Responding to the few recent posts…
Multiculturalism is a wonderful thing…within a balanced context of a unified culture as well. The way it has emerged in the last half of the 20th century and going forward, is competing subcultures and the eclipse of a common culture. It is a further radicalization of the United States, which is more than a geographical definition.
It used to be, when we taught history, including U.S. history, that the history of our subcultures within our boundaries was also taught, as an aspect of ethnic history. Today that is not good enough. It’s a war. One must separate, in equal status, as it were, one “country within a country,” providing that “country” with its own separate “month,” and capitalizing its “History.”
We aren’t several nations. We are one nation, with certain distinguishing cultural characteristics as a nation, which makes us different from other nations with similar features such as democracy and personal freedoms. In addition, we have ethnic subcultures within our nation, brought from elsewhere. When discussing the history of the United States, the ethnic subcultures should not be taught as competitive with the unifying culture, as if the subcultures eclipse the unifying culture or are in a battle with the latter for domination. But that’s the way it appears to be when you have separate “months” to “celebrate” every conceivable ethnic, racial, gender, sexual subculture in the land. It’s Balkanization out of control. Frankly, it’s also somewhat revealing about the need for “identity” affirmation. If you need your identity affirmed publicly, you aren’t too sure of it.
I actually think it would promote a certain accuracy to have a separate curriculum about the history of immigration to the United States, feature those lands, their cultures, and how that intersection was achieved within the U.S. (And good K-12 curriculum has actually always done that. – Poles, Irish, Italians, Jews from Eastern Europe, Hispanics, Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asians, etc.) It not only teaches different cultures and aspects of international history, it also teaches about some of the dynamics of immigration, how those have changed, and what is common – and not-- about the immigrant experience. This is teaching historiography, not just Identity Politics.and polemics.
It would always have been better either to have no particular “celebration” of competing “histories,” or to limit those to weeks instead of months, or to have a combined month of Immigrant and Ethnic History. But the reality is that the U.S. population can be manipulated by guilt (with regard to racial issues in particular), and can also be bullied, because of political realities.
