OPTIONAL WRITING ASSIGNMENT: Multiculturalism's strength & weakness--which is greater?

STEP 1 of 3. This assignment is an exercise in the construction of an effective Argumentative essay (although here the parameters are more brief).  Here in outline form (for the exams you'll be writing using paragraphs and not an outline) make your case for who you believe comes closer to the Greater Truth on this issue.  The sample you submit will be returned to you before the first essay exam to provide you with feedback.

STEP 2 of 3. Arthur Schlesinger takes one position more critical of multiculturalism, while Juan Gonzalez is favorable.  Pick a side in the debate and make the case for your choice.

STEP 3 of 3. Cut and paste the following points in your one-page outline submission:

Introduction (thesis).  Clear, provocative, one sentence position on the “greater truth” of this issue.
Positive Evidence. The author you mostly agree with; what are the key arguments (evidence) in favor?
Negative Evidence.  Identify the strongest counter-argument to your favored position; why are these lesser truth/less conclusive? Note no name-calling.
“Philosopher” (Inquiry/Analysis). Probes the subtext (what the text is doing); analyzes implications/consequences of the position taken.
Grasp of the “big picture.”  Understanding of complexity of the issue; connection to other key issues.
“Responsible Judge.”  Shows understanding of value assumptions that yield different outcomes; makes the case for why one is preferable to the other(s).

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Multiculturalism and Disunity (1991) ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. Source: The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.  Copyright © 1992, 1991 In this selection from his best-selling book The Disuniting of America, Pulitzer-prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. sets forth his views about multicultural education, especially as it pertains to the treatment of history. Is Schlesinger a supporter of multicultural education? What does he see as its main consequences? How does he use history to support his conclusions?

The vision of America as melted into one people prevailed through most of the two centuries of the history of the United States. But the twentieth cen­tury has brought forth a new and opposing vision. One world war destroyed the old order of things and launched Woodrow Wilson's doctrine of the self­determination of peoples. Twenty years after, a second world war dissolved the western colonial' empires and intensified ethnic and racial militancy around the planet. In the United States itself, new laws' eased entry for im­migrants from South America, Asia, and Africa and altered the composition of the American people ....

. . . A cult of ethnicity has arisen both among non-Anglo whites and among nonwhite minorities to denounce the idea of a melting pot, to 'chal­lenge the concept of "one people," and to protect, promote, and perpetuate separate ethnic and racial communities.

The eruption of ethnicity had many good consequences. The American culture began at last to give shamefully overdue recognition to the achieve­ments of minorities subordinated and spurned during the high noon of Anglo dominance. American education began at last to acknowledge the existence and significance of the great swirling world beyond Europe. All this was to the good. Of course history should be taught from a variety of perspectives. Let our children try to imagine the arrival of Columbus from the viewpoint of those who met him as well as from those who sent him. Living on a shrinking planet, aspiring to global leadership, Americans must learn much more about other races, other cultures, other continents. As they do, they acquire a more complex and invigorating sense of the world-and of themselves.

But pressed too far, the cult of ethnicity has had bad consequences too.

The new ethnic gospel rejects the unifying vision of individuals from all nations melted into a new race. 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 most Americans, that ethnic ties are permanent and indelible, and that division into ethnic communities establishes the basic structure of American society and the basic meaning of American history.

Implicit in this philosophy is the classification of all Americans according to ethnic and racial criteria. But while the ethnic interpretation of American history, like the economic interpretation, is valid and illuminating up to a point, it is fatally misleading and wrong when presented as the whole picture. The ethnic interpretation, moreover, reverses the historic theory of America as one people-the theory that has thus far managed to keep Amer­ican society whole.

Instead of a transformative nation with an identity all its own, America in this new light is seen as preservative of diverse alien identities. Instead of a nation composed of individuals making their own unhampered choices, America increasingly sees itself as composed of groups more or less ineradicable in their ethnic character. 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.

The schools and colleges of the republic train the citizens of the future. Our public schools in particular have been the great instrument of assimilation and the great means of forming an American identity. What students are taught in schools affects the way they will thereafter see and treat other Americans, the way they will thereafter conceive the purposes of the republic. The debate about the curriculum is a debate about what it means to be an American.

The militants of ethnicity now contend that a main objective of public education should be the protection, strengthening, celebration, and perpetu­ation of ethnic origins and identities. Separatism, however, nourishes preju­dices, magnifies differences and stirs antagonisms. The consequent increase in ethnic and racial conflict lies behind the hullabaloo over "multicultural­ism" and "political correctness," over the iniquities of the "Eurocentric" cur­riculum, and over the notion that history and literature should be taught not as intellectual disciplines but as therapies whose function is to raise minority self-esteem ....

... Immigrants, [nineteenth-century Frenchman Alexis de] Tocqueville said, become Americans through the exercise of the political rights and civic responsibilities bestowed on them by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

A century after Tocqueville, another foreign visitor, Gunnar Myrdal of Sweden, called the cluster of ideas, institutions, and habits "the American Creed." Americans "of all national origins, regions, creeds, and colors," Myrdal wrote in 1944, 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.

The schools teach the principles of the Creed, Myrdal said; the churches preach them; the courts hand down judgments in their terms. Myrdal saw the Creed as the bond that links all Americans, including nonwhite minori­ties, and as the spur forever goading Americans to live up to their principles.

"America," Myrdal said, "is continuously struggling for its soul." The Amer­ican Creed had its antecedents, and these antecedents lay primarily in a British inheritance as recast by a century and a half of colonial experience. How really new then was the "new race"?  Crevecoeur’s vision implied an equal blending of European stocks .... In fact, the majority of the population of the 13 colonies and the weight of its culture came from Great Britain.

Having cleared most of North America of their French, Spanish, and Dutch rivals, the British were free to set the mold. The language of the new nation, its laws, its institutions, its political ideas, its literature, its customs, its precepts, its prayers, primarily derived from Britain. Crevecoeur himself wrote his book not in his native French but in his acquired English. The "curse of Babel," Melville said, had been revoked in America, "and the lan­guage they shall speak shall be the language of Britain."

The smelting pot thus had, unmistakably and inescapably, an Anglocentric flavor. For better or worse, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition was for two centuries-and in crucial respects still is-the dominant influence on American culture and society. This tradition provided the standard to which other immigrant nationalities were expected to conform, the matrix into which they would be assimilated ...

The Anglocentric domination of schoolbooks was based in part on unas­sailable facts. For better or for worse, American history has been shaped more than anything else by British tradition and culture. Like it or not, as Andrew Hacker, the Queens political scientist, puts it, "For almost all this nation's history, the major decisions have been made by white Christian men." To deny this perhaps lamentable but hardly disputable fact would be to falsify history. But history can also be falsified by suppression of uglier aspect~ of Anglo rule--callous discrimination against later immigrants, bru­tal racism against nonwhite minorities-and by the creation of filiopietistic myths ....

The belated recognition of the pluralistic character of American society has had a bracing impact on the teaching and writing of history. The women's-liberation movement, the civil rights movement, the ethnic up­surge, and other forms of group self-assertion forced historians to look at old times in new ways. Scholars now explore such long-neglected fields as the history of women, of immigration, of blacks, Indians, Hispanics, and other minorities. Voices long silent ring out of the darkness of history.

The result has .been a reconstruction of American history partly on the merits and partly in response to ethnic pressures. In 1987 the two states with both the greatest and the most diversified populations--California and New York-adopted new curricula for grades one to 12. Both state curricula mate­rially increased the time allotted to non-European cultures.

The New York curriculum went further in minimizing Western traditions.  A two-year global-studies course divided the world into seven  regions:  ­Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe-with each region given equal time. The history of West­ern Europe was cut back from a full year to one quarter of the second year. American history was reduced to a section on the Constitution; then a leap across Jefferson, Jackson, the Civil War, and Reconstruction to 1877.

In spite of the multiculturalization of the New York state history curricu­lum in 1987-a revision approved by such scholars as Eric Foner of Columbia and Christopher Lasch of Rochester-a newly appointed commissioner of education yielded to pressures from minority interests to consider still further revision. In 1989, a Task Force on Minorities: Equity and Excellence (not one historian among its 17 members) brought in a report, its first sentence sounding the keynote:  "African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Puerto Ricans/Latinos and Native Ameri­cans have all been the victims of an intellectual and educational oppression that has characterized the culture and institutions of the United States and the Euro­pean American world for centuries."

The "systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives," the report asserts, has" a terribly damaging effect on the psyche of young people of African, Asian, Latino, and Native American descent." The dominance of "the European-American monocultural perspective" explains why "large numbers of children of non-European descent are not doing as well as ex­pected." The 1987 curriculum revision, the report concedes, did include more material on minority groups, but "merely adding marginal examples of 'other' cultures to an assumed dominant culture" cannot counteract "deeply rooted racist traditions"; all it produces is "Eurocentric multiculturalism." ...

Cultural pluralism is a necessity in an ethnically diversified society. But the motives behind curriculum reform sometimes go beyond the desire for a more honest representation of the past. "Multiculturalism" arises as a reac­tion against Anglo- or Eurocentrism; but at what point does it pass over into an ethnocentrism of its own? The very word, instead of referring as it should to all cultures, has come to refer only to non-Western, nonwhite cultures. The president of the Modern Language Association even wonders why "we can­not be students of Western culture and multiculturalism at the same time." Can any historian justify the proposition that the five ethnic communities into which the New York state task force wishes to divide the country had equal influence on the development of the United States? Is it a function of schools to teach ethnic and racial pride? When does obsession with differ­ences begin to threaten the idea of an overarching American nationality? ...

The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history. All major races, cultures, nations have committed crimes, atrocities, horrors at one time or another. Every civilization has skeletons in its closet. Honest history calls for the unexpurgated record. How much would a full account of African despotism, massacre, and slavery increase the self-esteem of black students? Yet what kind of history do you have if you leave out all the bad things?

Even if history is sanitized in order to make people feel good, there is no evidence that feel-good history promotes ethnic self-esteem and equips students to grapple with their lives. Afrocentric education, on the contrary, will make black children, as William Raspberry has written, "less competent in the culture in which they have to compete." After all, what good will it do young black Americans to take African names, wear African costumes, and replicate African rituals, to learn by music and mantras, rhythm, and rap­ping, to reject standard English, to hear that because their minds work dif­ferently a first-class education is not for them? Will such training help them to understand democracy better? Help them to fit better into American life? "General [Colin] Powell did not reach his present post." Jacques Barzun reminds us, "by believing that Black English was sufficient for the career he wanted to pursue." ...

The separatist impulse is by no means confined to the black community.  Another salient expression is the bilingualism movement, ostensibly con­ducted in the interests of all non-English speakers but particularly a Hispanic­ American project. ...

In recent years the combination of the ethnicity cult with a flood of immi­gration from Spanish-speaking countries has given bilingualism new impetus. The presumed purpose is transitional: to move non-English-speaking children as quickly as possible from bilingual into all-English classes. The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 supplies guidelines and funding; the 1974 Supreme Court decision in Lau v. Nichols (a Chinese-speaking case) requires school districts to provide special programs for children who do not know English.

Alas, bilingualism has not worked out as planned: rather the contrary. Testimony is mixed, but indications are that bilingual education retards rather than expedites the movement of Hispanic children into the English-speaking world and that it promotes segregation more than it does integration. Bi­lingualism shuts doors. It nourishes self-ghettoization, and ghettoization nourishes racial antagonism. Bilingualism "encourages concentrations of Hispanics to stay together and not be integrated," says Alfredo Matthew Jr., a Hispanic civic leader, and it may well foster "a type of apartheid that will generate animosities with others, such as Blacks, in the competition for scarce resources, and further alienate the Hispanic from the larger society."

Using some language other than English dooms people to second-class citizenship in American society. "Those who have the most to lose in a bilin­gual America," says the Mexican-American writer Richard Rodriguez, "are the foreign-speaking poor." Rodriguez recalls his own boyhood: "It would have pleased me to hear my teachers address me in Spanish .... But I would have delayed ... having to learn the language of public society .... Only when I was able to think of myself as an American, no longer an alien in gringo society, could I seek the rights and opportunities necessary for full public individuality."

Monolingual education opens doors to the larger world. "I didn't speak English until I was about 8 years of age," Governor Mario Cuomo recently recalled, "and there was a kind of traumatic entry into public school. It made an immense impression on me." Traumatic or not, public school taught Cuomo the most effective English among politicos of his generation.

Yet a professor at the University of Massachusetts told Rosalie Pedalino Porter, whose long experience in bilingual education led to her excellent book Forked Tongue, that teaching English to children reared in another language is a form of political oppression. Her rejoinder seems admirable: "When we succeed in helping our students use the majority language fluently ... we are empowering our students rather than depriving them."

Panicky conservatives, fearful that the republic is over the hill, call for a constitutional amendment to make English the official language of the United States. Seventeen states already have such statutes. This is a poor idea. The English language does not need statutory reinforcement and the drive for an amendment will only increase racial discrimination and resentment.

Nonetheless, a common language is a necessary bond of national cohesion in so heterogeneous a nation as America. The bilingual. campaign has created both an educational establishment with a vested interest in extending the bilingual empire and a political lobby with a vested interest in retaining a Hispanic constituency. Like Afrocentricity and the ethnicity cult, bilingualism is an elitist, not a popular, movement-"romantic ethnicity," as Myrdal called it; political ethnicity too. Still, institutionalized bilingualism remains another source of the fragmentation of America, another threat to the dream of "one people." ...

 

Empire, Racism, and Multiculturalism (2000) JUAN GONZALEZ SOURCE:  Source: Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America by Juan Gonzalez. In this selection, from a popular history of Latinos in America, Puerto Rican-bern journalist Juan Gonzalez takes up the late-twentieth-century "discord over how we interpret and teach the American experience." In so doing, he makes clear his views about multicultural education. How does Gonzalez respond to Schlesinger? How does his view of history differ from Schlesinger's? How does he connect the issues of language and culture?

In his 1991 polemic, The Disuniting of America, historian Arthur Schlesinger, [r., rails against the rising "cult of ethnicity" or "compensatory history" by con­temporary advocates of multiculturalism and bilingualism. In the process, Schlesinger serves up his version of the creation story of America: "Having cleared most of North America of their French, Spanish, and Dutch rivals, the British were free to set the mold. The language of the new nation, its laws, its institutions, its political ideas, its literature, its customs, its precepts, its prayers, primarily derived from Britain."

Unfortunately, whether the mythmaking comes from Bible Belt conserva­tives like Judge [Samuel] Kiser" or eastern liberals like Schlesinger, it suffers from the same flaw-a failure to accept that the quest for empire, fueled by the racialist theory of Manifest Destiny, divided and deformed the course of ethnic relations from our nation's inception, fragmenting and subverting any quest for one "national language" and "national culture."

Few of us would disagree that English is the common language of the country. Yet the very process of territorial expansion-not just immigration­created repeated battles throughout U.S. history over whether English should be the only recognized tongue. A number of ethnic groups have attempted to preserve their native languages at the same time they adopted English, while our government, especially at the federal level, sought just as strenuously to suppress efforts at bilingualism.

Those language battles from prior eras do not all fall under one neat category-rather, a close examination of them reveals three main trends, and the qualitative differences between those trends gets lost in the rhetoric of the current debate. The first category includes the millions of immigrants who came here from Europe and Asia voluntarily seeking American citizenship, and who, by doing so, were cutting ties with their homelands, adopting the language of their new country and accepting a subsidiary status, if any, for their native tongues.

The second category was made up of the slaves from dozens of African na­tions who were brought here in chains, forced from the start to give up their various mother tongues, and not permitted even to acquire a reading or writ­ing knowledge of English so that the slave-owners could more easily control and dominate them.

The third category, and the one least understood, encompasses those people who were already living in the New World when their lands were either con­quered or acquired by the United States: the Native Americans, the French Creoles of Louisiana, the Mexicans, and the Puerto Ricans. These latter groups became American citizens by force. Congress declared them so without any vote or petition on their part; it did not care what language they spoke nor did it seek their public oath of allegiance.

Since a new sovereignty was imposed on them while they were still residing on their old lands, these "annexed" Americans could hardly consider themselves foreigners. This turned them into persistent defenders of the right to use their own language, and the new Anglo authorities who took over ad­ministration of the states or territories in which they resided occasionally understood that viewpoint and accommodated them. The federal government, on the other hand, reacted with hostility to any linguistic diversity.

Throughout the past two centuries, Anglo historians consistently relegated the languages of these conquered nationalities to the margins of the Ameri­can experience, dismissing their cultures as either primitive or nonexistent. Despite that marginalization, Latinos in particular managed to preserve their language and traditions by fashioning a parallel subterranean storehouse of music, dance, theater, journalism, literature, and folklore-in English, as well as Spanish. Over time, the culture of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other Latinos who resided here gradually fused with one anothers', while continuing to borrow elements from their Latin American homelands. At the same time, this emerging U.S.-Latino culture combined with and reshaped aspects of African American and Euro-American music, dance, and theater, creating in the process a dazzling array of hybrid forms that are today uniquely American, and which are most evident in musical genres such as Tex-Mex, Cubop, Latin jazz, Latin rock, bugaloo, salsa, rap, and even country rock, but which have spread to other areas of the arts as well. Only in recent years, with the phenomenal growth of Latino immigration, has this underground cultural stream finally surfaced and begun to sweep away the melting-pot myth of the United States. Despite that resurgence, Latinos remain invisible to mainstream chronicles of American culture, and they are virtually absent from the culture's most influential contemporary media, Hollywood movies and television.

The Early Battles Over Language

From the very beginning, the thirteen colonies confronted a quandary over language. Before independence, German was virtually the only tongue spo­ken throughout fifteen thousand square miles of eastern Pennsylvania, while Dutch was widely used in the Hudson River Valley. Between 1732 and 1800, at least thirty-eight German-language newspapers were published in the Pennsylvania colony, and the University of Pennsylvania established a pro­gram in German bilingual education as early as 1780. So widespread was the use of German that the first U.S. Census reported 8.7 percent of Americans spoke it as their first language, almost identical to the proportion of Hispanics in our country in 1990.

The prevalence of a German linguistic minority continued into the twenti­eth century. By 1900, as many as 600,000 children in American public and parochial schools were being taught in German, nearly 4 percent of the coun­try's school population. Only with the Americanization policy that accompanied World War I was German finally eliminated as a language of instruction.

The experience of European immigrants, however, is not as relevant to the modern-day language debate as that of the annexed nationalities. When Louisiana became a state in 1812, for instance, the majority of its residents spoke French. As a result, until the 1920s, all laws and public documents in the state were published in French and English. The courts, the public schools, even the state legislature operated in two languages. Louisiana's second governor, Jacques Villere, spoke no English and always addressed the legislature in French. As more settlers moved in, and English speakers became the majority during the 1840s, the use of French declined, but it did so through the evolution of the population, not through government fiat, and the rights of French-speaking children continued to be recognized in the public schools.

After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo imposed American citizenship on the Mexicans living in the annexed territories, Congress did not require its new subjects to swear allegiance to their new nation or adopt a new lan­guage. Those who did not want to become citizens had to publicly register their refusal but the lives of the mexicanos continued pretty much as before. As late as the 1870s, more than a quarter century after annexation, New Mexico's legislature operated mostly in Spanish. By then, only two of fourteen counties had switched to jury trials in English and most of the public schools conducted instruction either all in Spanish or bilingually. This did not mean that New Mexicans resisted learning English, only that their opportunities to learn the language were minimal in isolated rural communities where they composed the overwhelming majority. Because of that, New Mexico was one of the last territories to become a state, in 1913, but it boasted a mexicano majority until 1940. A similar process evolved in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, only there mexicanos have remained the overwhelming majority for 250 years, with most residents still retaining the use of Spanish while also being fluent in English.

Then there is the language experience of some Native Americans. Okla­homa's Cherokees built a public school system in the 1850s in which 90% of the children were taught in their native language while also learning English. So successful was the effort that Cherokee children of that era registered higher levels of English literacy than white children in the neighboring states of Texas and Arkansas. But in the late 1800s, the federal government initiated a policy of Americanization. It forcibly removed thousands of Indian children from their families and shipped them to boarding schools to learn English. The disastrous result, as documented by repeated studies during the second half of the twentieth century, was that 40 percent of Cherokee children became illiterate in any language and 75 percent dropped out of school.

Finally, there is Puerto Rico's forgotten language saga. Shortly after the U.S. occupation of the island in 1898, Congress declared the territory officially bilingual, even though its population had spoken Spanish for four hundred years and almost no one spoke English.  Military governor Guy Henry promptly ordered all public school teachers to become fluent in the language of their new country, and he instituted an English-proficiency test for high school graduation. Despite widespread resistance from island politicians, educators, and students, the territory's Anglo administrators proceeded to make English the language of instruction in all island schools. The result was a near-total breakdown of the education system as thousands of students stopped attending classes, and those who stayed struggled to learn academic subjects in a language they did not understand.

Efforts to force Puerto Ricans to learn English continued unsuccessfully for nearly half a century, with only a brief reversion to Spanish instruction in the 1930s when Jose Padin, the island's education commissioner, tried to reintroduce Spanish. But President Roosevelt promptly fired Padin on the advice of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and brought back the English­only policy. Things remained that way until 1949, when the island's first native­born elected governor, Luis Munoz Marin, finally ended the hated policy of language suppression. Even though Munoz and the local legislature reinsti­tuted Spanish as the language of instruction, they still required pupils to learn English as a second language. The Popular Democrats took their reforms one step further in 1965; they brought back Spanish as the official language of the island's local courts. Congress, however, insisted that English remain as the language of the federal courts on the island.

The mere existence of Puerto Rico-an entire U.S. territory whose resi­dents speak Spanish-has created enormous problems for theorists of a mono­lingual US. nation. In 1917, the same year Congress established a literacy test for all foreigners applying for citizenship, it declared Puerto Ricans citizens without requiring them to demonstrate any English proficiency! Once Puerto Ricans began moving to the United States in big numbers after World War II, this contradiction of US. citizens who spoke no English was exacerbated. The situation produced such a dilemma that Congress had to include a special "Puerto Rican" provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law, which suspended literacy tests in southern states where they had been used to prevent blacks from voting, also had a part, Section 4(e), introduced by New York senator Robert Kennedy, that prohibited New York State, which had a sixth­grade education requirement for voters at the time, from denying the vote to any citizen whose education had been in an American-flag school where "predominant classroom instruction was other than English." Through that provision, Congress acknowledged that, at least in the case of Puerto Ricans, U.S. territorial expansion had created Spanish-speaking citizens with a claim to certain linguistic rights.

The Mexican, Puerto Rican, French Creole, and Native American language experiences, then, are markedly different from that of European immigrants, who, as Schlesinger notes, "stayed for a season with their old language" before the next generation adopted English. Spanish, Cajun, and the surviving Native American languages are not "foreign." They are the tongues of long-settled linguistic minorities who were absorbed by an expanding multinational state.

International law has long recognized that linguistic minorities within a multiethnic state like ours have a right to protection against discrimination. Article 53 of the United Nations Charter, for example, urges member states to promote "universal respect for and observance of human rights and funda­mental freedom for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or reli­gion" (my emphasis). Similar descriptions can be found in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in proclamations of the European and Inter­American states.

Those principles, however, are routinely violated in this country, where federal courts prohibit discrimination because of a person's race, religion, or national origin, but continue to permit language discrimination. A classic example occurred in Texas in 1975 in the case of Garcia v. Gloor Hector Garda, the plaintiff in the case, was a twenty-four-year-old native-born Texan who attended public schools in Brownsville and who spoke both English and Spanish. His parents, however, were Mexican immigrants and the family always spoke Spanish at home, so he felt more comfortable in Spanish.

Garda was hired as a salesman by Gloor Lumber and Supply, Inc. specifically because he could speak Spanish to its customers, but the company had a policy that employees could not speak Spanish to one another on the job, though they were free to speak whatever language they wanted off the job. In June 1975, Garda was dismissed after violating the company rule several times, whereupon he filed a federal discrimination complaint. At the trial, the U.S. district court found that seven of the eight salesmen Gloor employed, and thirty-one of its thirty-nine employees, were Hispanic, that 75 percent of the customers in the Brownsville business area also were Hispanic, and that many of Gloor's customers wished to be waited on by salesmen who spoke Spanish. Alton Gloor, an officer and stockholder, testified that there were business reasons for the Spanish ban, among them: English-speaking customers objected to communications between employees that they could not understand; pamphlets and trade literature were only in English, so employees needed to improve their English skills; and supervisors who did not speak Spanish could better oversee their subordinates. The court ruled in Gloor's favor, finding no discrimination.

The case eventually went to the US. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which agreed in a May 1980 decision that "Mr. Garcia's use of Spanish was a significant factor" in his firing. The court concluded, however, that Garda had not suffered national discrimination, even though he presented an expert wit­ness who testified that the "Spanish language is the most important aspect of ethnic identification for Mexican Americans," and even though he was backed in his contention by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The court's decision went on to say Mr. Garcia was fully bilingual. He chose deliberately to speak Spanish instead .of English while actually at work. ... Let us assume, as contended by Mr. Garcia, there was no genuine business need for the rule and that its adoption by Gloor was arbitrary. The EEO Act does not prohibit all arbitrary employment practices .... It is directed only at specific impermissible bases of discrimination, race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. National origin must not be confused with ethnic or socio-cultural traits or an unrelated status, such as citizenship or alienage ... a hiring policy that distinguishes on some other ground, such as grooming codes or how to run his business, is related more closely to the employer s choice of how to run his business than to equality of employment.

In other words, because Garda was bilingual, he had lost any right to speak his language-the language for which he was hired and the majority Ian !Wage in the community-at work. Spanish was a "preference" of his, the court said, and an employer could legally ban it just as he could ban "persons born under a certain sign of the zodiac or persons having long hair or short hair or no hair at all." The court thus performed a Solomon-like miracle ­severing Garda's nationality from his language.

The language debate is a nagging reminder that conquering a territory by force does not guarantee the assimilation of that territory’s original inhabitants, nor does the passing of a few generations assure the gradual disappear­ance of their culture. For if conquered people feel themselves systematically mistreated by their conquerors, they inevitably turn their language and culture into weapons of resistance, into tools with which they demand equality within the conquering society. This is precisely what happened with Latinos in America toward the end of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, even some of the best Anglo historians' have misread that movement as one that is seeking separation rather than inclusion. Take Pulitzer prize-winner Arthur Schlesinger's response to the multicultural movement. "It may be too bad that dead white European males have played so large a role in shaping our culture," Schlesinger writes in The Disuniting of America, "But that's the way it is. One cannot erase history."

The alarmism of Schlesinger and others notwithstanding, no one in the multicultural movement except a few bizarre ethnocentrists ever sought to erase the historical role of "dead white European males" in American history. Rather, most exponents of that movement have endeavored to undo the damage created by several centuries of what Edward Said, one of America’s most perceptive social critics, has properly called "cultural imperialism."

A culture's music, song, fiction, theater, and popular lore, Said notes, together with specialized disciplines, sociology, literary history, ethnography, and the like, comprise the narratives by which a people understand the best of themselves, their place in the world, their identity. But over the course of civilization, culture became attached to specific nations and states, and at least since the time of the Greeks, those attachments have led to classifications, often antagonistic notions of "us" and "them," of superior and inferior societies, thus turning culture into another weapon by which the strong dominate the weak. As Said notes: "the main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it go­ing, who won it back, and who now plans its future-these issues were re­flected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative [culture] .... [T]he power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very im­portant to culture and imperialism and constitutes one of the main connections between them."

In the United States, the link between culture and empire has been harder to grasp, partly because our heterogeneous immigrant society has made even the definition of a "dominant" culture more difficult to distill, but that link is just as strong as it was between the former European powers and their colonies, insists Said: "before we can agree what the American identity is made of, we have to con­cede that as an immigrant settler society superimposed on the ruins of consid­erable native presence, American identity is too varied to be a unitary and homogeneous thing; indeed the battle within it is between advocates of a unitary identity and those who see the whole as a complex but not reductively unified one ...."

Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is sin­gle and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and un­monolithic. This, I believe, is as true of the contemporary United States as it is of the modern Arab world.

In his pioneering literary analysis, Culture and Imperialism, Said goes on to demonstrate how many of the West's greatest fiction writers, [Daniel] Defoe, [Joseph] Conrad, [Rudyard] Kipling, [Jane] Austen, [Andre] Malraux, T. E. Lawrence, [Herman] Melville, and [Albert] Camus, all unconsciously pro­moted in their works the imperial ambitions of their separate nations, while they ignored or overlooked the intrinsic value of the colonial cultures in which their novels were set.

Much the same has happened in this country with both classical and popular traditions and culture. During the nineteenth century, Anglo settlers in the Southwest readily adapted the Spanish hacienda styles of architecture, Spanish names for cities, rivers, and even states, Mexican food, the vaquero life of the Mexican rancho, or the hunting, camping, and solitary worship of nature so prevalent among Native Americans, while they refused to regard the Mexicans or Indians among them as equals.