Desegregating Multiculturalism: Problems in the Theory and Pedagogy of Diversity Education

The question I wish to pose for you is this: To what extent has multicultural education at the College level become an apology for inequality and segregation? To frame this issue, I want to address in very broad terms some of the contributions and contradictions of multiculturalism over the last 30 years. When Carey McWilliams (1973:95) wrote about Southern California in 1946, he found “no visible reminder” of Chinese legacies. “There is not a single Chinese place-name in Southern California,” he observed. This erasure of whole peoples from historical memory was commonplace until quite recently. When I started teaching what is now known as “multiculturalism” in the late 1960s, to find materials on “race” for the curriculum was a difficult quest and every item found was a jewel. One of the most striking shifts in university education during the last two decades has been the increased commitment to teaching diversity and multiculturalism. (1) In most undergraduate programs, students are expected to take at least one required course on the topic; in graduate programs in the “helping professions” — especially education, psychology, counseling, and social work — multiculturalism has become “infused” into the curriculum. There is much disagreement, however, about the contents of the multicultural canon, which range from “teaching tolerance” to postmodernist deconstruction of race, gender, and sexuality (McClaren, 1994). Today, multiculturalism is fashionable and omnipresent: in Benneton and ATT in Disney’s theme park, “California Adventure,” which includes a video narrated by Whoopi Goldberg on immigrants’ contributions to the Golden State (Sterngold, 2001); in President Bush’s cabinet; in a Gold Rush chocolate bar from the Oakland museum. (2) It also appears in an avalanche of college texts for required undergraduate courses and diversity training for future social workers, educators, and other managers of an increasingly diverse society. The titles tell the story: Handbook of Multicultural Counseling, The Multiracial Experience, Increasing Multicultural Understanding, Social Work Practice and People of Color, Developing Intercultural Awareness, Educating for Diversity, Social Services and the Ethnic Community, to name a few. Before suggesting a critique of contradictions and problems in the new multicultural literature, let me first recognize some important contributions that have been made. Strengths (1) The “no name” people — to use Maxine Hong Kingston’s term from her 1975 book, The Woman Warrior — have been endowed with fully human personalities. The archeological project of excavation has not only given voices to the voiceless, but also made them agents, activists, and contributors to society, an important corrective to the legacy of academic racism that shifted between images of inferiority and reified victimhood. “Can a people…live and develop for over three hundred years simply by reacting,” asked Ralph Ellison in his 1944 critique of Gunnar Myrdal’s portrait of African Americans. (3) Since 1957 (using as an historical marker the publication of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy), many intellectuals have answered “no” and given us complicated portraits of human agency and creativity. The legitimacy of this perspective is evident in the success of Ron Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993: 427), first published in 1993. It is an optimistic, ground-up view of A merica’s future: “We have nothing to fear,” he writes, “but our fear of our own diversity.” (2) Critiques of monoculturalism and ethnocentrism now permeate texts on multiculturalism. Students are encouraged to question assumptions about the norms and standards that they take for granted. They are taught to tolerate and appreciate differences, to exchange their “melting pots” for “salad bowls.