seen against such a background, it may be possible to regard current curricular revolutions as the latest chapter of a long story of change, not an unprecedented deviance saved for modern times.
But the central objection to multicultural reforms comes from the belief that traditional literate culture is more meaningful than newly promoted objects of study—that the lives and works of the hitherto ignored, however much we may wish to feature them for sentimental or political reasons, are less remarkable human achievements than the classics, and their study therefore less rewarding. (Saul Bellow meant this when he asked: “Where is the Zulu Tolstoy?”) This is a weighty charge, but to it we might reply: How could you know that these things are less valuable except by having studied them, extended them your sympathy, and given them your patient attention? A silent premise of much of my education was that there were all manner of things not worth knowing about and that we could know they were not worth knowing without bothering to consult them. When I came to the study of American literature, for example, I often read that Hawthorne, Melville, and the other geniuses of the American Renaissance wrote in opposition to a popular sentimental literature of unimaginable banality, and—in a beautiful convenience—my contemporaries and I understood that there was no need to read this work in order to be confident of its perfect worthlessness. From a later vantage I can testify that when one takes the trouble to look into them, ignored or downvalued traditions—even the mid-19th century sentimental novel—can turn out to contain creations of extraordinary power and interest. (There would be no need to make this point for our own time, when the achievements of women and minorities are unmistakable; what contemporary literature course would leave out such great American writers as the Asian-American Maxine Hong Kingston, or the African American Toni Morrison, or the Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez?) My own career in the last 15 years had led me to be increasingly engaged with writers from outside the traditional canon. In my courses I now frequently teach authors from hitherto ignored traditions together with their more famous contemporaries—Frederick Douglass and Fanny Fern with Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott and Charles W. Chesnutt with Mark Twain. And in my classes such writers do not just add new material, they substantially change and enrich the terms on which every author is grasped and understood.
In my experience then, without causing any defection from the classic authors I still love, teach, and value, the changes associated with multiculturalism have brought a real renovation, a widening of the field of knowledge and a deepened understanding of everything it contains. Yet without in any way retracting what I have said, it seems to me possible to wonder whether current ways of conceptualizing and implementing multicultural education are as problem-free as some proponents imply. If the older model of education had its limits, the new program has a potential to enmesh us in limits of its own; and a full assessment would want to reckon these dangers together with the advantages it might supply.
To mention three problems very quickly: Multiculturalism has promoted an inclusionistic curriculum. Its moral imperative not to discriminate leads it to want to put everything in and leave nothing out. But there is an undeniable danger that the practice of universal curricular representation can degenerate into high-minded tokenism. Everyone has seen the new-style school anthologies and curricular units with snippet samplings of all the nation’s or world’s peoples. Like all official school instruments, these show the strong sense of feeling answerable to a vigilant cultural authority that watches their every move. The old-style textbook paid obeisance to an imaginary censor who asked: “Are we being sufficiently patriotic? Are we avoiding blasphemy and smut?” The new one’s choices show it similarly attentive to a moral overseer who asks for instance: “Have we got our Native American? Our Asian-American? Is our black a man? If so, have we also got a black woman?”
I mean no denigration of these groups when I say that a curriculum composed by checking off the proper inclusion of such groups often results in tokenistic representation, and, worse, in what I’d call “Epcotization”: the reproduction of complicated cultural experiences into so many little manageable units, pleasurably foreign yet quickly consumable, that we can wheel in and out of at high velocity and leave with a complacent sense that we have now appreciated that. To my mind, it would be not a hater but a lover of serious multiculturalism who would feel that much contemporary multicultural education teaches naïve, presumptuous attitudes toward the cultures it intends to honor. A week on Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima or Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in the well-meaning modern classroom and the mysteries of Chicano or African life seem to lie revealed! But I would have thought that one of the first points we would want to learn about other people is that their lives are not so easily known, and that their cultures exist not to display their beauties to outsiders, but in part to protect them against such intrusions. As the benevolent study of other cultures gets more deeply installed in the earliest levels of education I can imagine the objects of multicultural appreciation rising up against their appreciators to say: “Recognize our reality, yes, but stop thinking you can know us so easily.” Such a reply has already been heard from the Native American woman who wrote to the New York Times to ask, in response to an article on a California grade-school curriculum in which children learned to perform mini-versions of tribal rituals, how they would like it if their children were taught how to perform the crucifixion with popsicle sticks? Zora Neale Hurston, the great novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote this warning against the presumptions of culture-crossing in her ethnological study Mules and Men (1936): “The theory behind our [i.e., African American] tactics: ‘The white man is always trying to know somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind.’”
In a parallel naïvete, the “It’s a Small World” or “Rainbow Curriculum” tends to put forth an Edward Hicks model of cultural relations, displaying a peaceable kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb and every other beast. But this humane image conceals the lesson that the relations among cultures tend quite as often to conflict as to complementarity. I remember a colleague of mine coming back from a year in Berlin to report how mystified European academics were by the American desire to teach all our separate traditions in place of a unified, common culture. In the vicinity of Eastern Europe, he said, such a presentation would be a reminder of ethnic conflicts always threatening to erupt into violence. This was in 1988, on the eve of the Yugoslavian civil war.
In addition to these potentials for naïvete, a second danger of modern multiculturalism lies in the tendency to confer a dubious absoluteness on group identities and group labels. Some parts of American society are experiencing a kind of romance of gender and ethnicity at present, in which an alluring aura comes to surround an object to the extent that that it can be found to derive from a formerly marginalized group. Through this familiar logic, a book like Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree won wide adoption as a high and junior high school text in part because its author was understood to be an Indian (it has since been learned that he was a white segregationist); and even so powerful a book as Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God has received a curricular exposure out of all proportion to its interest because its author fit the double categories Woman and Black. (For Hurston’s ironic reflections on such an abstraction or generalization of her meaning, read her essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me.”)
To practice this kind of extrapolation from the person to the category catches a valuable half-truth, namely that none of us is only individual, and all of us have had our individual lives shaped by the social positions we have lived in. At the same time, a perpetual and unself-critical practice of extrapolation from person to category negates the countervailing truth—that no human group is homogeneous, and that no person has his or her identity set solely by the groups he or she belongs to. When we teach the habit of thinking of people as Men and Women and Whites and Blacks we run the risk of teaching—without meaning to—that people can be adequately identified by such generalizing labels. But this way danger lies, for what made the multicultural revolution necessary in the first place was the existence of a world where qualified people could be denied places in schools because they were blacks, or because they were women, and so on.
Last, just to the extent that they value the enrichment it supplies, proponents of multiculturalism will want to protect against another lurking danger: the presumption that its contributions have a monopoly on everything important to know. Occasionally one meets people for whom multiculturalism means not the amplification of a knowledge now found incomplete, but the notion that what has heretofore been ignored is valuable, and what has hitherto been valued is pernicious, part of a conspiracy of dehumanization and oppression. I confess that I have met products of recent education who knew the new pan-ethnic literary canon to perfection but who were ignorant of great traditional authors and content to be so; people who had subtle thoughts about (for instance) Nella Larsen’s recently rediscovered novel Passing, but who took no interest in Faulkner’s nearly contemporary novel of racial passing, Light in August, since Faulkner was a famous misogynist.
What is this attitude? A new manifestation, surely, of the same presumption I mocked in multiculturalism’s more traditionalist foes, the presumption that what I already know and like is worth knowing, and what I don’t is fit to ignore. But no educational program can contain the whole of wisdom. Every educational model closed-mindedly embraced can be made a home for prejudice and self-limitation, the new as much as the old. Multiculturalism’s great achievement was to teach us that traditional literate culture did not include everything worth knowing, and that the right corrective for its limits was to reach outside its boundaries and learn to appreciate the different things encountered there. But multicultural education will do itself a favor if it remembers to apply this same lesson to itself: to be aware of the boundaries its own enthusiasms establish, and to strive to feel the power of things outside its ken—the works of traditional culture not least. (And there are still plenty of world cultures that are not registered with any detail or seriousness even in “reformed” American education.)
The current revolution in education has opened our eyes to many worlds of human experience that lie outside of received accounts. In so doing, it has produced an enormous enrichment and made school an exciting place. But what multiculturalism is not is an all-purpose solution to the problem of education. Like all educational programs, it has things it can teach us, and like all programs it will enforce its inevitable limits on us if we do not take pains to avoid them. That said, it seems to me that the major challenge for thoughtful education now is neither to try to prevent the multicultural revolution nor simply to help install it in power. Rather, it is to subject this program to the fullest possible exercise of intelligence, imagination, curiosity, and self-criticism, so that as we add its contributions to the field of knowledge, we maximally realize its powers of extension—and maximally protect ourselves from its powers of limitation.  |
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