Against "Post-Ethnic" Futures

Abstract

Where rationality is measured by the ability to distance oneself from one's cul tural and religious traditions, the preemptive commitments of seem counter to the ideal of a rational life. Arthur Schlesinger's The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society gives a typical account of this view. Schlesinger paints a picture of a past America happily moving toward the melting pot that Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, author of the widely read Letters from an American Farmer, thought he could perceive in the 1700s, a United States where individuals were losing their old identities and forming what he called a new race of men. This marked progress, not simply because a homogeneous nation would be a stronger nation, but because what these indi viduals left behind included ancient prejudices and manners, or backward ways of life, clearing the way for them to adopt a more advanced way of life based on democratic ideals (Schlesinger 1991, 1). Schlesinger suggests that the cult of ethnicity that derailed this move toward a post-ethnic future by the 1960s actually began to emerge in the early 1900s, not as a product of the grassroots but of intellectual elites who presumed a right of cultural and political leadership as spokesmen (34). Schlesinger claims that these intellectuals were moved by real concern for distinctive eth nic values [but] also by real if unconscious vested interest in the preservation of ethnic constituencies (34). Thus, according to Schlesinger, the opposition to ethnic assimilation was not an expression of the spontaneous will of the masses but was promoted by leaders motivated by their own desire for power, a charge that he continues to maintain against the political leadership of ethnic commu nities today. Here, then, is the picture: authoritarian elites ramming down the throats of gullible citizens for their own narrow purposes. And here is the effect: