Multiculturalism is the biggest thing to hit America's campuses since light beer. And, as a watered-down perversion of a once-great collegiate ideal, it follows nicely in its predecessor's footsteps. Although the word once signified a healthy respect for other cultures, its mantle has been usurped by an often bitter and hypocritical ideology of visceral hatred toward Western culture and civilization. Like so many other fads in academia, multiculturalism has sunken into a morass of ignorance, absurdity and prejudice while at the same time selling itself as thoroughly sophisticated, intellectual and tolerant.
To be sure, not all people who call themselves multiculturalists have gone off the deep end. Some operate under the traditional definition of the term, and they simply believe that it is important to study the world and to learn about other cultures with an open mind. This position is quite admirable. Differences in clothing, customs, cuisine and lifestyles should not be scorned but instead respected and even valued for the richness they contribute to the world. Likewise, we should constantly examine our own society and criticize it when necessary, lest complacency allow us to indulge injustices.
But a significant strain of today's multiculturalism goes far beyond this. In academia today, intellectuals blame the West for spreading plagues of greed, racism, sexism, violence, and materialism throughout the world. On a Web site called the "Multicultural Pavilion," run by staff members of our own Curry School of Education, one author paints an illustrative picture:
"America's indigenous people believed in the sharing of property, freedom to enjoy pleasure, and a family that incorporated the whole community. Native American children were doted upon, and the entire community worked only as much as was necessary, reserving their free time for pleasurable activities." Western colonists, on the other hand, brought with them "the desire to accumulate property, the repression of pleasure, the establishment of a nuclear family with a father in control, the reduction of power for women, authoritarian child-rearing, and conversion to Christianity." The Pilgrims are here, Squanto -- there goes the neighborhood.
On the same Web site, another author jealously describes her observations of women's rights in communist China (!), stating that while "occidental women must struggle for better conditions, women in China assume equality to be the given status quo." It becomes clear that there is no real need to worry about the factual record of human rights in China, because, as the author explains, "even 'facts' may be fundamentally different in various cultures
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