Executive Summary

The growing racial, religious, and cultural diversity of the United States is a fact -- indeed a juggernaut, unstoppable even if the country's liberal immigration laws were reversed tomorrow. The 1990 Census counts only three-quarters of Americans as non- Hispanic whites and finds that whites as a group are older and less fertile than people of color. "If current trends continue," writes demographer Martha Farnsworth Riche, "the United States will become a nation with no racial or ethnic majority during the 21st Century... Without fully realizing it, we have left the time when the non-white, non-Western part of our population could be expected to assimilate to the dominate majority. In the future, the white Western majority will have to do some assimilating of its own."

America's increasing "multiculturalization" offers an historic opportunity to enrich democratic pluralism here and throughout a world that still looks to the U.S. for alternatives to endless tribal warfare. This essay maintains that, precisely because the country is becoming more diverse, Americans of different and increasingly mixed backgrounds should be working overtime to find and affirm common principles.

The democratic precepts enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution form the common core of our national identity. Around these vital principles has grown a less formal but palpable civic culture, emphasizing such characteristically "American" virtues as tolerance, optimism, self-restraint, self-reliance, reason and civic activism in the public interest as a function of both benevolence and enlightened self-interest. These values are taught and "caught" in the workplace, schools, churches and in neighborhood organizations. To become an American is to internalize and uphold these common values, which permit us to forge unity from diversity.

America's civic culture has advanced certain fundamental premises, values and rules that are transethnic and transracial in essence, even if they have not always been so in application. Without that common culture as its inspiration and guide, the American experiment could not have survived and cannot endure. The immigration that is expanding our cultural diversity is a tribute to the power of that inspiration: American political culture, condemned not so long ago as a fount of imperialism and oppression, is in reality a magnet for people from every country and civilization.

But the promise of a multicultural America must be defended against the new "identity politics" propounded by activists and institutionalized by bureaucracies on campuses, in government offices, and in private corporations. Identity politics makes race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation the primary lenses through which people view themselves and society. Turning the mere fact of racial, ethnic, and sexual difference into the most basic organizing principle of society, it portrays American civic culture as an elite trick or imposition upon minorities on behalf of an oppressive "Eurocentric," patriarchal, or capitalist agenda, rather than as the common, if contested, ground it really is.

This essay defends America's civic culture against the claims of this new ethnocentrism. It presents three examples of how the identity politics agenda is shaping public discourse and policy in ways that threaten true multiculturalism and promote social fragmentation.

Electoral politics: Racial activists are leading minority voters into isolation and impotence in the name of empowerment. An expansive reading of the Voting Rights Act has opened a Pandora's box: People of the same skin color now must be linked no matter how much that defies other considerations, such as geography and indeed, in some areas, racial integration itself. The underlying assumption is that voters define themselves mainly in racial terms, rather than as homeowners or suburbanites, etc. when they vote -- and that the government must reinforce this racial self-definition. This policy wrongly enforces the idea that minorities must vote racially to be empowered and, in effect, says that there is no basis for trust beyond one's own group. The Supreme Court seems to have recognized the problem and to be moving the nation toward the reconsideration of the more extreme forms of racial districting.

Education: Ethnocentric advocates want to put race consciousness and group pride at the center of school curriculum, in the name of empowering the oppressed. But the more we celebrate our respective ethnic experiences, the harder we must work to teach the compensatory values of tolerance and respect. Yet ethnocentrism often assumes innate racial constraints on children's capabilities and leads us back to the doctrine of separate but equal schools, rather than towards interracial tolerance and exchange.

The Economy: Most inner city blacks lack the social infrastructure -- family structures and cultural resources -- that make possible the lending societies and the coordinated family labor that have helped immigrant groups such as the Koreans advance. But economic demands based on historic grievances are no answer, for they flout the tenet of self-reliance and alienate all those who embrace that tenet -- the bulk of the U.S. population, including a substantial proportion of people of color.

Government cannot create the social infrastructure, but we should explore private efforts to bolster social, cultural and entrepreneurial programs and determine whether government can assist them. Public investments can be directed toward rebuilding the authority of key institutions such as schools and police. However, the electorate is likely to support these investments only insofar as they are accompanied by concomitant moves to replace the existing welfare system with one that promotes work.

Perhaps the most important point in this essay is this: civic virtues must be taught. These virtues cannot be imposed since they are expressions of freedom, but they can be taught to young people and immigrants and regenerated by community-based organizations and movements for social justice. Educators should teach that self-esteem isn't enhanced only by taking pride in one's own origins, but more importantly by taking pride in a mastery of the civic virtues. Policymakers should couple rights and entitlements with obligations and incentives that nurture self-reliance and commitment to the whole.

When the culture and alternative traditions clash, the former must prevail. It is one thing to argue that we must purge the common culture of its racist, sexist or elitist elements; it is another to demand that the common culture celebrate one's own preferences or to abandon the hard work of forging shared values. Defenders of American pluralism need to make clear that whenever multiculturalism turns into identity politics or ethnocentrism -- that is, whenever it becomes an ideology that forecloses a common culture and a polity based on shared principles -- it undermines freedom and therefore the basis for multiculturalism itself.