[In the following review of Schlesinger's The Disuniting of America, Woodward examines Schlesinger's view that the recent emphasis on ethnic and linguistic separatism will not exhaust the unifying ideal of the American republic.]

The current upsurge of American minorities goes under several names, each designating a different aspect of the movement and varied attitudes toward it: ethnicity, diversity, pluralism, multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, anti-Westernism. All these aspects have found lodgement in the universities, where their most vocal spokesmen are often concentrated and where students provide their most volatile followers. It was natural, therefore, that the current debate and concern should have focused first on academic questions such as who shall be admitted, what they should be taught, and who should teach them. And it is well that this should be so, for higher education is most immediately affected, and the discussion of the effects must continue.

In his brief and brilliant book, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is certainly not unaware of the academic aspects of the problem, and in fact he has a chapter titled "The Battle of the Schools." But Schlesinger is mainly concerned with larger and more lasting implications and their national consequences. The jacket of The Disuniting of America bears a subtitle, Reflections on a Multicultural Society, that is not carried on the title page but helps to indicate the nature of the book, while the main title suggests its graver and wider implications.

The outburst of minority assertiveness in the United States is taking place against a background of explosions of the sort within nation-states around the globe. Those abroad are often marked by old hatreds and deeply entrenched linguistic and religious differences; they take separatist forms, and use organized violence that threatens the existence of the nation in which they occur. On the larger scale one thinks of the Soviet Union and India, and with many variations the smaller examples include South Africa, Canada, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia, and even the most recent liberated generation of nation-states, such as Czechoslovakia. History in the real new world order is made not primarily by what nations do to each other, but by what is done to nations by divisive ethnic feuds within.

Against this background of current foreign divisiveness and (until lately) in sharp contrast to it, Schlesinger brings to bear a historical perspective on the American tradition. He begins aptly with the celebrated question posed in 1782 by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer. "What then is the American, this new man?" And he follows with the familiar example cited by the Franco-American author, of one couple that in three generations united in marriage American citizens of eight different national origins. "From this promiscuous breed," continued Crèvecoeur, "that race now called Americans has arisen." He follows by coining in the same paragraph the melting-pot metaphor: "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men," a race that had turned its back on "ancient prejudices and manners." Crèvecoeur's Letters were translated into several languages and became a favorite text for prominent America-watchers of Europe in the next two centuries, including Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, James Bryce in 1888, and Gunnar Myrdal in 1944. All of them marveled at a unique capacity of America, what Bryce called "the amazing solvent power which American institutions, habits, and ideas exercise upon newcomers of all races."

Americans themselves proclaimed assimilation to be an ideal of the national creed from the start. Washington welcomed "the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions" not as groups or ethnic enclaves, but as individuals who would be "assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people." Wilson echoed him during World War I: "You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourself in groups. America does not consist of groups." What with more than 27 million immigrants pouring in between 1865 and 1917—more than the total population of the country in 1850—it is just as well for the national welfare that the tradition of assimilation generally continued to prevail. America seemed to have made diversity a source of unity.

It is true that the melting pot met with resistance from time to time. Assimilation was not automatic, and ethnic enclaves were formed in metropolitan quarters. Foreign languages and newspapers persisted, and so did a suspicion that the melting pot was a WASP device for imposing on newcomers from other nations the dominant Anglo-centric culture. And apart from European newcomers, certain oldcomers were held unassimilable from the start. Crèvecoeur answered his own question, "What then is the American, this new man?" in his very next sentence: "He is either an European, or the descendant of an European." That silently defined blacks out of an American identity. Later Tocqueville deplored the omission. The exclusion was supported by a consensus among whites for a long time to come, but for whites themselves—for newcomers as well as oldcomers—assimilation remained the goal. Even among the majority of blacks, down through Martin Luther King Jr., the fight was against segregation and separatism, and for desegregation and integration.

Then came the growing cult of ethnicity, the passion for "roots," for ancestral voices, for separate and inviolable group identities. As Schlesinger describes this shift from integration and assimilation to separatism:

Instead of a transformative nation with an identity all its own, America increasingly sees itself as preservative of old identities. Instead of a nation composed of individuals making their own free choices, America increasingly sees itself as composed of groups more or less indelible in their ethnic character. The national ideal had once been e pluribus unum. Are we now to belittle unum and glorify pluribus? Will the center hold? Or will the melting pot yield to the Tower of Babel?

Schlesinger readily admits that the republic, long dominated by white Anglo-Saxon males, owes overdue acknowledgement to the contributions of women, black Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Indians, and that their demands have had some healthy consequences. What he fears is the "disuniting" effects of overdoing both demands and responses. In 1989, for example, the New York state commissioner of education appointed a Task Force on Minorities to report on a history curriculum for the public schools. With no historian among its seventeen members, and with ethnic representatives in charge, the task force denounced as "terribly damaging" to the psyche of ethnics a prevailing emphasis on Eurocentric tradition and Western culture and demanded a new curriculum containing four other cultures to teach "higher self-esteem" to their children. The report contains no reference to the ideas of individual freedom and political democracy to which most of the world now aspires. Such ideas, along with their unifying effect, are presumably too Western. Instead the report sanctions racial tension and deepens racial divisiveness.

While numerous groups have joined in to voice their own grievances and claim redress as victims, black Americans, the largest minority with the oldest and most tragic grievances, have been the most prominent. To them Schlesinger devotes most of his attention in this book. The self-appointed spokesmen whom he quotes are not presented as typical or representative, but as pacesetters and extremists. A black psychiatrist attributes white racial inferiority to a genetic inability to produce the skin pigments of melanin that account for black racial superiority. Another black psychologist contends that the black mind works in genetically distinctive ways. Some argue that biological and mental differences make blacks "process information differently" and prove the need for teaching in "black English." This explains black learning difficulties under the present system. The solution is to break with white, racist, Eurocentric culture and embrace "Afrocentricity." Leonard Jeffries of the City College of New York offers his people a choice between the cold, materialistic "ice people" who brought "domination, destruction, and death" to the world, and the warm, humanistic "sun people" and their intellectual and physical superiority.

The multiracial curriculum conceived by the New York task force has inspired similar efforts in many parts of the country. An educational psychologist, Asa G. Hilliard III of Georgia State University, who conceived the collection African-American Baseline Essays, contends that "Africa is the mother of Western civilization," that Egypt was a black African country and the source of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. Africans also discovered America and named the waters they crossed the Ethiopian Ocean, long before Columbus. Adopted first by the public school system of Portland, Oregon, Hilliard's ideas have inspired Afrocentric curriculums in Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and other cities.

How fully and faithfully all these metropolitan school systems have followed the Portland example framed by Hilliard and his six collaborators I have no means of knowing. As published in a revised edition of 1990 by the Portland Public Schools, African-American Baseline Essays runs to a total of 486 pages. All parts follow the common thesis that Africa gave birth to Western civilization, and that it was the birthplace of architecture, mathematics, medicine, music, and philosophy—not to mention the arts and sciences in general, social studies and history included. The theory of origins relies heavily on identifying Egyptians through the millennia as black Africans, an identification that leading American Egyptologists consulted by Schlesinger firmly reject—as firmly as classical scholars reject the dependence of Greek civilization on Egypt.

American blacks are not the first racial group with wounded pride to seek comfort in myths of a glorious past. The Irish also claimed to have discovered America before the Vikings and Columbus. Perhaps it is because the wounds of black Americans are so much deeper than those of white minorities, or because contemporary Africa offers little but famine, civil wars, and police states, that they reach back so desperately to mythic antiquities for solace. Their purpose is therapeutic, to instill pride and self-esteem in black children. That is a misuse of education and an abuse of history, and it will not work. The trouble is not the teaching of Afro-American history or African history. "The issue is the teaching of bad history under whatever ethnic banner," as Schlesinger puts it, and goes on to observe: "Surely there is something a little sad about all this."

One of the sad things is a seemingly unconscious resort to a type of racism of which American blacks have themselves been the main victims: the theory that biology or race determines mentality, once a favorite apology for slavery. But even sadder is the crippling effect of the Afro-centric therapy on the children it is designed to help. In Schlesinger's words:

The best way to keep a people down is to deny them the means of improvement and achievement and cut them off from the opportunities of national life. If some Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to devise an educational curriculum for the specific purpose of handicapping and disabling black Americans, he would not likely come up with-anything more diabolically effective than Afrocentrism.

The adoption of Afrocentric curricula for public schools from Portland to Baltimore illustrates the manipulability of white guilt and the danger of taking paths paved with good intentions.

Reflective black Americans must often find themselves embarrassed by the present rage for Africanization. They know that Americanization and rejection of Africa has long been the dominant message of black leaders from David Walker in 1829 to Martin Luther King, who declared unequivocally, "The Negro is American. We know nothing of Africa." W. E. B. DuBois noted a "fierce repugnance toward anything African" among his associates in the NAACP, who "felt themselves Americans, not Africans"—this before he moved to Africa himself in his last years. Among outstanding contemporary black scholars, John Hope Franklin draws a sharp distinction between propaganda "on the one hand and the highest standards of scholarship on the other," and Orlando Patterson scornfully denounces the "three Ps" approach to black history: princes, pyramids, and pageantry. At least one black journalist, William Raspberry of The Washington Post, begs his people "not to reach back for some culture we never knew but to lay full claim to the culture in which we exist."

Other minorities—brown, yellow, red, white—each with its own separatist slogans, myths, and programs of ethnicity, have joined in the common cult of victimization, inflammable sensitivity, alibi-seeking, and self-pity. Hispanic Americans, increasingly at odds with black Americans, reject "black English" but promote bilingualism, another source of fragmentation and ethnic separatism. Minorities do not congregate, they self-segregate. Sometimes they are assisted in this on university campuses by administrations that furnish separate dormitory, dining, study, and social facilities. Stanford boasts "ethnic theme houses." Where Chief Justice Earl Warren held in 1954 that segregation "generates a feeling of inferiority," ethnics now hold that integration generates such a feeling and segregation is the cure.

A more realistic view of ethnic separatism is that it fosters sensitivities, resentments, and suspicions, setting one group against another. With more reasons for suspicion against whites than others, blacks may have acquired the greatest susceptibility to paranoia. Alarming evidence of this is provided by a poll of New Yorkers in 1990 that showed that 60 percent of black respondents thought it "true or possibly true" that the government was making drugs available in black neighborhoods to harm black people, and 29 percent thought it true or possible that the AIDS virus was invented by racist conspirators to kill blacks.

The cult of ethnicity and its zealots have put at stake the American tradition of a shared commitment to common ideals and its reputation for assimilation, for making "a nation of nations." At stake as well are Washington's goal of "one people," Crèvecoeur's "new race," Tocqueville's "civic participation," Bryce's "amazing solvent," and Myrdal's "American Creed." With this attack comes a contemptuous assault on Western culture in general as a curse to mankind. It appears, as Schlesinger suggests, that "white guilt can be pushed too far."

For all that, Schlesinger believes that "the campaign against the idea of common ideals and a single society will fail," and that "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." It is his "historian's guess" and his personal conviction "that the resources of the Creed have not been exhausted. Americanization has not lost its charms." Whether his guess and conviction prove justified or not, we owe Arthur Schlesinger a great debt of gratitude for his reflections on the subject.