Henry, William. In Defense of Elitism . New York: Anchor, 1994:65-7

The once-proud phrase "melting pot" is now viewed as an expression not of ethnic advancement, but of quislinglike capitulation. As conservative an institution as Chemical Bank distributed in 1993 a flier about a high school debate program it was sponsoring that admiringly quoted a New Utrecht High School student as saying, "In a culturally diverse society, everybody belongs. The melting pot is an absolute contradiction to what American democracy stands for." Set against that was a contrary view from a student at Midwood High in Brooklyn. But the anti-melting pot words were featured first and foremost, and they expressed misguided views that no one would have touted a generation ago.

This anti-assimilation posture would, if taken seriously, lead to an ungovernably fissile nation. Fortunately, the vast majority of new arrivals and, for that matter, the vast majority of such incompletely assimilated groups as African Americans still see both the practical value of participating in the main stream and the spiritual satisfaction of plunging into patriotism. In any case, racial inclusion in and of itself need not pose 2 any threat to elitist standards. Inclusion as defined in the era of the melting pot was egalitarian only in the positive sense of giving everyone a chance.

In the seamy world of practical politics, however, multiculturalism promotes quotas over competition, allocation of resources over attainment of them, a cabinet that "looks like America" over one that has sufficient background not to re quire on-the job training. If some multicultural extremists had their way, the United States would do business in the fashion of Malaysia, where advancement of the backward native population was ensured by the simple legal expedient of requiring that every executive hired from other races would have to be matched, one for one, by an executive from the protected group, regardless of talent or credentials. That is affirmative action at its crudest. But it is not all that far removed from the way things work in many American institutions. Nor is it entirely different from the views that nearly got Lani Guinier the post as President Clinton's civil rights chief in the justice department. She argued that protecting minority rights may be close to meaningless if the minority, as a permanent and distinct minority, never becomes part of a coalition shaping public policy. In such circumstances, she suggested, open competition might not be enough. Special advantages might have to be conferred.

That is the dilemma for American multiculturalists. On the one hand, they want all heritages and groups to be equal. On the other hand, like Orwell's pigs, they want some to be more equal than others. Scholarly multiculturalism, with its emphasis on cruelty and oppression in the past, is in effect the propaganda arm of affirmative action and other political quota plans.

One salient example of this link is multiculturalism's ritual, buzz-word emphasis on the "voices" of the formerly dispossessed. In early 1993, New York's Hunter College a public institution that for decades served its working-class clientele by demanding that they meet rigorous and traditional academic standards-shifted to a curriculum explicitly based on this theme. All incoming freshmen would henceforth be required to take twelve credit hours (about a third of their academic course load) from among the four categories of European cultures, non-European cultures, American studies, and women's studies and sexual orientation (the latter two, revealingly, grouped under one rubric). The college's president at the time, Paul LeClerc, explained that he was "motivated by a belief that any college in a melting-pot city like New York would be remiss in its academic duty if it did not expose students to the diverse voices of women, minority group members and foreign cultures." With minor variations in wording, this sentence could have been uttered by countless heads of changing academic institutions.

On one level, the rhetoric is reminiscent of the words of the Bush-era appointee to the "glass ceiling" commission who said her foremost task was to accumulate "stories." It is a tenet in many of the more politically charged circles of multiculturalism that the "voices" are not to be examined too closely, certainly not subjected to analytic scrutiny, but rather are to be respected as pure cultural artifacts whose very importance lies in their lack of intermediation with conventional hierarchical elitist culture. This emphasis on the testimonial element is evocative of black churches and of women's empowerment sessions. What is most important is the act of speaking, not what is being said. It goes without saying that this posture is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-rational. It provides multiculturalists a pedagogical and cultural basis for the argument that jobs and other positions of responsibility ought to be apportioned by gender and ethnicity rather than credentials or performance. In the civil service as in the classroom, the voices of the previously unheard are presumed to legitimize things merely by their testimonial presence.

Carl Gutierrez-Jones,

Department of English

University of California

Santa Barbara, CA 93106

E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu