America is Making a Risky Bet on its Entire Future

Since the 1960s, America has been placing ever more of its chips on replacing its culture with one that--as soon as possible--has no dominant culture, in which its residents (legal and illegal) have primary identification with their own race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.

I am certainly not enamored of some aspects of American culture, for example, its worship of materialism and of celebrity, the too-great disparity between rich and poor, its failure to provide an adequate health care safety net, and the liberal bias of its most influential media and colleges. But America has spawned a generally good quality of life for most Americans and produced a remarkable array of accomplishments from the car to the computer, from stents to Spielberg.

I am amazed that America is betting its entire future on multiculturalism. Yes, the U.S. could end up a dynamic place in which "diversity is our greatest strength," but multiculturalism could, instead, accelerate America's descent into third-world status. After all, not one of the world's 200+ countries is a clear multicultural success story. Diversity, far from a strength, seems, in every country including the U.S., to perennially be more a source of strife than of strength.

Yet, without firing a shot, identity groups within the U.S. are replacing American culture with some yet evolving mixture in which pluribus drowns out unum, in which what's good for America (let alone the world) is replaced with what's good for Latinos, women, Blacks, fundamentalist Christians, etc.

As the decades go on, would you bet that most Americans will find the U.S. a more pleasant or less pleasant place to live? A more productive or less productive country? I'm not sure, but I am certain that we don't have sufficient basis for betting the whole country's future on multiculturalism.

Do We Need Less Pluribus and More Unum?

Recently, I attended my assistant’s master’s-degree commencement ceremony at San Francisco State University.

We entered the auditorium to Jamaican percussion. Then, the African-American emcee introduced the retiring chair, a man who said that his vision for the counseling department is to create a program in counseling the incarcerated, disproportionately minority. He introduced the keynote speaker, an African-American woman who spoke of the need to continue fighting for the underrepresented while an audience member waved a large Latino-Power flag. Next, a Latina professor praised an African-American student who had died. Then that professor handed out four student awards: three to Latinos and one to a white male who had been transgendered and did his thesis on transgender counseling. Finally, the graduates walked across the stage. Some added African-American or Latino shawls to their cap and gown. One pasted a Mexican flag on top of her mortarboard.

I wondered how the straight white male graduates must have felt. I’d imagine that many of them felt okay about it. After all, their education likely has included much rhetoric explaining why one should celebrate all forms of diversity except that of the straight white male. But I wondered how many, in their heart of hearts, felt sadness or anger at being marginalized.

I wondered how the of-color graduates felt about the ceremony?

I wondered how the audience of friends and family felt?

I wondered whether the ceremony and awards would, net, increase feelings of cross-group amity or enmity?

In light of all the wars and other enmity, worldwide, throughout the ages, that have been caused by various forms of tribalism, I left the auditorium wondering whether society wouldn’t be better off if we focused less on pluribus and more on unum.