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WSCA 2005 presidential address: toward a well-functioning intercultural nation.

Article Excerpt
I would like to speak today to our students--the up-and-coming generation--and to those among us who can help to prepare them to live in an intercultural twenty-first-century USA.

The current generation has a relational and a national task, an obligation, a requirement that, whether it prefers it or not, it must undertake. The task of the current generation can be summarized very succinctly: to create a well-functioning intercultural nation.

We have no choice about whether the USA will become an intercultural nation. It already is one. Our only choice is whether we take actions that will help us to become a well-functioning intercultural nation. Because if it is left to chance or to happenstance, such a desirable outcome is not very likely. There are just too many examples of intercultural nations that function poorly, that discriminate based on a person's culture, that sustain deep-seated hatreds and prejudices, that in its milder forms perpetuate an underclass based on cultural membership, and in the extreme lead to ethnic cleansing, genocide, or apartheid. Indeed--and here is the tough nut to confront without flinching or turning away in despair--to the best of my knowledge such a nation does not now exist; nor, perhaps, has it ever existed. But this does not mean that the task is an impossible one, and therefore unachievable;...

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