Inside American Education (14 page)

First of all, when people say that racial, ethnic, or linguistic minorities will make up some projected percentage of “net additions to the U.S. Labor force,” there is much less there than meets the eye. The American population and labor force
are growing slowly, so that any given fraction of that small
increment
is not a major factor in the over-all composition of the country’s population or labor force. Even if it were, it is a
non sequitur
to say that special language programs must be established for newcomers, in a country where millions of newcomers have flooded in for generations on end, without any such programs being established.

Inflating the size of the population affected by language policy by speaking of “people of color” ignores the fact that most of those people of color are black, native-born, English-speaking people. Finally, even for those people who come to the United States speaking a different language, they not only can learn English but are in fact learning English, just as other immigrants did before them. Virtually all second-generation Hispanics speak English and more than half of all third-generation Hispanics speak
only
English.
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All the sound and fury of the bilingual advocates is directed toward countering this natural evolution, which will otherwise deprive them of the separate and alienated ethnic enclaves so useful to “leaders”—and so detrimental to minorities as a whole and to the society as a whole.

The political success of bilingual activists—despite the opposition of parents and teachers, and despite both scholarly studies and journalistic exposés revealing the fraudulence of their claims—has wider implications for the vulnerability of the political process to strident special interests who are organized and ruthless. Education at all levels is especially vulnerable to promoters of their own ideological or financial interests in the name of some group for whom they claim to speak. In Los Angeles, which has one of the largest bilingual programs in the country, more than three-quarters of the school teachers oppose such programs—but to no avail. Bilingual activists have been so successful in branding critics as “racists” opposed to Hispanic people that an organization critical of bilingualism keeps their membership secret.
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Intimidation and character assassination tactics have proved effective all the way up to the college and university levels, and for other groups besides Hispanics. Sometimes it is sufficient to accuse people merely of “insensitivity” to accomplish the same political result.

“Sensitivity”

One of the most tendentious words in the vocabulary of multiculturalism is “sensitivity.” When it is proclaimed that one must become more “sensitive” to various ethnic, linguistic, sexual, or lifestyle groups, neither a reason nor a definition usually accompanies this opaque imperative. Moreover, what is called “sensitivity” often involves being
less
sensitive, in order to be more ideologically in fashion. For example, it is considered “insensitive” to use the word “Orientals” instead of “Asians” (even though the Orient or east is ultimately just a direction—and no one considers it insensitive to refer to the West or to Westerners). But, where there is a substantive difference between “Orientals” and “Asians,” the former is the more specific term, referring to persons of Chinese, Japanese, and related racial ancestry, while the latter geographical term encompasses as well the racially different peoples of India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

In other countries as well, to be “sensitive” in the ideological sense is to be
insensitive
to finer distinctions. In Britain, for example, to be ideologically sensitive is to call all non-white Britons “black,” whether they are in fact Chinese, Pakistani, or West Indian. In Canada, the phrase that lumps all non-whites together is “visible minorities.” In the United States, the corresponding phrase is “people of color.”

In plain English, to make finer distinctions is to be more sensitive, but in educational Newspeak “sensitivity” means going along with current ideological fashions. When racially and culturally heterogeneous groups are lumped together—whether as “Asians” in the United States, “blacks” in Britain or “visible minorities” in Canada—the ideological point is to depict them all as victims of whites, and their economic, educational, or other problems as being due to that victimization. What a finer breakdown would reveal is that some of these groups differ as much from one another as they do from whites, whether in race, income, education, or cultural patterns. In some cases, particular ethnic groups within the broad category depicted as victims actually exceed the income or occupational status of whites. The taboo against finer distinctions among such groups serves to conceal such ideologically inconvenient facts.

“Sensitivity” goes in only one direction. It is seldom considered insensitive to refer to individuals or groups as “Anglos” or “WASPs” (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants), even when they are in fact Celtic, Semitic, or Slavic in ancestry or Catholic, Judaic, or agnostic in religion. Nor are the most sweeping stereotypes about “Anglos” or “WASPs” likely to be questioned, either as to taste or accuracy.

The charge of “insensitivity” applies far more widely than to names, though usually with the same one-sidedness. To be sensitive, as ideologically defined, requires that one not merely accept but “affirm” other people’s way of life or even “celebrate” diversity in general. Like other demands for “sensitivity,” this demand offers no reason—unless fear of being disapproved, denounced, or harassed is a reason. If the thought is that anyone who really understood, or tried to understand, others’ cultures would necessarily approve, then this is simply an unsubstantiated dogma posing as a moral imperative. Moreover, automatic approval has no meaning, except as a symptom of successful intimidation.

If you have no right to disapprove, then your approval means nothing. It may indeed be distressing to someone to have you express your opinion that his lifestyle is disgusting and his art, music or writing is crude, shallow, or repugnant, but unless you are free to reach such conclusions, any praise you bestow is hollow and suspect. To say that
A
has a right to
B
’s approval is to say that
B
has no right to his own opinion. What is even more absurd, the “sensitivity” argument is not even consistent, because everything changes drastically according to who is
A
and who is
B
. Those in the chosen groups may repudiate any aspect of the prevailing culture, without being considered insensitive, but no one from the prevailing culture may repudiate any aspect of other cultures.

The Flow of Racism

One of the claims for multicultural programs in schools and colleges is that they reduce intergroup conflict by making all groups aware of, and sensitive to, racial, ethnic, and cultural differences—and more accepting of these differences. Whatever the plausibility of these claims, they are seldom, if ever, backed
up with any evidence that schools or colleges with such programs have less intergroup conflict than institutions without them. The real dogmatism of such claims comes out most clearly, however, where mounting evidence of
increasing
animosities among students from different backgrounds, in the wake of multicultural programs, is met by further claims that this only shows the racism of the larger society overflowing into the schools and colleges.

An editor of
The American School Board Journal
was all too typical in asserting—without a speck of evidence—that “the effects of society’s racism are spilling over into the schools,” and adding (also without evidence), “public schools are society’s best hope of battling racism.”
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He urged adding multicultural programs to the school curriculum and quoted an education professor who said: “Few other instructional techniques promise to make such improvements.”
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That statement is no doubt true enough in itself. The real question is whether multiculturalism delivers on that promise—or whether it in fact makes racism worse. That empirical question is not even asked, much less answered, either by this editor or by numerous other advocates of “multicultural diversity.”

This dogmatism by multicultural zealots is found from the elementary schools to the colleges and universities. It stretches across the country and internationally as well.

The chairman of a committee of inquiry into a race-related murder on a school playground in Manchester, England, reported: “At several stages of our inquiry, we were told that racism in school derives from racism in the wider community.”
⁴⁴
Yet, after reviewing the zealous “multicultural” and “anti-racist” policies of the schools—policies which the committee chairman generally favored
⁴⁵
—he was forced to conclude that, in this instance at least, the actual implementation of these policies was “one of the greatest recipes for the spread of racism from the school out into the community.”
⁴⁶
The
very possibility
that racism is flowing in the opposite direction to that assumed is never considered in most of the vast international literature on multiculturalism.

The Manchester multicultural program was instituted despite a warning that such programs in the London area had proved to be “a fiasco,” and “divisive,” and had creatd “suspicion” and “squabbles.”
⁴⁷
Ordinary people in the neighborhood
near the Manchester school, where a Pakistani boy was killed by a white boy, also had no difficulty considering the possibility that multiculturalism could be counterproductive.

“I feel that this enforced focus on multi-culturalism produces prejudices,” one said.

“I feel that the best way to bring about avoidance of racial hostility would be to ignore people’s ethnic origins and characteristics,” another said.

Double standards in treating students were cited among the counterproductive fruits of multiculturalism: “The teachers are scared, they are frightened to take the white side in case they are accused of racism.”
⁴⁸
Such complaints of double standards, favoring non-white students, also came from white students in the school—and were confirmed by the predominantly
non-white
committee of inquiry, dominated by Labor Party members.
⁴⁹
This panel’s findings could not be dismissed in the usual way by labeling them white male conservatives.

Some of the criticisms of multiculturalism as a counterproductive factor in race relations may be only statements of plausibility—but so are the opposite statements of the multicultural zealots. Yet these zealots operate as intolerantly as if they had the certainty of a proven fact. Belief in multiculturalism became a litmus test for applicants for teaching positions in the Manchester school, for example, and initiatives from the principal and other multicultural zealots “were presented in a way that assumed everybody was racist.”
⁵⁰
None of this was peculiar to Manchester or to England. Such things as enforcement of ideological conformity,
a priori
accusations of racism, and double standards for judging students’ behavior are common features of multicultural programs in the schools and colleges of the United States. So too is trying to force people to take part in foreign cultural experiences—in religion, food, and a useless smattering of foreign words, for example
⁵¹
—whether they want to or not, and regardless of the academic or other costs.

“Why do we have to eat their food?” a student in Manchester asked.
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Their parents’ questions included: Why are English children being taught to count in Punjabi, when they are having trouble counting in English?
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Why are they being forced to take part in Moslem religious rites?
⁵⁴
Similar questions can be raised wherever multicultural zealots gain dominance—and
such questions are likely to be ignored elsewhere, as they were in Manchester.

In the United States, multiculturalism not only covers the kinds of practices and attitudes found in England. In the U.S., the very pictures in textbooks must reflect the multicultural ideology. As one education writer noted:

… the textbooks teachers rely on are required to reflect the growing insistence on inclusion of “underrepresented populations”—mainly racial and ethnic minorities, women, and the handicapped.
⁵⁵

In the two biggest textbook markets in the country, Texas and California, committees of the state legislature have “set up exacting goals for depicting these groups in a book’s stories and illustrations.” One free-lance artist stopped illustrating children’s readers after receiving a set of “multicultural” instructions running to ten pages, single-spaced. As she described the pictures resulting from these instructions:

The hero was a Hispanic boy. There were black twins, one boy, one girl; an overweight Oriental boy, and an American Indian girl. That leaves the Caucasian. Since we mustn’t forget the physically handicapped, she was born with congenital malformation and had only three fingers on one hand….
⁵⁶

The Hispanic boy’s parents could not have jobs that would seem stereotypical, so they had to be white collar workers and eat non-Hispanic food—“spaghetti and meatballs and a salad.” The editor even specified to the artist what kind of lettuce should be in the salad: “Make sure it’s not iceberg: it should be something nice like endive.” There also had to be a picture of a “senior citizen”—jogging.
⁵⁷
Such nit-picking is neither unusual nor the idiosyncracy of a particular editor or publisher, A specialist in textbook production pointed out that virtually every textbook “has to submit to ethnic/gender counts as to authors, characters in stories, references in history books, etc. Even humanized animal characters—if there’s two boy bears, there have to be two girl bears.”
⁵⁸