The Diversity Myth

by David O Sacks

  “Talking ‘Terrorism': Ideologies and Paradigms in a Postmodern World” was one of a series of conferences organized as part of the University's centennial celebration in 1988 and was sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center.100 In the lobby of Stanford's Cubberley Auditorium, conference attendees were confronted by videos showing pictures of rioting Palestinians, marching Sandinistas, Chinese Red Guards, and Winston Churchill holding a gun. Viewers were encouraged to read Noam Chomsky's The Real Terror Network, a book with the thesis that the United States government is behind virtually all of the world's suffering and violence. The conference proceeded on an even more extraordinary premise: “Terrorism” is a word devoid of meaning—merely a label attached to people with whom one disagrees (unless, of course, one disagreed with the West; in that case terrorism did exist and referred to acts perpetrated against the Third World by capitalist Western societies).

  At this conference, Edward Said, a representative of the PLO, delivered the keynote address. Mr. Said informed his Stanford audience that American actions throughout the world were offensive to decency and morality, and concluded that it is treasonous for any person with intellectual integrity to work for the U.S. government. Christopher Hitchens, another outspoken critic of American policies, compared the word “terrorism” to “witchcraft” in its lack of real meaning. Hitchens suggested that both terms served purely as tools to discredit certain people, as part of a “state strategy of propaganda.”101 For Hitchens, as for the other participants, the only proper use of the word “terrorism” was “the use indicated by Chomsky in The Real Terror Network” (that is, in reference to the United States government).102 Hitchens's speech was followed with a performance by Ulrich Preuss, the former legal counsel to Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang. Preuss attempted to locate the “essence” of terrorism in “meanings and symbols,” while downplaying its violent dimension. Preuss declared that terrorism is superior to other acts of violence because of its “political quality,” and lamented “the unsupportable gulf between what the terrorists know to be the right order and the means to achieve it.” He ended by elevating terrorism as a sort of “political theology.”103

  Even the most violent kidnappings, tortures, and murders could be effaced as “political theology” or dismissed as something nonexistent like “witchcraft,” so long as the object of this violence was the West, its citizens, and its governments. At the same time, even the most seemingly nonviolent activities, like trade between First and Third World countries, could be transfigured into the imaginary “terrorism” of Western capitalism. In some respects, this seeming paradox—that the word “terrorism” referred to something nonexistent and simultaneously was something perpetrated by the West—holds a key to understanding multiculturalism. Stanford's activists had declared that “Western Culture's got to go,” and the “Talking ‘Terrorism’” conference provided one blueprint for how such a liquidation might be effected. Western civilization could be eliminated more readily if bereft of the will to resist terrorists or if it could be brought to turn on itself by locating and eliminating the supposed “terrorism” that constituted its very being.

  In contrast with “Talking ‘Terrorism,’” the conference entitled “Women of Color and the Law” sounded positively benign. Organized by Stanford Law School in the fall of 1990, this symposium sought to explore the challenges facing “women of color” in the American legal system. The prestigious Stanford Law Review lent its support, printing a special edition of the conference's major speeches.104

  The conference's keynote speech was delivered by Angela Davis, professor of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the quadrennial vice presidential candidate of the American Communist Party. She set the tone for the conference:

  There is something about the way in which Western society has constructed the law that evokes a sense of dread in me. Although I was never quite able to summon up enough courage to consider studying the law, I do know that many who have entered the legal profession with the express purpose of doing battle against injustice have found the philosophical principles underlying the social function to be hopelessly biased. Personally, I have always found the law to be one of the most terrifying dimensions of the social order.105 (emphasis in original)

  Most of the remaining speakers were even more radical than Davis, as the gnosis enjoyed by “women of color” became an excuse for a series of explicitly political sermons. Sharon Parker, Director of Stanford's OMD, who like Angela Davis and most of the conference's other speakers held no law degree, spoke on “Understanding Coalition,” while Evelyn Nakano Glenn, professor of Asian American and women's studies at the University of California, Berkeley, entitled her historical lecture on the work of women “Cleaning Up/Kept Down.”106 Not all of these lectures were open to the general public. At various points in the proceedings, all those who were not “women of color” were asked to leave Kresge Auditorium—because only “women of color” could possibly “understand” whatever would be said next.

  Typical of the performances was that of Haunani-Kay Trask, a Native Hawaiian who works at the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii. An activist who hopes to see Hawaii declare independence from the United States, Trask began her presentation with a personal introduction that emphasized her revolutionary credentials:

  Aloha mai. Aloha mai. I am Haunani Kawekinohaleakala, descendent of the Pi'ilani line of the Maui and the Kahakumakaliua line of Kaua'i. I greet you as an indigenous woman, as an American-subjugated Native, as part of a non-self-governing people—Hawaiians—and as a Polynesian member of the pan-Pacific movement for self-determination that has been growing in our part of the world for the last thirty years…. Who we are is determined by our connection to our lands and our families. Therefore, our bloodlines and birthplaces tell our identity…. This is who I am—not what I do or where I work—but who I am—lineage and residence.107

  She exalted the culture of Native Hawaii as radically antithetical to the evil West: “Those of us committed to the recognition of our nationhood have evolved away from identification as Americans and, in many ways, despise all that is ‘American.’” Trask continued to describe her “interdependent and wise society:”

  As in most indigenous societies, there was no money, no idea or practice of surplus appropriation, and no value storing or payment deferral because there was no idea of financial profit from exchange. Therefore, no basis for economic exploitation existed in pre-haole Hawai'i…. [P]eople living in each ahupua'a had access to all the necessities of life…forest land, taro and sweet potato area, and fishing grounds.108

  One may wonder how much Trask actually would have enjoyed living in the idyllic paradise she describes. For with her Marxist rhetoric regarding the exploitation of “surplus” value in Western culture, Trask unwittingly acknowledged part of the truth: Only capitalist Western societies have a problem with the exploitation of surplus value because such societies are the only ones that produce much surplus value to be exploited. Digging for taro roots and fishing for seafood are quite different from the kind of work one imagines people do at the Center for Hawaiian Studies—a center whose very existence requires more surplus value than Native Hawaiian culture ever generated.

  The focus of Trask's tirade, however, was more limited than the West generally. Almost everybody agreed with her about the evils of Western civilization, and so, to distinguish herself, Trask had to come up with a somewhat narrower set of targets. Most implausibly, she suggested that Western liberals (of the sort putting on the “Women of Color and the Law” conference, presumably) were a particularly big stumbling block to Native Hawaiian self-determination. Full of sound and fury, Trask continued: “In particular, Natives must beware of white liberals, particularly lawyers, anthropologists and archaeologists, and other scientists and technicians. These people's interest in Native Hawaiians is often self-serving—it is motivated by professional aspirations” or by “some personal/ psychological p
roblem, such as guilt about being part of an oppressive white ruling class in a stolen Native country.”109 Cooperation with white liberals, she said, should be limited to immediate goals; in the long term, after all, Trask hoped to throw 80 percent of the present-day Hawaiian population—those who are not Native Hawaiians—off the islands. If Native Hawaiians and non-Native “liberals” worked too closely with one another, they might become friends. Such friendships would be an obstacle in the coming revolution:

  For myself, as a Native nationalist, the only long-term coalition I could ever participate in would be with other Native people: first, my Polynesian relations, the Maori and Tahitians and Samoans; then other Native peoples, like Indians and Aborigines; and then, Third World peoples…. To the extent that coalitions take us away from our people or divert our energies, they are a waste of effort and may actually be detrimental to us. In the nascent stages of a struggle, coalitions with non-Natives may work. At later, perhaps more developed stages—when Natives are asserting their sovereignty, for example—coalitions may not work.110

  After the conference, law professor Mari Matsuda, herself a Japanese American from Hawaii, exulted that the “Women of Color and the Law” conference “was coalition.”111 Matsuda, for one, did not appear particularly upset about her expulsion from Trask's future paradise. And, for that matter, she had little reason to worry. The struggle was still in its “nascent stages,” and all of the participants (Matsuda and Trask included) agreed on the most immediate goal: The common enemy, which provided the glue to cement the alliance of “women of color,” was the West itself.

  The Empty Curriculum

  The radical conferences, Black Hair, race and gender studies, the new CIV courses, and “political action” programs like SWOPSI and IAC—all promote an “education for difference” of sorts. Each class examines a different persecuted minority group, a different episode of injustice, a different “socially constructed” oppression, and so on. But, cumulatively, the new humanities curriculum provides students with a solid background only in minutiae. Never once questioning their fundamental assumptions, dozens of professors, aided by students, spend their entire careers poring over ephemeral literature, minor historical records, or marginal sociological studies. After all this effort, it is hardly surprising that even the most banal of observations, when found or imagined, becomes transformed into unchallengeable confirmation of the most esoteric theories imaginable.

  In this vein, the class experiments conducted in Psychology 116, “The Psychology of Gender,” a heavily enrolled class meeting the gender studies DR, prepare academically inclined students for the type of research they might expect to complete along a multicultural career track. One group research project, passed out to the class in Spring 1994 by Professor Laura Carstenson as an exemplar, studied “Gender Discrepancies in Pizza Consumption.” The students described their cutting edge experiment:

  We observed couples eating at a local pizza restaurant (Applewood Inn) and recorded the number of slices each individual consumed. The intent of the study was to show that men and women eat more when in the company of a same-sex partner than with an opposite-sex partner. The effect was expected to be greater for females than males because of issues related to body-image and societal gender-based etiquette rules. Toppings, age of each individual, and observed relationship were recorded.112

  The group found that “gender discrepancies exist not only in quantity, but also in rate of consumption.” Of course, even if the results were accurate, they have almost no significance whatsoever, because they may be interpreted in a number of different ways. While a feminist researcher might interpret them as confirmation of the widespread oppression of women, one could just as readily conclude that it is men who are really oppressed because they are pressured to eat more than women. Or, perhaps these differences in pizza consumption reflect nothing more than natural physical differences between men and women. When even pizza can confirm multicultural dogma, it is unlikely that anything could disprove it.

  In many respects, multicultural fieldwork recalls the “science” of phrenology (also known as craniometry), which reached its zenith in the late 19th century. Phrenologists believed that even the smallest variations in brain sizes were highly predictive of human intelligence. And so, upon this thin reed, the most laborious of experiments were conducted. Skulls and brains across races were measured lobe to lobe to justify theories of racial superiority (then fashionable in academic circles); numerous data of length, width, and volume were diligently recorded and analyzed. The leading American anthropologists J. W. Powell and W. J. McGee even made a wager over who had the larger brain, the winner to be decided by a measuring after their deaths.113 Modern medicine has since shown phrenology to be without foundation, but for a long time its practitioners managed to convince themselves of their own assumptions with carefully designed experiments.

  The new multicultural phrenologists think they can reduce the world to a few simple variables—if not brain size, then perhaps black hairstyles and pizza toppings. These simple and banal observations, in turn, are embedded in elaborate theoretical frameworks, which do all the “work” to yield the desired results. The multicultural paradigm always takes precedence over the evidence, and ensures that the desired conclusion will be reached. This curious, almost symbiotic juxtaposition of banal simplicity and Byzantine complexity was encapsulated, for instance, in the self-described purpose of “Post Neo-Colonialism and Identity Politics,” a graduate-level anthropology course (the following description, it is worth stressing, comes from the introductory syllabus explaining the purpose of the course):

  This course attempts to sort out the significance and mobilization potential of a new jumble of cultural practices located in the terrain that calls for yet paradoxically refuses boundaries. This terrain is situated in the borderzone between identity-as-essence and identity-as-conjuncture, and its practices challenge the ludic play with essence and conjuncture as yet another set of postmodernist binarisms.

  Much work on resistance has been response-oriented, reacting to the Eurocenter by occupying either the essence pole or the hybrid pole. The course stakes out this new terrain, where opposition is not only responsive, but creative. It is a guerrilla warfare of the interstices, where minorities rupture categories of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the center as well as on the margins, and where such ruptures intersect with and challenge the late 20th century murky overlap between nationalism(s) and imperialism(s).

  The course examines the strategies of theorizing this hodgepodge of everyday experience and its textual representations. It scrutinizes new units of analysis that transcend and resist national boundaries through their creative articulations of practices which demonstrate possible modes of corroding the Eurocenter by actively Third-Worlding it. It explores the processes through which identity and place become multiple as they are actively forced into constantly shifting configurations of partial overlap.114

  The pretentious terminology (“Third-Worlding” the “Eurocenter” !) may sound impressive until one realizes that it means very little—just the same old anti-Western themes, dressed up in neologisms. As with phrenology, the ornate research techniques and convoluted lingo simply mask a substantive emptiness. Instead of clear and rational discourse, one sees a wholesale retreat into a sort of fanatical obscurantism.

  In spite of multiculturalism's widespread implementation, it is difficult to gauge just how much direct intellectual impact the doctrine has had on the current generation of students—Generation X. While multicultural educators succeed in radicalizing a number of students, many others become so alienated by the multicultural ideology that they actually become more conservative. Comments and public statements on behalf of multiculturalism may significantly overstate the actual level of agreement, because most students understand that tolerance and open-mindedness are not great multicultural virtues.115 Like Mike Newman in Anthro 1, they value good grades and choose to regurgitate politically correct
answers—it is not especially difficult. And many students who buy into multiculturalism will be disabused of these notions soon after graduating, since many multicultural claims—like Professor Manley's in Political Science 10—simply do not withstand close scrutiny. The ferocity of multiculturalists may be a sign of weakness, not strength: If their claims could survive in a competitive marketplace of ideas, the multiculturalists would have no need to exclude all other perspectives to convince students that they are right. To have a lasting effect, multicultural education would seem to require a monopoly that multiculturalists do not (yet) enjoy in American society at large.

  Nevertheless, these observations do not render multicultural education any less catastrophic. For the major impact is indirect: While indoctrinating the new generation with ephemeral ideologies, multiculturalists simultaneously are wasting some of the best years of America's brightest students. The lost opportunities to study some of the West's great thinkers, to address the enduring questions in philosophy or religion, or to inform one's thinking about public policy or contemporary issues are not replaceable. The multiculturalists do not discriminate in this regard; they exact a steep price from liberal and conservative students, believers and heretics alike. Even most students who feel cheated by multicultural education do not know what they have missed. Of course, many suspect that there are more important issues than the “Great Debate” (over black hairstyles). They know that terrorism is real, unlike witchcraft. Some students do not even believe that multiculturalists are asking any of the important questions, or that any of the answers proposed by people like Aime Cesaire happen to be right. But this awareness of one's ignorance is not the end of education: It is only the beginning. Most students have only the vaguest notion of what some of the alternatives might be—what Socrates, Jesus, or Jefferson said that might be relevant to the contemporary situation. They have only a minimal understanding even of the ideas that built the American regime. Most have not read John Locke or Adam Smith, much less The Federalist, Alexis de Tocqueville, or Abraham Lincoln. Many students sense this “presence of absence,” but after years of multicultural education lack either the will or the rudimentary knowledge necessary to correct this loss.