Multiculturalism

How can the culturally diverse communities of America live justly and fruitfully together? Not by assimilation into the dominant culture -- nor by fighting for the freedom to pursue our own self-interest at the cost of our repressing both the wounds and the promising potential of our own cultural roots. This book offers a theory and practice of transformation that shows, especially through literature, education, and politics, how we can create a multicultural society that liberates our being as a fulfillment of the story of democracy. Perhaps for the first time in American history we are seeing the personal, political, historical, and sacred faces of women, people of color, and all ethnic groups as they tell their stories. It is this emerging scholarship that constitutes the new multicultural and feminine face of the story of democracy.

For peoples whose legal agreements, treaties, and other accords and conventions with the United States have been violated, multiculturalism as a pedagogical tool often becomes suspect of reinforcing the continued reification and abstraction of their cultures and nations with little if any real meaning for educational and social transformation. The continued oppression and repression of the exercise of self-determination for African Americans; the persistence of policies aimed at the destruction of indigenous populations and land; the insidious continuation of classical colonialism in the case of Puerto Rico are all vivid reminders to these peoples of the racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic patriarchy that characterizes their status. In order to restore people's rights to fully determine their own histories, Jackson and Solis point out that it is imperative to destroy the material foundations that breed and recycle the ideology, discourse, and cultural practices of domination. It is not enough to celebrate diversity and difference; there must be grand-scale social, political, economic, and educational transformation.

The melting pot is a myth, according to Fernandez. The United States is and always has been a banquet of cultures. Thus, he argues, the best way to deal with the millions of new immigrants is to accept, recognize, and eagerly explore the differences among the American people.

This collection of readings provides the reader with a basic introduction to the topic and concepts of cultural diversity as it has come to characterize the culture of the United States. Particular attention is given to the practice of racial, ethnic, and special interest group characterizations. No other book is as complete in its coverage of the diverse cultural groupings that make up the American culture. This unique work serves as a first step in beginning the quest for greater understanding and appreciation of diversity.

A major contribution to the new American studies, a work that shows that even radical Black and White thinkers and writers opt for Eurocentrism as the preferred ideal.

"McLaren offers us cogent, wide-ranging, theoretical criticisms of the dominant ideology that permeates our language, culture, & pedagogy." Michael Parenti Author of Dirty Truths & Blackshirts & Reds "A thought-provoking work. McLaren includes the colonized as actors in an important dialectic which proposes to change the paradigm operative in higher education." Rodolfo F. Acuna California State University at Northridge; author of Occupied America

So-called "multiculturalists" have been recently targeted by journalists and scholars arguing that such apologists are the cause of contemporary cultural fragmentation, racism, neo-segregation, "lowered standards," and a radicalism that ignores the wishes of mainstream America. This book is an introduction to some of the ideas underlying the claims multiculturalists make for diversity, inclusion, and complexity, and is one of the first rejoinders minorities have presented to combat the onslaught. Spanning the philosophical spectrum from difference to competent intercultural communication, each essay represents the precipitate produced from the writer's engagement with students, scholars, the public-at-large, and marginalized peoples. The reader will not find in these pages a call for chaos, civil war, or racism. None of what is here espoused can responsibly be characterized as unpatriotic or misanthropic. Radical? Yes. Subversive? Yes. But also expansive, sympathetic, challenging, and galvanizing. This book is not for the faint of heart. Readers looking for a demanding analysis that will provide guidance on adjudicating the claims of multiculturalists and monoculturalists will find it in this book.

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of this discussion. It is now joined by Jürgen Habermas's extensive essay on the issues of recognition and the democratic constitutional state and by K. Anthony Appiah's commentary on the tensions between personal and collective identities, such as those shaped by religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and on the dangerous tendency of multicultural politics to gloss over such tensions. These contributions are joined by those of other well-known thinkers, who further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism, and cultural separatism.Praise for the previous edition:

Antonette posits a critical multicultural literacy theory that investigates the construction of categories of cultural identity and the ways in which relationships are set up among those identities. This analysis allows consideration of the ways Anglo-American cultural identity is often effaced, made transparent, or "unraced," not only in the text but also in traditional critical readings of a text, which reifies the universality of Anglocentric culture and maintains traditional relations of power.

In this broad condemnation of multiculturalism, the author works to uncover pernicious errors in the arguments of diversity's proponents and to sound a warning against the dire consequences for American culture if the tenets of "political correctness" are incorporated into our social structure. Schmidt begins by exposing multiculturalism not as a movement aimed at expanding democratic ideals but rather as a crypto-Marxist political ideology that seeks to import Marxist concepts into social and cultural institutions. Subsequent chapters then illuminate a number of dismaying trends: a tendency toward historical revisionism in multiculturalist arguments, the sly linguistic maneuvering and limits on speech that characterize "political correctness", and the dismantling of the traditional image of the family unit - the primary building block of American society. Schmidt concludes with a rousing admonition to expel from our midst the latter-day Trojan horse that is multiculturalism.

The modern world is, in the authors' view, undergoing the process of meltdown--global meltdown. Having argued in an earlier book that humankind is headed for an environmental catastrophe that will either eliminate the human species or greatly reduce our numbers, the authors now focus on the breakdown of organized social order that will occur when the ecological crisis happens. Believing that civilization as we know it will not last, even without a definitive environmental cataclysm, they explore here the social, political, and philosophical ramifications of this vision.

An examination of the philosophical assumptions, theoretical currents, and conceptual foundations of multicultural education and multiculturalism. The author identifies profound weaknesses in both projects, and presents an alternative proposal for educational reform and social change that stresses the development of students' critical-thinking skills.