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But Glazer himself describes his own trajectory as that of a mild radical who turned into a mild conservative. A sublimated Limbaughism with footnotes is not his style. "We Are All Multiculturalists Now" proves far more pacific than polemical. It sues for peace in the culture wars. Perhaps some multiculturalists are wild-eyed bisexual Maoists who once spray-painted "Death to Amerika" on the walls. Glazer does not argue that point (which so preoccupies some conservatives). "But," he writes, "if we look further into the objectives of most of those who promote a strong multicultural thrust, and who in doing so presented a somewhat lopsided view of our history, we will find that they promote it, for the most part, not because they aim at divisiveness and separatism as a good, not because they want to break up the union, but because they aim at a fuller inclusiveness of deprived groups." He provides a brief, not terribly deep survey of multiculturalism, recognizing the existence of varying currents within it. He ponders the mechanics of implementing even very moderate sorts of multicultural reform in basic education. After looking into several recent textbooks, Glazer remarks: "One wondered what specialists, let alone fifth graders or high school students, could know about 'gender roles' in pre-Columbian Indian societies or in the earliest agricultural communities of the Middle East." Yet he accepts multiculturalism as a necessary evil. He calls it "the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African-Americans, in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many groups." Now, from one perspective, that is the understatement of the century. Coming from Glazer himself, it carries enormous weight. It suggests an almost total reversal of his work from "Beyond the Melting Pot" (1963) through "Affirmative Discrimination" (1975) and beyond. Previously, Glazer assumed that every ethnic group started out in some kind of enclave or ghetto, moved providentially through the phases of assimilation and eventually found its way, at last, to the suburbs and the board rooms in representative numbers. Remove such barriers as legally sanctioned discrimination in housing and employment and -- voila! -- the ghetto would disappear. If, as in the case of black ghettoes, that did not happen, the problem lay in the unintended consequences of existing government programs. The provisions of the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-'60s embodied the necessary and sufficient conditions to overcome the history of racism.
Glazer no longer quite believes this. At the very least, he believes, we must have multicultural education, too. And the less belligerent their conservative opponents (by implication), the less the well-meaning and hard-working multiculturalist teachers in the public schools will be driven to embrace the theory that ancient Africans invented the flying saucer, or whatever. That sounds like the height of pragmatic rationality. But to his readers on the right, it may seem that Nathan Glazer has shifted, mildly, back to radicalism.
-- Scott McLemee
Scott McLemee is a contributing editor at Lingua Franca and the editor of "C.L.R. James on the Negro Question" (University Press of Mississippi, 1996). |
if all you know about Nathan Glazer is that, in 1965, with Irving Kristol, he founded the Public Interest -- the intellectual flagship for disillusioned liberal policy wonks everywhere, the prime incubator of neoconservative social thought -- then the title of his new book is apt to sound darkly ironic, verging on the sarcastic. That, after all, is the usual tone of polemic; and the neoconservative intellectuals were, and are, mostly polemicists.
