Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian, Arthur Schlesinger, sees both
benefit and danger in the trends toward ethnic awareness. The benefits include
the new recognition of minorities in academic and cultural spheres. "But
pressed too far, the cult of ethnicity has bad consequences too.... Its
underlying philosophy is that America is not a nation of individuals at all but
a nation of groups, that ethnicity is the defining experience for Americans..."
p. 20. He goes on to say that, "The multiethnic dogma abandons historic
purposes, replacing assimilation by fragmentation, integration by separatism. It
belittles unum and glorifies pluribus.
"The
historic idea of a unifying American identity is now in peril in many arenas--in
our politics, our voluntary organizations, our churches, our language. And in no
arena is the rejection of an overriding national identity more crucial than in
our system of education." p. 21.
Schlesinger
notes on page thirteen that, "Events each day demonstrate the fragility of
national cohesion. Everywhere you look, tribalism is the cause of the breaking
of nations." On page 124, he quotes Theodore Roosevelt who said "The
one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all
possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to
become a tangle of squabbling nationalities..."
The
Author discusses the ethnic divisions happening around the world, even in stable
civilized countries like Britain, France, Belgium, Spain and Canada and says,
"In a world savagely rent by ethnic and racial antagonisms, it is all the
more essential that the United States continue as an example of how a highly
differentiated society holds itself together." p. 25.
He
devotes a chapter to the use of history as a weapon and claims "The result
has been a reconstruction of American history partly on the merits and partly in
response to gender and ethnic pressures." p. 71.
Schlesinger
feels "that the cult of ethnicity in general and the Afrocentric campaign
in particular do not bode well either for American education or for the future
of minorities." p. 80.
He
encourages us to return to the centrality of what a foreign visitor, Gunnar
Myrdal of Sweden, called "the American Creed." He said that Americans
"of all national origins, regions, creeds, and colors" hold in common
"the most explicitly expressed system of general ideals" of any
country in the West: the ideals of the essential dignity and equality of all
human beings, of inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity. p. 33.
What
do radical Indian apartheid activists think about Schlesinger's ideas? Ward
Churchill evidently agrees with him about our vulnerability. On page 422 and 423
in the book Struggle for the Land he says, "Anyone who doubts that it's
possible to bring about the dismemberment of a super power state using internal
forces in this day and age, ought to sit down and have a long talk with a guy
named Mikhail Gorbechev. . . .
These megastates are not immutable. They can be taken apart. They can be
destroyed. But first we have to decide that we can do it, and that we will do
it." In her Introduction to the same book, university professor and vice
presidential candidate, Winona LaDuke says on page 5, "Native North America
is struggling to break free of the colonialist, industrialist, militarist
nation-state domination in which it is now engulfed. It is fighting to 'secede'
from the U.S. and Canada." Is that what this country wants? Did we fight
the Civil War in vain?