The Politics of Separation

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

On the eve of the funeral of Chicano hero Cesar Chavez last April, UCLA Chancellor Charles Young announced that the school had decided against creating a separate Chicano studies department. No other ethnic group had its own department, a university task force on the subject noted, and there was not enough academic substance to justify adding that one. Within days, however, 300 students -- equivalent to a tenth of the school's Chicanos and about 1% of total enrollment -- staged a protest that escalated into a window- breaking skirmish with police. Next came a hunger strike by five students and one faculty member. In June UCLA backed down, creating the Cesar Chavez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana (in deference to women) and Chicano Studies.

Four hundred miles up the coast, at the University of California, Berkeley, "students of color" -- notably those of Asian and Hispanic descent -- have grown into a majority that demands to see its diversity reflected in textbooks and the faculty. After a debate admittedly more political than scholarly, the school now requires all undergraduates, whatever their ethnicity or major, to study at least three out of five cultural groups: Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, African Americans and Europeans. The explicit goal: to move away from an "Anglocentric" curriculum toward one that validates other cultures, however slim their connection with America's past, as equally and essentially American.

Curriculum changes like these -- which really amount to a rethinking of what is required to be an informed citizen -- have become commonplace since the twin phenomena of political correctness and prescribed multiculturalism emerged into national consciousness at the end of the '80s. Like much else in American culture, the changes have been most visible first in California, the place where the face of the nation is changing most rapidly. There, Hispanic and Asian presences have both fueled and complicated the p.c. and multicultural debates that initially arose out of polar conflicts between blacks and whites or men and women.

With America moving toward an era when there may be no ethnic majority, with whites just another minority, multicultural and p.c. demands are spreading to previously unbesieged institutions. Ethnic studies have been mandated at such heartland schools as the University of Wisconsin and Texas A&M. At Yale, funds unavailable to most extracurricular groups underwrote student performances of Hispanic culture, while nearly half the student body petitioned for more courses on the Asian-American experience.

Now the focus of p.c. multiculturalism seems to be shifting from curriculum battles -- so many have already been won -- to the suppression of "hate speech," which is loosely defined as anything that any recognized minority or victim group chooses to find offensive. A chief tenet of political correctness is that minority groups must support each other, rather like union members refusing to cross a picket line. The very use of the term "of color" -- which embraces blacks, historically antagonistic Asian ethnicities, Native Americans and Hispanics, many of whom are ethnically white -- implies that these disparate groups are bonded simply by not being of Northern European descent. Often such coalitions add up to a majority, but they cling to rights based on minority status. When white male conservatives feel harassed, multiculturalists retort that they are enabling these fellow students to share in the sense of disenfranchisement, enriching their understanding of the world.

One thing is certain: there are a million ways to give p.c. offense. At the University of Nebraska, graduate student Chris Robinson kept a 5 in.-by-7 in. desktop photograph of his wife wearing a bikini -- until two female coworkers complained that it constituted sexual harassment and got the department chairman to order it removed. The Universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota, bowing to pressure from Native Americans and allies, adopted the "nickname rule." This dictum bars sports teams from playing nonleague games with schools using American Indians as symbols.

At the University of Pennsylvania, black students who disliked a student's columns challenging affirmative action and the character of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., stole 14,000 copies of the Daily Pennsylvanian and said they were combating "institutional racism." At Duke University, gays who did not like a student columnist's opinion that theirs was "a dirty, sinful lifestyle that doesn't deserve any special rights" blocked his way to class and shouted epithets. At neither Penn nor Duke were the perpetrators disciplined. During the academic year that ended in June, there were 12 major incidents of U.S. campus papers stolen or destroyed because their contents transgressed political correctness. This form of censorship hits most at "alternative" newspapers -- a term that in the '60s and early '70s automatically denoted a leftist competitor to the main campus organ, but that today means one leaning to the right. More than 100 such papers challenge what they see as liberal orthodoxy. The climate of political correctness has diverted the eternal spirit of adolescent rebellion clear across the political spectrum.

What does it mean to be p.c.? To qualify, one must be pro-feminist, pro-gay rights, pro-minority studies, mistrustful of tradition, scornful of Dead White European Males and deeply skeptical toward the very idea of a "masterpiece," because it implies that one idea, culture or human being can actually be better than another. One must believe in a consumerist approach to education: whatever the student wants is what the curriculum ought to be. Academics must recognize that ignorance of student wishes in favor of one's own scholarly interests is wickedly elitist.

At a deeper level, to be p.c. means to debunk the enduring intellectual values of American life. For the generations that fought World War II and the cold war, those values were pluralism, freedom of individual opportunity, integration and free speech. The goal of universities, cultural institutions and most journals of scholarship and opinion was to open the American experience -- ipso facto a virtuous and desirable one -- to all comers, regardless of race, creed, color or, later on, gender. American culture was considered so good that no one should be denied a chance at it, and no one should be assumed unable to appreciate or comprehend it.

For much of the generation that attends American universities today, almost all those comforting assumptions are either suspect or condemned. In place of integration has come a renewed separatism or tribalism. Women's studies, assorted ethnic studies and, increasingly, gay studies are premised on the idea that people derive their identity less from their individuality than from some group. Strength comes from clustering with the like-minded rather than from grappling with differences. In place of individual opportunity, consequently, p.c. thinking emphasizes the betterment of the group. In place of pluralism and intellectual freedom, it champions the normative rights of the community. In place of freedom of speech has come a demand for freedom from speech, if that speech is deemed offensive by any victim group. And in place of the assumption that America represents the highest aspirations of mankind is a conviction that the U.S. was, and to a considerable degree still is, an oppressor nation, its history a chronicle of injustice and deceit. Some conservative critics point to p.c. and multicultural rhetoric as proof that the American campus is the last bastion of Marxism. Much p.c. analysis is indeed tinged with scorn for capitalism and its correlative, the proverbial marketplace of ideas. But the movement has more to do with the social contract, with how people interact, than with any economic theory.

The pageant of American history has always looked rather different to the descendants of slaves than it does to descendants of slave owners. Not surprisingly, it also appears less than festive to the descendants of conquered natives, exploited migrant workers or Chinese railroad coolies. To them the vital history lesson is not the myth embodied in the Statue of Liberty but the reality of immigration laws that sharply restricted the chances of Hispanic and Asians. They value less the dazzling engineering feat of the transcontinental railroad than the abuse of laborers. They see the culture that shaped America not as a desirable legacy to be embraced, but as at best an alien heritage and at worst a tainted pattern for elitism. As their numbers grow, they want other Americans to see things the same way.

It is this redefinition of the American past that makes p.c. and multiculturalism so distressing to the mainstream. Patriotism and national pride are at stake. In effect, the movements demand that mainstream white Americans aged 35 and over clean out their personal psychic attics of nearly everything they were taught -- and still fervently believe -- about what made their country great. Like the black and women's movements before them, the new movements rely heavily on the unwelcome rhetoric of guilt.

Proponents insist that the new thinking promotes only innocuous inclusion. University of Chicago literature professor Gerald Graff's Beyond the Culture Wars, a 1993 American Book Award winner, acknowledges that he favors "feminism, multiculturalism and other new theories and practices that have divided the academy" but insists that this can be a moderate position. Writes Graff: "The curriculum is already a shouting match, and one that will only become more angry and polarized if ways are not found to exploit rather than avoid its philosophical differences. It is important to bring heretofore excluded cultures into the curriculum, but unless they are put in dialogue with traditional courses, students will continue to struggle with a disconnected curriculum, and suspicion and resentment will continue to increase."

Persuasive as Graff can be, his book fights a battle that is largely won. Stanford's acrimonious debate on a compulsory course in Western civilization took place five years ago. Most campuses have long since rejected the idea of an immutable "canon" of indispensable Western classics in favor of recognizing the reality that, long before p.c., curriculum has always evolved in response to the changing marketplace of students. A generation or two ago, it demanded validation of America's cultural maturity. Today it demands diversity. The 1991 Heath anthology of American literature, widely used in colleges, begins with Indian chants and Spanish voyager poems, rather than Pilgrim ruminations. Next year's update adds more "Native American oral narratives." The Heath editors treat literature as of mainly anthropological value. The volume abounds in work by Asians, Hispanics and especially blacks and women -- there is more by Charlotte Perkins Gilman than by Hemingway -- and conspicuously stints Wasps and Jews.

. If at times excessive, the p.c. and multicultural movements arose out of real concerns. Says Siby Philips, a senior at the University of Texas: "Multiculturalism came about because a lot of people are ignorant about people of color, gay and lesbian people, or whatever. These groups feel like they are marginalized. It's more than validation for certain groups. It's validation for the whole of society rather than just some part of it." Many distinguished scholars, however, see firsthand evidence that the p.c. and multicultural movements are leading to a more general separatism, a fragmentation of the centrist consensus that built America. To study anyone's culture but one's own -- unless one is white, in which case it is necessary to learn about the oppressed others -- is to commit an act of identity suicide. Beyond this loss of interest in universal ideas, often expressed as disbelief that anything is actually universal, Duke political scientist James David Barber sees a growing attitude that reason and factuality themselves are European cultural artifacts. Says Barber: "I think a lot of 'impressionism' -- a detestation of reason in favor of emotion -- is happening now." Scholars who agree with Barber note that p.c. thinkers consider a claim of harassment essentially unchallengeable, regardless of fact, because the only meaningful perception of grievance is that of the alleged victim.

The pressures of p.c. and multiculturalism are by no means limited to the campus. They are almost as intense among cultural institutions, charities and the media, which increasingly earmark jobs for Hispanics, Asians or other target groups. After the San Diego Opera was cited by a state arts agency for not having enough Hispanic employees, it set aside for only Hispanic candidates its next opening for a publicist. The September convention of the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association turned into a recruitment center for major national media seeking to diversify newsrooms. Insiders say the National Book Awards and even the Pulitzer Prizes have at times bowed to political correctness rather than pure merit, seeking to honor blacks, Hispanics and women.

The same principles often lead to strictures on content. When the Guthrie Theater revived The Front Page, it debated whether to edit out racist language. Jewish leaders told the Oregon Shakespearean Festival, albeit unsuccessfully, that The Merchant of Venice was irredeemably anti-Semitic and should never be produced.

- The greatest intellectual danger of political correctness is its assumption that there are some ideas too dangerous to be heard, some words too hurtful to be allowed, some opinions no one is ever again permitted to hold. It assumes that all advances in the rights of the downtrodden are final victories, and that questioning those victories is tantamount to colonialism, night riding and the sword.

Children are taught to fear sticks and stones but chant that names will never hurt them. Names, and the ideas behind them, do hurt people. Political correctness argues that the price of peace in a racially diverse America may be suppressing ideas that cause such pain. Perhaps that could mean a more civilized nation. Up to now, though, America's genius has not been in its civility, but rather in its raucous barroom brawl in search of the truth.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Erik A. Meers/New York