Book Description

This study approaches the phenomenon of multiculturalism in America by examining the manifestly political core of arguments being made for it. The study of multiculturalism necessarily becomes the study of the new commitment to anti-discrimination policy in American life since the primary source of this argument is to be found in the world of multicultural education, a new, distinctive form of civic education associated with victories of the civil rights movement. I examine the relationship between multiculturalism and the new political imperative of anti-discrimination by contrasting these with an earlier, more emphatically liberal argument for "cultural pluralism" (especially the position of Horace Kallen) which is essentially an extension of the liberal doctrine of religious toleration. A new logic of group-based identity recognition and a new call for "respect" replaces an older logic of individual liberty and a standard of "toleration." In examining the older argument (Part One of the thesis), it becomes necessary also to explore the problematic language of "diversity," "pluralism," and "anti-assimilation" that we inherit from the liberal tradition. I emphasize the theoretical difficulties associated with liberalism's tendency to elide the "political" element in social life and trace this tendency in liberal pluralism to the earliest arguments made for a distinctive kind of (liberal) diversity in the doctrine of religious toleration and the separation of church and state. In turning to contemporary multiculturalism (Part Two), the focus shifts to the question of the changes wrought, by the new commitment to anti-discrimination in America. The contrast "cultural pluralism versus multiculturalism," which seems puzzling at first, points to a broader contrast between traditional liberalism and the new politics of fighting racism, sexism, and so on. I examine the arguments of James A. Banks and other writers in the multicultural education literature and survey competing interpretations. To place the political interpretation of multiculturalism in a broader context, I close by looking to other massive evidence of the challenge to the liberal order posed by anti-discrimination policy, arguing for the emergence of what might be termed "anti-discrimination democracy."