Henry, William. In Defense of Elitism . New York: Anchor, 1994: 67-8

There are, it should be noted, a few scholars who think that the brouhaha over multiculturalism and, for that matter, ethnic diversity is vastly oversold. Louis Menand, professor of English at New York City's Queens College, which has adopted a curriculum almost as politically correct as Hunter's, argues: "The belief that the United States is becoming more racially and culturally diversified, more like a mosaic and less like a can of mixed paint, is not supported by any statistics that I am aware of. A much smaller percentage of the population is foreign-born than was the case sixty or seventy years ago; the rate of interracial marriage has increased dramatically. Insofar as multiculturalism means genuine diversity, the United States is becoming not more multicultural but less. When the whole culture is self-consciously diverse, diversity has disappeared. Real diversity is what the United States used to have when women and men, black and white Americans, Christians and Jews, gays and straights, and the various ethnic communities of recent immigrant groups led, culturally, largely segregated lives. Assimilation does not come from suppressing difference; it comes from mainstreaming it." The rhetoric is compelling, the argument offbeat. But of course it has very little to do with the world most Americans perceive themselves as living in, and nothing whatever to do with the political dynamic of the present moment.

Carl Gutierrez-Jones,

Department of English

University of California

Santa Barbara, CA 93106

E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu