Daryl Michael Scott

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Daryl Michael Scott | Postwar Pluralism, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Origins of Multicultural Education | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Postwar Pluralism, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Origins of Multicultural Education

The rise of multiculturalism in American society has rarely, if ever, been linked to the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Many scholars believe that the Court viewed its opinion as the beginning of the end of ethnoracial divisions. In his call for a postethnic America, the historian David A. Hollinger goes a step further and argues that those who struggled against segregation "had little incentive to embrace the pluralist emphasis on the autonomy or durability of ethnoracial groups." As the multicultural movement blossomed in the early 1990s, the liberal historian John Higham joined Nathan Glazer and other racial neoconservatives (who opposed social engineering to bring minorities into the mainstream) in pointing an accusatory finger at the black power movement and white guilt as the parents of multiculturalism. Most recently, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn has extended this line of interpretation, claiming that therapeutic race experts, fueled by black power's identity politics, hijacked the civil rights movement and forged an excessive multiculturalism. To such critics, multiculturalism, like black power, smacks of separatism, overwrought group consciousness, the suffocation of individualism, and the decline of class politics.¹	1
That interpretation stems largely from a misreading of multiculturalism as ethnocentric. When the word multiculturalism came into vogue, critics of the movement saw no distinction between Afrocentrism and ethnocentrism, on the one hand, and multiculturalism, on the other. Controversies over public school curricula in New York City in the early 1990s clarified the distinction. In 1990 the historian of education Diane Ravitch, opposing Afrocentrism in the public schools, distinguished it from pluralism but treated both as brands of multiculturalism. Yet she noted that Afrocentrism does not embrace a common culture. That distinction should have led her to dissociate multiculturalism from Afrocentrism since the existence of common cultural ground in a society—in this case, American society—is a fundamental issue. In debate with Afrocentrics, self-identified multiculturalists such as the public intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr. have distanced themselves from Afrocentricism by insisting that European and mainstream American culture have shaped the culture and identity of people of African descent in the New World. It was not until the fallout from the debate on Afrocentrism in public schools and higher education that one leading Afrocentric scholar, Molefi Asante, saw the advantage of repacking Afrocentrism as a form of multiculturalism. Others, such as the late John Henrik Clarke, continued to see multiculturalism as a separate movement. By the mid-1990s, the debates between Gates and Asante had distinguished multiculturalism from Afrocentrism and ethnocentrism.²	2
Though both ideologies—multiculturalism and ethnocentrism—place racial and ethnic identity above class concerns, multiculturalism looks outward rather than inward. It is more concerned with harmonious race relations than with preserving or promoting cultural integrity and authenticity. Multiculturalists value the rights, aspirations, and freedom of the individual over those of the racial or ethnic group. Thus they often celebrate complex individual identities as well as interracial marriage and dating. Though multiculturalists accept and even advocate the state's use of racial and ethnic categories to promote social justice, they reject the notion that any particular race or culture has inherent or necessary content and otherwise criticize efforts to impose a racial identity on any person or group. (They call the former "essentializing" race and culture; the latter, "racialization.") Further, multiculturalists promote the cultures of virtually all descent groups, not only or primarily their own, and stress diversity within a "race" and "transcending" race. Many multiculturalists, especially the postmodernists, are more postethnic—more estranged from the life of the ethnic community with which they are identified—than they or their opponents are willing to admit.³	. . .

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