The "multiculturalist" notion that
America’s current power and wealth rest upon shameful
foundations is intended to degrade the ideal of patriotism and cause
citizens to believe that their good fortune is undeserved and
illicitly gained.
The multicultural Left teaches that early
America's geographic expansion and economic progress
were made possible only by a genocide against native
populations (a particularly ineffectual one, however, since there are
more Native Americans in the U.S. today than at the time of
Columbus); the uniquely vicious oppression of African slaves; and
the corporate exploitation of immigrant masses. It holds that
U.S. imperialism has spread misery and oppression to billions of
people living far beyond the shores of North America. This view was
behind former University of Colorado professor Ward
Churchill’s
characterization of the United States as a nation so evil, that the
9/11 attacks represented ony a "tiny" retaliatory "dose"
of America's "own medicine." Churchill wrote that "to
attain an actual proportional parity of [the] damage" which
the U.S. had inflicted on Iraqis during the Iraq War, "it would
require" the killing of "something on the order of 7.5
million" Americans.
While Churchill's views are extreme,
they nonetheless express the undercurrent of shame and hatred that
the Left as a whole feels toward the United States for its racist and
sexist past and environmentally rapacious present. These
enduring injustices are all part of what New
York Times book reviewer William Grimes has
described as the "tainted legacy" that contemporary
Americans have inherited.
This "tainted legacy,"
this endlessly analyzed burden of embarrassment and apology, has
brought a decidedly sour flavor to great national
celebrations. For example, just prior to Thanksgiving of 2007,
the Seattle City Schools sent out a letter signed by the district’s
“Director of Equity, Race & Learning Support” and addressed
to all faculty and staff, warning that for many students, the holiday
represented "a time of mourning, of remembering how a gift of
generosity was rewarded by theft of land." In this view,
"Thanksgiving’ is a bitter reminder of 500 years of
betrayal."
Columbus Day provokes similar controversy each
October, with angry demonstrations against the unwelcome
encroachments of white interlopers in the pristine New World paradise
they polluted with their disease-ridden, gold-hungry
presence.
Similarly celebrations of the Fourth of July feature
pointed reminders that some of the most prominent figures in the
struggle for Independence (Jefferson, Washington, Patrick Henry)
owned slaves.
Even Memorial Day and Veterans Day have lost
some of their patriotic fervor and have taken on a distinctly
mournful, even skeptical, edge. The Vietnam Memorial in the nation’s
capital has not only become a popular tourist attraction, but now
serves as a major focus for both national holidays honoring the armed
forces – an association that takes the mood a great distance from
the parades, picnics, brass bands and flapping banners of prior
generations.
Since the 1960s, tribalism has become
a prominent feature of America's national life, with
identity politics and jostling interest groups taking the place of
any homogenizing notion of Americanism. African-Americans, feminists,
Latinos, gays, Asians, the disabled, hippies, Native Americans –
each aggrieved segment of society demands justice and redress,
competing for recognition as the most victimized. This
competitive victimhood encourages even privileged people to affiliate
with some marginalized cohort or synthetically assembled “community,”
and to shun any assimilation into the bland American middle.
With
all the suffering subgroups clamoring so colorfully for recognition
and sympathy, the old national motto, “E Pluribus Unum” – "out
of many, one" –has come to sound intolerant and disrespectful
of difference and diversity. The ideal of a melting pot has
given way to a “gorgeous multicultural mosaic” comprised of
stones that don’t metamorphose into a single national identity.
The concept of an overarching, unifying, non-ironic definition of
what it is to be an American appears less and less plausible.
If Americans see
themselves as heirs to nothing more than a heritage of shame, they
will inevitably accept and recycle prevalent slanders
about the United States. This section of
DiscoverTheNetworks contains resources that provide a necessary
counterbalance to that negative view of America.
