University of Georgia

Terry College of Business
 

The idea of multiculturalism in the academy signals evolution in thought about education and is an indication of a social consciousness that leaps toward national unity. This is so despite the fact that many decent people - and some not-so-decent people - have disparaged the idea for a variety of reasons. Their arguments to the contrary, multiculturalism is not antagonistic to the best American ideals.

Multiculturalism in education is the quality of creating and sustaining curricula, academic activities, programs, and projects that actively enhance respect for all human cultures. Seeking a multicultural academy does not portend the disuniting of America; instead, it suggests the possibility that a multiplicity of self-respecting and other-respecting cultures could coexist in a more perfect union. In fact, the only way that diverse cultures can coexist for long is on the basis of such mutual appreciation and respect. thus, multiculturalism in the academy is one way to support the objective of an effective education for the 21st century, when colleagues and universities will be infinitely more diverse than they are today. However, it is not diversity itself that should encourage multiculturalism, but our commitment as human beings to the fullest possible appreciation of other cultures. So it does not matter whether the college is located in an all-white town in Iowa; the imperatives for multiculturalism are based on the concrete values of human cultural experiences.

My idea of multiculturalism grows from the rich cultural mixture I experienced during the 1960s. As graduate students at UCLA in the last ‘60s, three of my colleagues, Andrea Rich, Deluvina Hernandex, Dennis Ogawa, and I conceived the idea that it was possible to have a society truly committed to transracial and transcultural cooperation. It was not a new idea, but we were earnest, and in our zeal, like so many other young people of the day, we misjudged the real obstacles to multiculturalism in society and in the academy.

We wrote books: Ogawa., The Japanese Americans: Rich, Interracial Communication; Hernandez, a co-author of How to Talk to People of Other Races; and I under my old name. Arthur Smith, Transracial Communication. We created course proposals and syllabi, occasionally with grants, to bring about the new intercultural and interracial dispensation. In what we believe was a remarkable union of African, Asian, Latino, and European commitments to a vision of a multicultural and multi-ethnic society, we saw intellectual and social promise in an academic orientation toward a new type of America emerging from the old order of segregation, overt discrimination, and anti-multiculturalism. Of course, we lived the high-spirited idealism of the ‘60s; the idea of a multicultural society was so normal and natural at that time around Westwood that we could not fully know the impregnable wall of Eurocentrism that would stand squarely in the way of such intellectual equality and social democracy. We did not realize the extend of our own indoctrination into the general system of Eurocentric education despite whatever specific modifications had occurred in our own personal educational experiences, such as reading or listening to multicultural authors.

The culprit that stole idealism in the 1960s was the institutional insistence of a white hegemonic solution to the problem of a multicultural education. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a veritable American icon of history, seemed to propose just such a solution in a recent debate I held with him and Cornel West at East Stroudsburg University. Essentially, Schlesinger’s argument, which he has repeated in the small book, The Disuniting of America, is that the United States is a white country in the sense that the ideals of government and education are derived from European institutions, and anyone wanting to be an American must willingly conform to those institutions. Disunion, he believes, comes when African Americans insist that our heritage, or that of Asian Americans, or Latino Americans, or indigenous peoples must also be respected. to insist on such respect is to challenge the hegemony of the Eurocentrism that exists in the academy and society. Only acquiescence is acceptable in such a hegemony. One must willingly allow oneself to be clarencised (a word now used by African American college students to refer to the process by which Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is said to have abandoned his own history).

In many respects the great disaster so far in the quest for a multicultural academy has been the limited regard many whites have for African intellectual ideas. This is unfortunate, but it also is predictable when whites assume that all important knowledge is European. Of course, there are blacks who participate in the same drama of Eurocentric intellectual hegemony because they have a truncated view of their own historical experiences.

What I know now, if I did not realize it before, is that there is no clear path to a multicultural academy. However, I am as convinced as I have always been that it is one of the most positive ways to bring about a greater sense of collective responsibility. America is a dynamic project: it is not a static idea, and neither is the American academy a static institution despite the entrenched attitudes supportive of a monoracial and monocultural response to a multicultural society.
 
 

Whitness in the University
 
 

Since Afrocentricity was first proposed as a critique of domination and hegemony more than fifteen years ago, it has challenged the imposition of Eurocentrism as universal without attempting to claim such universality for itself. There is nothing wrong with a Eurocentrism that represents the normal and natural development of the culture of European peoples; it is when that particular development is imposed as the only basis for education that we incur problems. Among the difficulties are the minimizing of other cultural traditions, the obliteration of histories, the promotion of patriarchy, and the elevation of the material reality at the expense of the spiritual or relational. Understanding the Eurocentrifc idea as a normal player on the field with other cultures is the great problem of anti-multiculturalists. They seem to insist on Europe over all without reference to the agency that exists in other cultures. Afrocentrists, on the other hand, have argued that it is impossible to have multiculturalism and reject the agency of African or other people.

Thus, the demand that African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans "become" white in attitude, tastes, opinion, and behavior is not only an imposition, but an oppressive idea when forced by curriculum, process, or a system whereby whites reward those who deny their own heritage or culture and punish those who are most "centered." This particular situation is often referred to by African Americans as the "double sickness" where whites reinforce African Americans in our insanity. That is, the farther a person is from his or her personal cultural center, the more recognition and acceptance by the white university; the closer a person is to his or her culture, the less the acceptance in the academy. In fact, many African Americans who have simply worn African clothes or braided their hair in Egyptian braids have met with hostility from their white colleagues. Consequently, many African Americans, understanding the career dynamics of racism within the academy, seek to imitate Eurocentric ideals in dress, tastes, vocal accents, and mannerisms to gain access to advancement. They are victims of a sinister hegemony that seeks not to celebrate but to eliminate cultures in order to claim multiculturalism.

The whitest institutions in America, next to churches and corporations, are universities and colleges. But unlike churches and corporations, universities claim intellectual leadership, progressive attitudes, and an orientation toward inclusiveness. To the latter end numerous symbols of multi-ethnicism and multiculturalism are established to underscore various universities’ commitments to the idea of multiculturalism. But these symbols are rarely central to the university’s mission to a diverse population or to make African American, Asian, and Latino students feel welcome on essentially white campuses. There is some value in this, but what is needed is much more fundamental in the manner in which the university approaches its commitment to education.

Whiteness in the university is not found merely in the lack of matriculating African, Latino, or Asian students, but in the whiteness of the curriculum, the very heart of what we as professors teach, research, and otherwise transmit to our students. The fundamental dogma of the American academy seems to rest upon the belief that the European culture is the world’s only source of rational thought. Every sequence of courses in the disciplines seems to assume that whites created the foundations of all knowledge on the basis of European values. And there is rarely anything in the structure of the curriculum to challenge that assumption. Thus, we have an overemphasis on the contributions of the ancient Greeks and under emphasis on the contributions of the ancient Egyptians. In fact, the Egyptian language, Mdu Ntr, was not included as a classical language by the votarists of Greek and Latin in the 19th century, although Egyptian comes much earlier than either Greek or Latin, has more written documents, and expresses a holistic philosophy based on ancient traditions. Alas, as Martin Bernal has shown, it continental African origin, inter alia, is problematic for those who wished for a European origin of civilization.

I recall a conversation with a very distinguished dean of a major college of arts and sciences about the future name of a department she was envisioning. The dean had offered to combine several language departments into one larger department called the "Modern Language Department." I informed her that this was a misnomer since no African or Asian languages were included in the proposed department; only Western European languages were included in the term modern languages. This was a conceptual and philosophic problem because the term suggested that African and Asian languages did not constitute modern languages. A way around the dilemma of cultural imposition would have been to delimit the department to what it actually sought to express: A Department of Modern European Languages. That would have seemed an appropriate appellation. I am bouyed by the fact that once individuals examine the basis of their actions, they are often willing to modify their behaviors. This is most certainly the only avenue toward multiculturalism in the academy.

This problem is not merely a problem of the general curriculum. It also affects what we do in African studies in various departments. Take the fact that in one history department the description of the course "Topics in African History" reads: "Survey of precolonial African history, includes trans-Atlantic slave trade, legitimate commerce, scramble for Africa. European colonialism, anti-colonial African nationalism." You can bet your life that a student will come away from such a course with no appreciation or understanding of African agency. Even the history of Africa is captured through Europe. What did the Africans have to say about the process of dis-agencing them, and is not the trans-Atlantic slave trade a euphemism for European Slave Trade as East African Slave Trade is a euphemism for the Arab Slave Trade? What texts are available on these subjects, and are they written from a multicultural point of view, or do we have sufficient supplemental materials to provide various perspectives?

The idea that texts can be canonized is itself a religious idea, and nowhere has the religion of Eurocentrism been more strongly applied than in the social sciences and the humanities. There is almost no recognition of the fact that the African American presence or the Native American presence, for example, growing out of the realities of dispossession and enslavement in America, are significant for understanding human sciences throughout the world, not because we have transcended race and culture, but precisely because we are experientially who we are in this land.
 
 

The Locus of Multicultural Expression
 
 

The more I have thought about the fix we are in in the academy, the more I lay the academy, the more I lay the problem at the manner in which we have structured the curricula of universities since the Greco-Germanic invasion of the American academy in the 19th century. Not that the overthrow of the Latin-based model of education by the Greek-based one was not anticipated by the colleges and universities of the 19th century, but the enthroning of Greece at the head of every discipline in the West carried within it certain dangerous seeds of European hegemony that eventually would demand a response from non-Europeans. Almost in every quarter of the academy and from every continent have come those responses. The Afrocentrists have been the most insistent critics of this hegemony in the United States, but in India, Mexico, France, and England there have come other voices. All of them have not been culturally African, Asian, or Latino; some have been most clearly European: witness the work of Serge Latoche in France or Ian Hancock and martin Bernal in the United States. The writings of Theophile Obenga, Samir Amin, Ama Mazama, Kariamu Welsh, Claude Alvares, Aisha Blackshire-Belay, Abu Abarry, and Gustav Esteva constitute just a few of the critical pieces in the multicultural puzzle. These critics have unstruck the conundrum of European hegemony; they have solved that riddle and suggested that the dogma of rationalism as being of European origin is a bold and unnecessary overreach.

America has always been multi-ethnic and multicultural. this was so when there were only Iroquois, Muskogee, Athapascan, Lakota, and Algonquin people on the land. There is no other origin nor any other destiny of this land. the same cannot be said for higher education. It originated in denial of the African and indigenous people and was not designed to educate them, for often inherent in those early curricula were the seeds of white supremacy, not multicilturalism. Furthermore, the education granted to white males, its first students, was really about white cultural assertion over the darker races and the celebration of white cultural esteem. By the time the institutions got around to accepting women, Africans, and Native Americans, they were proficient at a curriculum that would make of Africans and Native Americans a class who could interpret law, literature, science, history, and even their own oppression in the interests of whites. The idea, rarely expressed but ditifully executed, was to create a class of persons. African or Native American in blood and color but European in values, habits, morals, and intellect. Prosecution of this line of thinking was to prove immensely popular, particularly to an African people so desious of education that they were willing to abandon even the little that they remembered for the idea of America education. This was not quite so successful among the Native Americans who saw very early the danger of receiving an education that would make them leery of their own people, spiteful of their own heroes, and antagonists of their own cultural and economic interests.

The academy is the locus, if there is to be a place, for the expression of the best elements of multiculturalism, which would include the appreciation of a multiplicity of cultural expressions. Several steps might be undertaken to transform an institution into a multicultural place of learning. First, the administration into a multicultural place of learning. First, the administration must express the institution’s mission in terms of human cultures. Secondly, the faculty must be deliberately developed with an aim toward excellence by virtue of multiculturalism. Thirdly, the curriculum must be evaluated holistically and specifically with regard to the different ways humans have focused on issues. Fourthly, there should be comprehensive appraisals of the institution’s activities for faculty and students to insure that the perspectives are not monocultural unless the integrity of the activities or programs will be violated by inserting different cultural perspectives. Finally, the institution should find every opportunity to promote respect for all human cultures while making necessary criticism of cultures that violate human dignity.