Quotes from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“The theory is that immersion in the history of one's own group will overcome feelings of racial inferiority both by instilling pride in past ethnic accomplishments and by providing ethnic role models to inspire future performance. Telling black children how marvelous old Africa was will make them work harder and do better. But does study of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome improve the academic record of Greek-American and Italian-American children? Not so that anyone has noticed. Why is it likely to help black children, who are removed from their geographical origins not by 50 years but by 300?”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“After Egypt, Afrocentrists teach children about the glorious West African emperors, the vast lands they ruled, the civilization they achieved; not, however, about the tyrannous authority they exercised, the ferocity of their wars, the tribal massacres, the squalid lot of the common people, the captives sold into slavery, the complicity with the Atlantic salve trade, the persistence of slavery in Africa after it was abolished in the West.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“In New York the curriculum guide for 11th-grade American history tells students that there were three "foundations" for the Constitution: the European Enlightenment, the "Haudenosaunee political system", and the antecedent colonial experience. Only the Haudenosaunee political system receives explanatory subheadings: "a. Influence upon colonial leadership and European intellectuals (Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau); b. Impact on Albany Plan of Union, Articles of Confederation, and U.S. Constitution".

How many experts on the American Constitution would endorse this stirring tribute to the "Haudenosaunee political system"? How many have heard of that system? Whatever influence the Iroquois confederation may have had on the framers of the Constitution was marginal; on European intellectuals it was marginal to the point of invisibility. No other state curriculum offers this analysis of the making of the Constitution. But then no other state has so effective an Iroquois lobby.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“[U]nless one is to yield to biological determinism and accept that the possession of black sin creates a unique black mentality and character, it is hard to see what living connection exists between American blacks today and their heterogeneous West African ancestors three centuries ago. And biological determinism--the theory that race determines mentality--is of course just another word for racism. Biological determinism is exactly the theory apologists for slavery used in the American South before the Civil War. It is bizarre to hear blacks invoking the same theory today.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“Certainly the European overlords did little enough to prepare Africa for self-government but Democracy would find it hard in any case to put down roots in a tribalist and patrimonial culture that long before the west invaded Africa had sacralized the personal authority of chieftains and ordained the submission of the rest. What the west would call corruption is regarded through much of Africa as no more than the prerogative of power.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“When every ethnic and religious group claims a right to approve or veto anything that is taught in public schools, cultural pluralism becomes ethnocentrism. An evident casualty is the old idea that whatever our ethnic base, we are all Americans together.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“Let us by all means teach black history, African history, women's history, Hispanic history, Asian history. But let us teach them as history, not as filiopietistic commemoration. The purpose of history is to promote not group self-esteem, but understanding of the world and the past, dispassionate analysis, judgment, and perspective, respect for divergent cultures and traditions, and unflinching protection for those unifying ideas of tolerance, democracy, and human rights that make free historical inquiry possible.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism. In this regard the Afrocentrists are especially absurd. The West needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those "sun people" who sustained slavery until Western imperialism abolished it (and sustain it to this day in Mauritania and the Sudan), who keep women in subjection, marry several at once, and mutilate their genitals, who carry out racial persecutions not only against Indians and other Asians but against fellow Africans from the wrong tribes, who show themselves either incapable of operating a democracy or ideologically hostile to the democratic idea, and who in their tyrannies and massacres, their Idi Amins and Boukassas, have stamped with utmost brutality on human rights. Keith B. Richburg, a black newspaperman who served for three years as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Africa, saw bloated bodies floating down a river in Tanzania from the insanity that was Rwanda and thought: "There but for the grace of God go I . . . Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive . . . Thank God I am an American".”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“Until very recent times, few black Americans have regarded the African connection as a major theme in their lives. David Walker, in his 1829 Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World, said of America, "This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood is now our mother country". "No one idea has given rise to more oppression and persecution toward the colored people of this country", wrote the great Frederick Douglass, "than that which makes Africa, not America, their home. It is that wolfish idea that elbows us off the sidewalk, and denies us the rights of citizenship". When the freedmen after emancipation chose last names, they took not African names but the names of American heroes--Washington, Jefferson, Clay, Lincoln. "Centuries of residence, centuries of toil, centuries of suffering have made us American", a black high-school principal in Ohio said in 1874. "In language, in civilization, in fears, and in hopes we are Americans".”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“Today it is the Western democratic tradition that attracts and empowers people of all continents, creeds, and colors. When the Chinese students cried and died for democracy in Tiananmen Square, they brought with them not representations of Confucius or Buddha but a model of the Statue of Liberty.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“The militants of ethnicity 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 inequities 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.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“[I]s there not something basically hostile to the actor's art in the consanguinity principle? After all, what is acting but an exercise in dissimulation?

The challenge to actors is to create characters on the stage; and these characters may be very different from what the actors are in real life. That indeed is the actor's triumph. The racialist restriction nullifies the talent of directors. The idea that only Swedes can direct Strindberg, only Russians Chekhov, only Irish Sheridan or Shaw, only Englishmen Shakespeare is self-evidently ridiculous--and, if carried out, would hopelessly impoverish the art of the theater. The consanguinity principle is an exclusionary rule that penalizes the very minorities it claims to benefit.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“The Irish were regarded as shiftless and drunken; moreover, they were papists, and their fealty to Rome, it was said, meant they could never become loyal Americans. They were subjected to severe discrimination in employment and were despised by genteel society. W.E.B. Du Bois, the black scholar, testified that when he grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the 1870s, "the racial angle was more clearly defined against the Irish than against me".”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“In 1856 the Know-Nothings even ran a former president, Millard Fillmore, as their presidential candidate. "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid", observed Abraham Lincoln. "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal'. We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except Negroes'. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics'".”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“Yet the old faith in the power of Bryce's "amazing solvent" to fulfill Washington's conception of Americans as "one people" held fast. However much they suffered from social prejudice, the newcomers were not barred from civic participation, and civic participation indoctrinated them in the fundamentals of the American Creed. They altered the ethnic composition of the country, but they preserved the old ambition to become Americans.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“In the Skokie case, it upheld the right of neo-Nazis to parade down the streets of an Illinois town inhabited by Holocaust survivors and their families. Wounded feelings were not deemed a persuasive reason for cancelling constitutional protection. As Justice Brenan wrote in Texas v. Johnson, a case in which a protestor burned an American flag: "If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable".”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“Three days after a German submarine sank the Lusitania, Wilson addressed an audience of recently naturalized citizens in Philadelphia. "You cannot become thorough Americans", he told them, "if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups, A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American".

"We can have no 'fifty-fifty' allegiance in the country", Theodore Roosevelt said two years later. "Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all". He condemned Americans who saw the world from the standpoint of another nation. "We Americans are children of the crucible", T.R. said. "The crucible does not do its work unless it turns out those cast into it in one national mould".”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“The rising cult of ethnicity was a symptom of decreasing confidence in the American future.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“The issue is the ethnocentric history that the New York task force, the Portland Baseline essayists, and other Afrocentric ideologues propose for American children. The issue is the teaching of bad history under whatever ethnic banner. Cn 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?”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“But in general one senses a certain inauthenticity in saddling public schools with the mission of convincing children of the beauties of their particular ethnic origins. Ethnic subcultures, if they had genuine vitality, would be sufficiently instilled in children by family, church, and community. It is surely not the office of the public school to promote artificial ethnic chauvinism.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“Instead of casting off the foreign skin, as John Quincy Adams had stipulated, never to resume it, the fashion is to resume the foreign skin as conspicuously as can be. The cult of ethnicity has reversed the movement of American history, producing a nation of minorities - or at least of minority spokesmen - less interested in joining with the majority in common endeavor than in declaring their alienation from oppressive, white, patriarchal, racist, sexist, classist society.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“Yet I believe the campaign against the idea of common ideals and a single society will fail. Gunnar Myrdal was surely right: for all the damage it has done, the upsurge of ethnicity is a superficial enthusiasm stirred by romantic ideologues and unscrupulous hucksters whose claim to speak for their minorities is thoughtlessly accepted by the media.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“The civil rights revolution provoked new declarations of ethnic identity by the now long-resident "new migration" from southern and eastern Europe--Italians, Greeks, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians. Claiming to speak for white minorities aggrieved by the idea of the melting pot, Michael Novak, an early and influential theorist of multiculturalism, wrote The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. "Growing up in America", Novak said, "has been an assault upon my sense of worthiness", and to improve his self-esteem he affirmed the need for a politics of identity. Against the conception of America as a nation of individuals, Novak hailed what he called "the new ethnic politics", which, he said, "asserts that groups can structure the rules and goals and procedures of American life".

The passion for "roots" was reinforced by the "third-generation" effect formulated in Hansen's Law, named after Marcus Lee Hansen, the great pioneer in immigration history: "What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember". It was reinforced, too, and powerfully, by the waning American optimism about the nation's prospects. For two centuries Americans had been confident that life would be better for their children than it was for them. In their exuberant youth, Americans had disdained the past and, as John Quincy Adams urged, looked forward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors. Amid forebodings of national decline, Americans now began to look forward less and backward more. The rising cult of ethnicity was a symptom of decreasing confidence in the American future.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“The pressure for the new cult of ethnicity came less from the minorities en masse than from their often self-appointed spokesmen, Most ethnics, white and non-white, saw themselves primarily as Americans. "The cravings for 'historical identity'", Gunnar Myrdal said at the height of the ethnic rage, "is not in any sense a people's movement. Those cravings have been raised by a few well-established intellectuals, professors, writers--mostly, I gather, of a third generation". Few of them, Myrdal thought, made much effort to talk to their own ethnic groups. This movement, Myrdal added with a certain contempt, was only "upper-class intellectual romanticism".”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“In 1974, after testimony from ethnic spokesmen denouncing the melting pot as a conspiracy to homogenize America, Congress passed the Ethnic Heritage Studies Program Act--a statute that, by applying the ethnic ideology to all Americans, compromised the historic right of Americans to decide their ethnic identities for themselves. The act ignored those millions of Americans--surely a majority--who refused identification with any particular ethnic group.

The ethnic upsurge (it can hardly be called a revival because it was unprecedented) began as a gesture of protest against the Anglocentric culture. It became a cult, and today it threatens to become a counter-revolution against the original theory of America as "one people", a common culture, a single nation.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“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?”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

“As for self-esteem, is this really the product of ethnic role models and fantasies of a glorious past? or does it not result from the belief in oneself that springs from achievement, from personal rather than from racial pride? Cohesive Asian-American and Jewish-American families instill in their children a sense of self-respect and a determination to work hard. For historical reasons, black families are often less cohesive, and in consequence many black kids often move into a mistrustful world with low self-worth and little self-confidence. Hearing about Africa won't change that.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

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