We Are All Multiculturalists Now.

HARVARD professor Nathan Glazer is one of America's most prominent social scientists; his writings on race, ethnicity, immigration, education, and social policy have influenced generations of scholars. His new book, which examines the debate over multiculturalism in pre-collegiate education, is sure to disappoint many old admirers and allies. Professor Glazer concludes with great reluctance that "multiculturalism has won" and that it is best to resign ourselves to this "reality."

Multiculturalism in education is defined as an emphasis on race, ethnicity, and gender in the teaching of history, social studies, and literature, including a new focus on women, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and non-Western peoples, combined with a critical view of America's legacy at home and abroad. Multiculturalism, Professor Glazer asserts, arises from "the fundamental refusal of other Americans to accept blacks, despite their eagerness, as suitable candidates for assimilation." While other groups are involved, he insists that the main impetus comes from blacks, who are the "storm troops of multiculturalism."

Moreover, he writes that although the multicultural approach often exaggerates and is not his personal preference, it is, nevertheless, essentially benign. In perhaps the single most important assertion of the book, Glazer declares that "the basic demand of the multiculturalists is for inclusion, not separation, and inclusion under the same rules -- stretching back to the Constitution -- that have permitted the steady broadening of what we understand as equality."

Well, not exactly. One leading proponent of multicultural education, the author of the National Council for the Social Studies' statement on the subject, writes as follows: "To create an authentic democratic unum with moral authority and perceived legitimacy, the pluribus (diverse peoples) must negotiate and share power."

Clearly, negotiation and power-sharing among diverse "peoples" are not the "same rules -- stretching back to the Constitution." Nor is this an isolated example. The New York State curriculum ("One Nation, Many Peoples"), the National History Standards, and other multicultural documents continually refer to the American "peoples." Multiculturalism is not about "inclusion" under the "same rules"; it is about changing the rules: transforming the American polity from a system based on individual citizenship to one based on group rights and group consciousness.

Those of us who have participated in myriad curriculum-development and social-studies conferences during the past decade have heard the multiculturalist message repeatedly. This message has come not primarily from blacks, but from advocacy-oriented whites in their forties and fifties -- in short, from an adversarial intelligentsia of the 1960s generation. These are the people who form vanguard opinion in the academy. They -- not black educators -- are the "storm troops of multiculturalism." At the same time, it is indisputable that the increasing percentage of different groups of minority children, including immigrant children, in our schools provides ammunition to justify the "need" for multiculturalism.

In the politics of education, the essentials of the activists' agenda are legitimized and ratified by what could be called an accommodationist intelligentsia. An example of how multiculturalism advances can be deduced from Glazer's descriptions of curriculum fights over the New York social-studies framework and the National History Standards. The original versions of these two documents evoked strong opposition. So, in both cases, a second group of academics was formed to review the work of the original panel and recommend a more "balanced" approach. Glazer himself served on the second New York panel, and he writes that in both situations, the review panels recommended eliminating the "smoking guns," but forged compromises that still produced multicultural documents. In effect, an accommodationist intelligentsia filtered, then ratified and codified, the basic multicultural frameworks originally presented in cruder forms. The net result was two steps forward, one step back for multiculturalism.

Unfortunately, Glazer is amiss in describing the details of the National History Standards controversy. He characterizes the process of creating the standards as "displaying remarkable inclusiveness," but he does not tell us that internal critics of the standards who objected to their anti-Western bias (including Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Gilbert Sewall) were ignored. Nor does he tell us that the organization that sponsored the review, the Council for Basic Education, rescinded its invitation to critic John Patrick Diggins to serve on the U.S. history review panel because Gary Nash, the principal author of the original standards, objected. (So much for "impartial" review.) Further, Glazer mistakenly describes the Council for Basic Education as "conservative." The CBE was formerly traditionalist but is now indistinguishable from the rest of the education establishment.

Other aspects of the book are troubling too. Glazer implies that he would not object to teaching elementary-school students that the Iroquois influenced the formation of the U.S. Constitution, although there is no evidence for this bogus claim foisted upon the New York curriculum by Indian activists. He sees no "smoking gun" in the revised New York framework he helped draft, although its very title, "One Nation, Many Peoples," should have set off an alarm. Glazer objects to Jorge Klor de Alva's insistence that Latino subgroup loyalty should "trump American loyalty" -- by replying that subgroup loyalty should be "on the same level as a larger American loyalty," instead of clearly stating that loyalty to America should trump all subgroup loyalties.

A chapter on black poverty is particularly disappointing. Glazer is skeptical of more federal programs, but his language evokes social-science liberalism circa 1965 ("residential segregation, lack of jobs, poor schools"). There is no serious discussion of morality, fatherhood, or religion. Just when it looks as if he is ready to plunge into the current civil-society debate with references to Glenn Loury, neighborhoods, and families, he stops short and is silent on what Gertrude Himmelfarb calls the need to "remoralize" society.

Professor Glazer is overly generous in attributing benign motives to multiculturalists: "They seek inclusion and equality in a common society." But many of them seek power, revenge, ego fulfillment, and career advancement. After all, the heroes of the adversarial intelligentsia are not the authors of the Federalist Papers, but Nietzsche and Gramsci; and accommodationist intellectuals are well aware of the rewards available to those who burn incense before the idols of race, ethnicity, and gender.

Glazer concludes by stating that America today is two nations, one white and one black -- hence the "inevitability" of multiculturalism. But if we are two nations we are closer to Norman Podhoretz's view that an adversarial "liberationist" nation has been waging non-stop cultural war on a "traditionalist" nation since the 1960s. In this sense, multiculturalism is a weapon wielded by an aggressive liberationist nation that seeks first to deconstruct and then to transform the traditionalist American nation and its liberal-democratic way of life. Our response to multicultural education should not be the resignation and accommodation suggested by Professor Glazer, but principled and forthright opposition in defense of our constitutional republic and its liberal-democratic virtues.