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Teaching multiculturalism post-9/11.

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Abstract

The virtues and vices of multiculturalism have come under renewed scrutiny as Americans struggle to come to terms with 9/11, as my recent experience teaching an English course on the subject attests. In November 2001 I offered a 1-hour credit, upper-division weekend course focused on multiculturalism and literary study at a mid-west regional university. The course served as an occasion for students to examine more carefully their assumptions about cultural difference. This essay overviews the various positions held forth in the course as to "why race matters," as well as arguments made by students in course evaluation and discussion comments--and some presenters that reflect the intensely felt need for unity in the months after 9/11.

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The virtues and vices of multiculturalism have come under renewed scrutiny as Americans struggle to come to terms with 9/11, as my recent experience teaching an English course on the subject attests. In November 2001 I offered a 1-hour credit, upper-division weekend course focused on multiculturalism and literary study at a mid-west regional university. With over 50 participants, the course mostly attracted English and English Education majors, but it was also open and advertised to other university students, as well as the community at large. The cultural make-up of the students in the course largely reflected the demographics of the community, with a majority of white students as well as several Native American (the largest minority in the region) and African-American students attending. In a more performative atmosphere than the traditional college English classroom, the weekend course was designed to involve students in the study of literature beyond the typical lecture/discussion format. The course was comprised of several cultural performances (including a student black gospel group and a Kiowa storyteller), films, and lectures by scholars in the field invited from the host university as well as nearby institutions. In addition there were several occasions in which students participated in small group discussions as well as engaged presenters with questions and comments.

The course's celebration of diversity was intended to broaden students' sense of the value of multiculturalism. Based on their initial reactions to the subject, it was clear that many tended to dismiss multiculturalism as an example of "PC" thought control, at best, and a form of reverse racism at its worst. Unfortunately, there is a version of multiculturalism that amounts to something like this, and it is this version that the media has caricatured and that many students accept at face value. As Richard Ohmann suggests, this sort of multiculturalism "takes the people of the world to be parceled out into cultures and subcultures, each self-contained and uniform, and each knowable only to its members ... Worse, it precludes learning about cultures from outside and certifies only the 'other' as a source of knowledge about other cultures ... " (18). It tends to see people as "always intrinsically what they are--black lesbians, white male homosexuals, and so on." Rejecting this version of multiculturalism becomes a moral imperative for students who view the celebration of racial and ethnic difference as threatening democracy and fostering division. The problem is that this particular manifestation of multiculturalism makes it possible for them to easily reject it across the board, without thinking carefully about all of the benefits and insights that more careful practitioners celebrate. For many of the students in the course, as some of their discussion comments suggested, multiculturalism amounts to nothing more than a coercive hypersensitivity to language, in its most innocuous form. More dangerously for these students, multiculturalism is backward-looking; it sanctions "whining," lingering on past wrongs, looking for excuses as to why certain groups remain disadvantaged. One student comment summed up this view by referring to "pity whores," those whose membership in different groups entitles them to dwell on the past as an excuse for why they do not succeed in the present. Insofar as this excuse is a "cop-out," so the argument goes, why talk about race at all?

The feeling of bitterness behind the question is one that the course gave students an occasion to vent. And if nothing else this made the course valuable, since multiculturalism, if it is to have any social relevance, has to confront this resistance or be dismissed as an anachronism from the sixties, no longer needed in what many view as "post-racist" America. It is this unquestioned resistance to multiculturalism that prompted my sense of the need for the course in the first place. But resistance took on new dimensions in the wake of 9/11. During the weekend many...