Tut I Tam

Multiculturalism In America

By Dr. Myron Kuropas

Multiculturalism in America is not what many Ukrainian Canadians think it is.  At least it’s not what I believe Senator Paul Yuzyk or even Dr. Manoly Lupul had in mind in promoting it.  Here in the USA multiculturalism has become a mantra for ideological indoctrination.

It wasn’t always that way.  Senator Yuzyk’s “third force” paradigm resonated in America. The 1970s became the “decade of the ethnic” according to Michael Novak, author of The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnic. White ethnics had been energized earlier by America’s “Black is Beautiful” movement.  If being Black was beautiful, we reasoned, then so was Italian, Polish, and Bulgarian. 

The 1970s were a great time to be Ukrainian in America.  As interest in ethnicity grew, the Ford Foundation funded three institutions to study white ethnics: the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the University of Chicago, and the Catholic Church.  The AJC established the National Project on Ethnic America, headed by Irving Levin. Catholics created the National Center for Urban/Ethnic Affairs, headed by Msgr. Geno Baroni.  The Center for the Study of American Pluralism, directed by Fr. Andrew Greeley, a sociologist, was launched at the University of Chicago.  I was intimately involved with all three organizations and its leadership.

The U.S. government became interested.  Congress passed the Ethnic Studies Heritage Bill in 1972 “to afford students opportunities to learn about the nature of their own cultural heritage, and to study the contributions of the cultural heritages of the other ethnic groups in the nation.”  In 1974, the federal government allocated $2.5 million for ethnic studies.  It was a beginning and colleges and universities were soon offering courses dealing with a wide range of national, religious and cultural groups.

I benefited from America’s new national model.  A doctoral student at the University of Chicago, I wanted to write about Ukrainian Americans and was able to convince professors in the departments of education, history, and sociology to serve on my dissertation committee.  A second stroke of good fortune was my 1976 appointment to the White House staff as President Ford’s Special Assistant for Ethnic Affairs.  Special assistants for Blacks, Hispanics and Women were already on board.  

Prior to my tenure in the White House, I became a board member of the Illinois Consultation on Ethnic Education, an affiliate of the National Project on Ethnic America.  Meeting regularly at the Chicago office of the American Jewish Committee, we were keen on preserving America’s ethnic heritage; our paradigm was cultural pluralism, the idea that we were Americans first, ethnics second,  “Americans plus” as we liked to call ourselves.

As America’s intellectual mood became more radical in the 1980s, the paradigm shifted.  Cultural pluralism faded, replaced by multiculturalism which emphasized studies of the “oppressed”, specifically, Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians, the so-called “visible minorities”.  Once Asians prospered, women and gays became the oppressed. Federal and foundation monies for white ethnic studies disappeared because, after all, Italians, Poles, and Bulgarians were “white”, and, therefore, part of the “oppressor class”.  Affirmative Action came into vogue and university and job set-asides were introduced for Blacks, women and Hispanics, the “official minorities”.  Research emphasis shifted to inter-group relations and “institutional racism”. 

Minorities were soon a protected class. When I was regional director of a federal agency in the late 1970s, the safest federal employee to be if you were incompetent was a black woman with an Hispanic surname.  

Multiculturalism eventually metastasized into “political correctness”.  Elementary school textbooks were rewritten to reflect minority equity. Gender roles were recalibrated so that mommy was now the bread winner, daddy the homemaker.  Next came appreciation for sexual change with children’s books such as “I Have Two Mommies”.  Universities established studies departments devoted to Black, Hispanic, and, later, Gay, Lesbian and Transgender programs.

American history was revisited to comply with the emerging ideological narrative.  Believing in American exceptionalism - Ronald Reagan’s America as “a shining city upon a hill” for example - was dismissed as “triumphalism” and condemned in American history classes which increasingly portrayed the United States as an evil empire.  Today we have President Obama travelling the world apologizing for American “excesses”.  

Political correctness is now an integral part of the dominant culture among America’s intellectual and professorial elite. Colleges have instituted “speech codes” and outdoor “free speech zones” - restricted areas where students are allowed to express their opinions openly.  A counter-culture is emerging, however.  The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), founded as a check on the increasingly radical indoctrination on American college campuses, is one example.   

Has Multiculturalism provided a knowledge base for understanding America’s many and varied ethnic groups?  Hardly.  As Mark Steyn recently wrote: “Multiculturalism doesn’t require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them.”