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Introduction: Arthur Schlesinger's The Disuniting of America
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19879 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1992 |
288 Words |
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Few metaphors have such enduring authority in popular myth as the idea of the American melting pot, in which all races and nationalities gradually fuse over the fires of American political traditions. In recent decades charges surfaced from many corners of academia, and elsewhere, that the melting pot idea has long been a smoke screen for Anglo-Saxon cultural domination. College campuses have witnessed far-reaching changes under the banner of multiculturalism, and textbooks from the earliest grades up have been rewritten to reflect the demand s of African-American scholars and others who objected to what they called Anglo-Saxon hegemony.
But not all for the better, says historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., whose Disuniting of America is excerpted in the following pages. Schlesinger argues that strident exponents of multiculturalism are leading America down the road toward bad scholarship, bad education, and bad politics--ultimately toward greater racial enmity instead of less.
Following the excerpt are three responses. Historian Edward Shapiro assesses Schlesinger's most recent book in the context of the Pulitzer Prize--winning scholar's entire career (p.296). Next follows an exchange of opposing view regarding the book. Molefi Kete Asante, head of the Department of African American Studies at Temple University, himself a target of Schlesinger's criticism, takes the book to task for its failure to recognize that the Anglo-Saxon claim to America's core identity is at an end (p.304). His claims are challenged by Charles Sykes, author of the forthcoming book A Society of Victims, who insists that the end result of separatism on our nation's campuses has been exactly contrary to what was intended (p.318). In a final rejoinder
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