Dividing Our Society By Race And Ethnicity Is Increasingly Destructive
By
Allan C.Brownfeld
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The
American society has welcomed millions of immigrants of every race,
religion and ethnic background. We are, as we are often told, “a nation
of immigrants.” We used to hear a great deal about the American
“melting pot,” in which these diverse men and women slowly became
Americans. Now, that idea is in disrepute. In a thoughtful new book,
“Out of The Melting Pot, into The Fire” (Encounter Books), Jens Kurt
Heycke notes that, “While the number of immigrants has soared and ethnic
tensions have risen, the philosophy for integrating diverse groups into
American society has shifted. For most of U.S. history, the ‘melting
pot’ was the prevailing ideal, even if it was imperfectly followed much
of the time.”
Beginning
in the 1970s, more and more voices were heard suggesting that the
melting pot be abandoned together with the goal of a shared national
identity. The focus of this thinking, Heycke points out, “…evolved from
tolerating or appreciating the cultural differences and distinctions of
diverse ethnic groups to actively fostering and promoting them. The
underlying philosophy, known as multiculturalism, also promoted programs
and institutions that distinguish individuals based on inherited
characteristics, such as race, and ethnic origins, and Grant
preferences to them on that basis.”
From
this point of view, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s declaration that
men and women should be judged “on the content of their character and
not the color of their skin” is considered outdated and something to be
abandoned.
It is
instructive to remember the origins of the term “melting pot.” The play
entitled “Melting Pot” was written by Israel Zangwill in 1908 and tells
the story of David Quixano, a Russian Jewish immigrant. David falls in
love with a Russian Christian immigrant whose father turns out to be
the commander who directed an antisemitic pogrom that killed David’s
family back in Russia. The father admits his guilt. David ultimately
forgives him and marries his daughter. Throughout the play, David
exhorts others to abandon old ethnic and racial prejudices. He
envisions an America where diverse ethnic groups will reconcile and join
in forging a new American identity , which is not based on ethnicity
but on a shared love of ideals like freedom.
Zangwill,
himself a native of England, wrote: “America is God’s crucible, the
great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and
reforming…Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and
Russians—-into the Crucible with you all! God is making the
American…Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian,—-black and
yellow.”
Ralph Waldo
Emerson had earlier noted that, “In this continent —-asylum of all
nations—-the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and
all the European tribes——of the Africans, and the Polynesians—-will
construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature…as
vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the melting pot of the
Middle Ages.”
Unfortunately,
we have largely abandoned the transmission of our history. At the time
of the 400th anniversary of the first British settlement in America at
Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day
0’Connor, who served as honorary chair of the 2007 national Jamestown
commemoration, lamented that, “The system of government that we have
today was an outgrowth of those early settlements…in the United States
today, public schools have pretty much stopped teaching government,
civics, and American history. It gets tossed in occasionally, but it’s
no longer a major focus for children. That’s a great concern to me
because I truly don’t know how long we can survive as a strong nation if
our younger citizens don’t understand the nature of our government, why
it was formed that way, and how they can participate and should
participate as citizens. That’s something you have to learn. It just
isn’t handed down in the genetic pool.”
The
present effort to replace the teaching of our traditional culture,
literature and history with multiculturalism ignores the fact that our
country has a culture of its own, and it is this American culture that
has attracted men and women of every race, nationality and religion.
They have come to our shores for something we had and they did not. It
is our responsibility to share it with them.
What
is the nature of this American culture that has been so appealing? In
his important book, “America’s British Culture,” Russell Kirk, one of
our foremost men of letters, points out that contemporary America is a
product of the long evolution of law, governmental structure, religion,
philosophy and literature of the larger Western world and, more
particularly, Great Britain, through which this Western culture in its
British form reached the New World.
In
four major ways, Kirk points out, the British experience, for more than
a dozen generations, has shaped the United States. In Kirk’s view,
“The first of these…is the English language and the wealth of great
literature in that language…The second is…the rule of law, American
common law and positive law being derived chiefly from English law. This
body of law gives fuller protection to the individual person than does
the legal system of any other country. The third of these ways is
representative government, patterned upon British institutions that
began to develop in medieval times, and patterned especially upon ‘the
mother of Parliaments’ at Westminster.”
Kirk
continues: “The fourth…is a body of mores, or moral habits and beliefs
and conventions and customs, joined to certain intellectual
disciplines. These compose an ethical heritage.” He noted that the very
language of our discussion about the law—-the “rights” of the accused,
the “right” to privacy, the presumption of innocence, “equality” under
the law—-all are derived very specifically from the British experience,
and can be found in no other legal tradition. The English Common Law,
Kirk points out, “…gives to those who come within its jurisdiction
privileges unknown in civil or Roman law, where generally the interest
of the State
looms first. Under the common law,
for instance, a defendant cannot be compelled to testify if he chooses
to remain silent; he is saved from self-incrimination.”
The
English common law is founded upon the assertion of the supremacy of
law. When the colonists declared independence, it was not to be free of
English law, but because the government in London had denied them their
traditional rights as Englishmen. The fact that the majority of
present-day Americans cannot trace their individual ancestry to England
bears little relationship to the British nature of American culture.
Russell Kirk argues that, “Two centuries after the first U.S. census was
taken, nearly every race and nationality in the world had contributed
to the American population, but the culture of America remains
British…The many millions of newcomers to the U.S. have accepted
integration into the British-descended American culture with little
protest and often with great willingness.”
In
1991, when efforts to alter how our history is taught in the interest
of “multiculturalism,” the Social Studies Syllabus Review Committee of
the State of New York embraced the idea of teaching history in a
“multicultural” manner and rejected “previous ideals of assimilation to
an Anglo-American model.” One member of the committee, the noted
historian, Professor Arthur M.Schlesinger, Jr. dissented. He asked his
colleagues “…to consider what kind of nation we will have if we press
further down the road of cultural separatism and ethnic fragmentation,
if we institutionalize the classification of our citizens by ethnic and
racial criteria and if we abandon our historic commitment to an American
identity. What will hold our people together then?”
Since
those days, things have accelerated in a negative direction. If we do
not transmit our own history, culture and values to our
students—-particularly to those who have come from other places with
other traditions and other values—-what future can we foresee for the
American society?
In his
book “Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire,” Jen’s Heycke surveys
multiethnic politics in history, focusing on societies that have shifted
between the melting pot and multicultural models. Beginning with
Ancient Rome, he demonstrates the appeal of a unifying identity that
diverse individuals can join, regardless of their racial or ethnic
origins. He details how early Islam integrated diverse groups, and even
different faiths, into a cohesive and flourishing society. Both
civilizations eventually abandoned their integrative ideals in favor of a
multicultural paradigm. The results were not good.
In
the modern era, he shows, many nations have implemented multicultural
policies like group preferences to compensate for past injustices or
current disparities. Heycke examines some notable examples:
Yugoslavia,Rwanda and Sri Lanka. They contrast with Botswana, a country
that opposes group distinctions and prohibits the collection of racial
and ethnic statistics.
At
the present time, Heycke laments, “Embedded in public and private
institutions across America…are departments and organizations with names
like ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ (DEI). They constitute a
multibillion dollar industry…In a unified society that values people
based on the ‘content of their character’ rather than ‘the color of
their skin,’ there would be no need for DEI departments…After
considering the terrible consequences of ethnic divisions in countries
like Bosnia and Sri Lanka, it is disheartening to see Americans advance
the same types of policies and rhetoric that promoted and toxified those
divisions. America has a regrettable past of racial and ethnic
discrimination…but the solution to past segregation is not even more
segregation.”
Judging men
and women on the basis of their race, religion or ethnicity—-whether
for penalties or advantages—-is the opposite of what our civil rights
movement sought to accomplish, which was to judge each individual on the
basis of his or her individual merit. It is time that we return to
that standard and not embark upon new forms of racial and ethnic
stratification which would turn our backs on the standard Martin Luther
King advocated and most Americans worked for so many years to achieve.
If, because of past discrimination, some groups have fallen behind, let
us assist them to advance so that they can meet necessary standards, but
let us not abandon the standards. Other societies which followed that
path, as Jens Heycke shows us, did not fare very well.