Religious Studies

------------------- Volume 14 of Humanism Today

Multiculturalism Humanist Perspectives

edited by

Robert B. Tapp in cooperation with the

North American Committee for Humanism

(9, ~~. l4·. .. ,.()()/~(..:.1t1J...tP!t'I.~.'",:.~ Jdk/pd,zn1.... Jf~ M , -q7}(,rdJiS)? ;:p;4f!t'6rJffifttlt5PJl "J (

If i"P. fcJiJ2f12 0Jj/4fACiL7 ~j v(fti " V!Jlze,/It~i;11:, >\ ~aU1jJPif'i:YiW J) /kiI:~M5 ~f v)~ a t{f, ~ ,7

I 3) ~wrA5J7/b~//fe~ l!1&rfu .. , jfrJ/lML.,littl>.~.~.'if ~'. "r.Jt~~1£,~ 7ft I.:,L,M<,.. .. 'i;(~ ~'.lJ!' (i-erw?Mll) ~\Z/Eu. ~ft /.

7" " p~o etheus Book~ ,iJ!;Ju.) , ,,' " 1 / 1.(\ ~ ~ ~59 John Glenn Drive 01Al./)) 1\Ji/)lat. t:} 1_ --r:-ll.....r ' Am~erst. New York 14228-2 1 7 q IIMII

•. ~ .) r "-.r. "j:1 \.1 l"~"\':r1t' v'] , C.J.'L{A l: ..,.J :~~?D"u I.c· ,/ •

4

¥ MULTICULTURALISM AND ME

Vern L. Bullough

-DC In thinking about this topic, I concluded that perhaps a unique way of dealing with the subject and its meaning is to give a personal­ ized history of multiculturalism, Let me begin by pointing out that _ multiculturalism in today's academic world as well as in much of the media is a politicallY correct term. Unfortunately it is often more a slogan than a reality. I found as II dean in the late 1980s,­ when the concept of'multiculturalism first appeared, all my social science faculty emphasized ~that their classes had always been multicultural and so there was no need for a change in their syllabi. The historians said they taught courses on China and India and in their American history courses always included a lecture on mi­ norities and on immigrants, the sociologists held their theory was universal, the political scientists claimed they taught comparative government. My fellow dean in the humanities had much the same

. response froin his facul with the modem Ian ua e believin that _not 111g could be more multicultural than teaching French or Italian

to American colle e students while the Literature peo Ie who taught world or comparative literature argue they were pioneers in multiculturalism. The list could go on. In a sense, they were

--right, but it is not multiculturalism in the sense that I define it. Neither for that matter does pluralism equate with multiculturalism~

............ . - -." . . 75

--------- ---------

t_ ..._

76 Multiculturalism: Humanist Perspectives

although it might be a step in that direction. The United States has .long been a pluralistic society byt it has not been a multicultural

- one. The key difference as I would define the term is not the pres­ ~ . -

ence of a variety of cultures and peoples, but sharing power and , ideas with them as well as recognizing their unique contributions

~ \ to present day society. This is just beginning to occur. But it did . not just happen., It has resulted from civil right campaigns, court

decisions, empowerment of minorities, and just plain hard ball politics:: .

The dominant voice in the USA in the past was a European (really British), English speaking, and Christian one. In many if not most areas of the country, this is still true. The difference to­ day, however, is that individuals and peoples of a variety of cul­ tures and life styles have moved into positions of power and lead­ ership and have effectively challenged what might be called a WASP c~lture in which White Anglo Saxon Protestant males dominated .. This challenge is not a !lew one, and the battle to achieve it in a sense has been a major, if somewhat ignored theme in nineteenth and twentieth century historY. It begun with attempts of the original settlers to deal with the Indians, and it was joined by

. German and Irish immigrants early on, and continued by each suc­ . ceeding wave of settlers on American shores. Some of the strug­

gles ended in violence such as the attempts of African Americans first to be fre~d from slavery and then froIl,l segregation. But tran­ sitions are not easy entier tor the establishment or for the challeng­ ers, and as the impeachment proceedings against Clinton empha­ sized, there is still a reluctance on behalf of many to accept changes in ideology and in power. This requires some explanation.

The United States has been built upon immigrants whether they came early or late. Many came in the nineteenth century to gain land for farming and the interesting thing about a large number of such settlements established in the nineteenth century in the Mid west and West is that they were segregated or perhaps ghettoized might be a better term. Q:rmans lived in one small town, Norwe-.

Bullough: Multiculturalism and Me 77

gians, Dutch, or what have you in another. Traditionally the most ethnicall diverse and multicultural areas were the Ire cities in t e United States but in spite of their diversity and th· ir economic power, they·· were not the dominant voices in the nited States

'\"' which remained overwhelmingl rural until well into he twentieth I, .~ntury. But the large cities were pluralistic not mult cultural and .~ like New York, Chicago, Philade pia, Bosto ,ha neig­ borhoods or concentrations of different national or cu tural groups throughout the city. This was natural and perhaps ine itable since the new immigrants wanted to have contact with peopl who spoke their language or had other factors in common. Detr it Chi Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, and other. cities had large Polish concentrations. ~ talians had their sections in New Yor ,in Boston, in Philadelphia, in Chicago, Buffalo, San Francisc , and else­ where. The list could go on with Slovaks, Czechs, . ungarians,

. Serbs, Russians, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, Jew, and. others. ~ The Germans who arrived earl and ke t comin h ve left their imprint by having more Americans with some trace 0 German an­ cestry than any other group. Their influence has bee much less ~ than it·might have been since the animosities raised b World War I and World War II towards Germans made them muc less willin to identif as Germans than other immigrant grou . While my early childhood, for example, was spent 10 a commu ity in which many still spoke German, few of the children my age ver learned it and many' tried to disassociate themselves form thi . gs German.

). ~~; ~ChOOls also stopped teaching it and although t e 1stmas emains as a SymbOl. of their influence, t _IS too as made es­

t sentially funerican. j . /} I IC6J2l0~),'1(;v~~::::: tJl. ; /).;Wtt1i ll'Y'//i)fJ,C , But even though ~rica was a pluralistic society! power was

mainly held by the WASP CUlture, in business, in eBucation, in ­ - ~overnment (although on the state level there were some break­

throughs), and there were all kinds of barriers to those not con­ forming to the dominant American id~.&. In fact, there was ;-re:­ luctance to accept people who were visibly different. Let me illus­ trate by mentioning my own family. I had five children, three of

------------------- L."

78 Multiculturalism: Humanist Perspectives

whom were adopted. My adopted children were euphemistically called special need children since they were not white and two of them were not infants when they were adopted..MY adopted chil­

'-dren were Korean, black and one with considerable black gelles . but light enough to pass as Egyptian or Jewish or Greel<. ev~ . though her hair is somewhat frizzy.I mention this because it made , me very conscious of where we could live and could not live. We

lived in Los Angeles mainly because it was a diverse city with considerable internal movement, and the ghettoization which ex­ isted in Chicago or New York or Buffalo or any of the older east­ ern cities were not so rigidly drawn and there was much more inte­ gration there than almost everywhere else. Only when most of our children had grown could we venture to places like Buffalo, but even there in the eighties, Buffalo, in spite of the diversity of its population, was not really a multicultural center. We turned down good jobs in the south and although we probably could have sur­ vived in a small college town in the Midwest or East, we still felt

. uneasy. When we traveled, we were always the object of attention, 'some of it hostile, some of it simply curious~ In East Berlin, for ex­ ample, a bicycle rider ran into a wall because we apparently made such a fascinating sight that he did not look where he was riding. Generally, when the children were small, the attention was not particularly hostile, but as they grew older it did become more un­ friendly. The civil rights battle of the 1960s made life somewhat easier but when I moved to Buffalo in th~ early eighties some of the neighbors in my upper class neighborhood refused to have anything to do with us even though we onIv had one black child at home. Many of my colleagues and friends in Buffalo came from a diversity of ethnic and racial backgrounds, and most of them told stories about how they had broken barriers of one kind or another to arrive at the positions they had achieved.

, L:::-''I Pluralism then is not multiculturalism. Many societies have been p uralistic mclu mg ermany e ore orld War II with sev­ eral different languages, different Christian religions, a large Jew­

I ish minority, but it was not multicultural. The same thing was true

Bullough: Multiculturalism and Me 79

of United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Let me illustrate with a case study of Postville, a real town in IQwa, which in the fifties could be taken to represent typical rural America. It had been settled in the middle of the nineteenth century by German and Norwegian immigrants and it took several generations for those two to get along since each had their own churches (although they were almost all Lutheran). With a population of 1500 in the 1960s, it was a center of farming and meatpacking. Unfortunately the local meat packing plant closed in the 1980s, and the threat of the collapse of the town was averted when a group of Hasidic Jews from New York City area bought the deserted plant and converted it into a kosher slaughterhouse. Perhaps the first sign of change was the appearance of three dozen rabbis to supervise the slaughter of cows and chickens. The~ obviously carne with families. Until this happened most of the people in the town had never known a Jewish person nor had the ghettoized Hasidic Jews ever really St0 mingled with non Jews, or for that matter with non orthodox Jews b in the New York ghetto from which they came.

One of the things that happened is that pluralism reached small town Iowa but not multiculturalism. The Jews were quickly pegged as snobby by the local folk since they wouldn't eat in the local pizza joint (it wasn't kosher), or greet their neighbors warmly (among the Lubavich sect to which they belonged, men don't shake hands with women and women don't shake hands with men.) They were thought odd because all the little boys had their hair long since by tradition it should not be cut until age three, and then they usually wore yarmulkes. The women for their part wore wigs, covering their natural hair as part of a modesty code. Moreo­ ver the Lubavich Jews came from New York City and had the manners of big city dwellers. But to complicate matters the boom­ ing meat packing business forced the plant to go on two shifts in order to kill 350 cows and 35,000 chickens a day. This brought a lot of job seekers who were Filipino, Latino, Vietnamese, Bosnian, Ukrainian, and other refugees and new immigrant groups arriving in this country in the 1980s or 1990s. Certainly Postville was

--------- ---------

l _ \- '

80 Multiculturalism: Humanist Perspectives

changing. It even soon had a kosher restaurant but for the most part the separate communities remained separate except the children often played together because the schools served as a common meeting ground. I

In a sense, late-twentieth century Postville, is a microcosm of what happened to urban America: earlier in the century except the current generation of migrants had it somewhat easier because of civil rights and similar legislation giving them greater opportunity for jobs a~d education. Earlier when new immigrant groups and religious groups appeared, there was not much cross over in cul­ tural contacts. There was suspicion of other groups and there were ghettoized neighborhoods all over. I lived in Youngstown, Ohio, early in my academic career. It had a variety of races, cultures, and religions, the "melting pot of America" but actually it was not. One was born and lived in a Polish, Italian, Serbian, Welch, German, Jewish, Irish, Chinese, Negro or what have you kind of neighbor­ hood. I remember a discussion with one of my students who told me that his family was the first Italian family to move into Board­ man, a suburb into which they had moved three years before. The city was beginning to change from a pluralistic and prejudiced community to a multi cultural one but the struggle to do so was long and hard. I had a colleague, a woman sociologist, whose hus­ band was a minister of a Hungarian Presbyterian Church who ar­ gued that there should never be a melting pot in America. She wanted our society to be pluralistic, but with each group keeping its own heritage and traditions. Her husband was in some trouble, however, because the younger people did not want their services in Hungarian and insisted on an English language one, and some had even moved out of the confines of the Hungarian community and married' outside of the group, an action which bothered her.

I myself had an interesting experience which got me fired from the university, at least temporarily. The university (then a private one, although now a public one) was really controlled by the own­ ers of the mills (all Protestant), and they had reluctantly given sup-

Bullough: Multiculturalism and Me 81

port to the university in the hope of keeping the children of their workers in the area instead of having them go away to school and not come back. They themselves never sent their children to the lo­ cal university but to Ivy League or similar schools. Most of the students I taught had come to the university in order to get out of the mills. In 1958, the Republican establishment of Ohio put a Right to Work initiative on the ballot, the perceived purpose of which was to_ weaken the unions, especially in the mills and factory towns such as Youngstown. I was opposed to the initiative, and obviously was somewhat left of center of the establishment. The labor unions called a rally to set up a citizen's committee to fight right to work. For presiding chair of the citizen's committee, they recommended an activist Catholic priest, and proposed that three co chairs be appointed with him, and those chosen included a Jew­ ish dentist, a Serbian lawyer, and me. The slate had been agreed upon by the union before the meeting but I didn't know about it.9-C When I asked why I (very much younger than the rest) was put on­ it, the answer was that they needed a Protestant, and I was the only one they knew or trusted. I told them I was not a Protestant but (at that time) a Humanist Unitarian, and they said no matter, you are not Catholic, or Jewish or Orthodox. They also added a woman as treasurer, and a black minister as secretary. This was pluralism in the political arena. Labor won big, and United States Senator, John Bricker, who had been identified with the Right to Work law, lost. The Trustees of the University who had backed the law blamed me and my "ilk" for this and while they couldn't do anything about the defeat, they could take their anger out on me. They fired me in a fit of pique. Actually, I did not stay fired because organized Labor intervened and I was kept on, but I decided to leave anyway.

In a sense this coming together for a cause was the incipient be­ ginnings of multiculturalism. I should add that individual members of one of the cultural minorities could probably always make it through the barriers to achieve significant success in the Anglo world, they often never quite belonged and many had to tum their backs on their traditions. In Chicago, where I lived in the early

--------- - - - - - - - - - - 82 Multiculturalism: Humanist Perspectives

1950s, there were areas which did not allow Jews to live, and much later areas where African-Americans were prohibited, and admis­ sion to many of the universities and colleges was by quotas, if they were admitted at all. The first real national breakthrough on the pa­ rochialism of higher education was the hordes of veterans brought on campus by the 01 Bill (I was one). Not only did many universi­ ties bend their racist and sexist admission barriers, but in order to have teachers for the students, broke down some of the traditional hiring barriers.

Before this time, most minorities took what they could get. In New York City, City College, became an intellectual center, mainly because of the large number of Jewish students in the 1930s and into the 1940s who went there because they could not get into most other universities and colleges. Some of the prestig­ ious universities be'gan to hire Jewish faculty members in the 1940s but many would not. Again let me report a personal experi­ ence.

When I deci~ed to go to graduate school, the Western graduate schools were just beginning to appear, although Berkeley had long had a program and the University of Washington had one dating from before the Second World War. My faculty sponsor advised me togo East. I sent for applications to a number of Eastern schools (anything east of the Mississippi was east to me) I applied to several schools, and I still remember the application form from Princeton which I never filled out because it emphasized it was a school for good Christian men. Princeton, in fact, did not hire its first Jewish faculty member until the late 1950s.

Eventually, I chose to go to the University of Chicago which . had the most polyglot faculty of any university at the time and a very mixed student body. The university, however, was an island of tolerance and pluralism in a sea of bigotry and discrimination which had only begun to break down. Sometimes ignoring this bigotry was already beginning to payoff. For example, the Univer­

-- _....,.~ ""--"----', "-.- _."}

Bullough: Multiculturalism and Me 83

sity of Utah, which 1 attended as an undergraduate, started its medical school in the late 1940s. The dean of the medical school, although a former Christian missionary, knew how to build, and what he did was recruit Jewish faculty, who were denied positions at most medical schools. This enabled the university to get a much faster start than it would have done otherwise and to do so with several national award winners on its faculty.

Another factor in changing the way the United States though was the baby boom of 1940s, and the products of this began to en­ ter the universities in 1959 in force. Many new young faculty were hired to fill the. professor gap and the average age of faculty de­ clined. Adding to change and coinciding with the. drop in average age of population in United States was the Civil Rights movement and the demands for blacks to achieve basic civil rights which in spite of U.S. constitution they had long been denied. Change was 9-9 in the air, and it hit the college campus with all sorts of radical ac­ 9-D tivity and demands, and a sympathetic faculty to listen to them.

* California State Universit , Northrid e, where I was then teac ng, was ethnically and racially and linguistically diverse, al­ though blacks remained a small minority. But it still was .not a multi cultunil institution since the curriculum remained in essence the standard one.,American history, depending on the whims of the

\ professor, was taught sometimes as if minorities never existed in

..~~ State~, or if they did., they ~ad no hisfi&.. Much of this changed in the late 1960s. In the middle sixties, when the college populations reached their height, and I again found myself in the middle of the change. 1 was president of the facul!y and chair of the Academic Senate. The campus revolutions, which had started a year or so earher at Berkeley, were spreading rapidly, fueled by the civil rights drive and the.anti Vietnam war movement. . Some ~easureofthe trouble on the Northridge campus was the fact that the fact that the administration building was set on fire, and over the year hundreds of students were arrested. So intense was the struggle that during my year of being a campus power, I served

84 Multiculturalism: Humanist Perspectives

I

under five presidents. One had resigned, one had a nervous break­ down, another was forced to resign, another agreed to serve three months and resigned, and finally a new president arrived who then

( served for some twenty years. In a sense and for a time, I ran the university, and I remember once giving a news conference in which the media representatives filled a 200 seat auditorium. One of the things I was able to persuade one of the acting presidents to do was to appoint a negotiating committee to meet with African­

. American residents of the northern section of the city, and with student groups who had been agitating for greater and more visible

1) . presence of blacks not only as students but as faculty and in sllbject I~ matter. T

I

~ bodI1y~ssed out of the library by a Black Panther who was giving support to his black brethren. The negotiating committee I chose sat down with the various communities and student groups which I also managed to influence, in part because I was advisor to many of the student groups, and in part because I had founded the Fair Housing Council movement in southern California and had a lot of contacts across cultural groups. Fortunately while they were doing this, San Francisco State blew sky high, and its acting president, Hayakawa, convinced that he needed to control the media, deliber­ ately set out to attract the press by his actions, and speeches, Since he made much more interesting copy than I did, they went there. We were able to settle the problems on the campus without the glare of publicity while Hayakawa kept San Francisco in turmoil for two years. I should add that he also was elected to the United States Senate because of this and I sometimes regret that I chose to negotiate rather than seek publicity. One of the agreements on the

'\ Northridge Campus as well as elsewhere was the appearance of .§!.bnic studies and African-American studies.. as well as a pledge to ..!?reak down even more of the hiring barriers and actively recruit visible minorities, physically handicapped, and others previousl>.:. neglected grou s£or- ositions at the universi . This became much

. eaSIer t mn it might have been since the federal Civil Rights and Affirmative Action legislation put the force of government behind such action.

- 1 ,

Bullough: Multiculturalism and Me 85

ItJ6~7 But the sixties saw other change; the gF0wth of a second wave_

of feminism wh~ch opened whole new areas for women.J and the campaign for rights of gays and lesbians, and for what was euphe­ mistically called the "Other Americans." I must admit I was in the forefront of all of these, and early wrote a book which became a standard in many course in women's studies, and I campaigned

'" early on for rights of gays and lesbians, and wrote the ACLU pol­ icy for Southern California which ultimately became the national policy. Universities and society in general would never be quite the

. same:Slowly multiculturalism became a goal. By the seventies the 19~J'J' Federal government was giving strong en~ouragement through

grants to universities for what would be called multicultural activi­ ties. Course s llabi were rewritten to give attention to previousl ~ected groups. Publishers of books a ouma s seem a mar- ,; ft' et jumped at it with a lethora of titles and articles. The color and

gender a university faculties changed and groups long suppressed or content to be on the frin e ushed to the fore. Undoubtedly ~ t ere were a lot of mistakes made, and standards in some of the(): special courses were not particularly high. I worked hard .~ a dea!!. to lessen some of the excesses that had taken place. Still, the ulti­ mate result was, the emergence of large numbers of professionals of almost eve race and color as well as bein female ay, lesbian, and disabled who came of age in the 1990s, and who have rna e= our country more truly multicultural, not only in urban areas, and not only in academia but in business, the arts, and elsewhere. : ..

The change has sometimes been traumatic. Not all Americans agree. What multiculturalism challenges is the idea of the United States as a Christian society. Although some version of Christian­ ity remains the dominant religion, neither the mainline Protestants nor the Roman Catholics have the control they once did and the

I power base itself is changing. Whatever one may think of the diffi­ culties that President Clinton found himself in, he really estab­ lished the first muiticultural gender-mixed administration in our history. And part of the hostility to him is that he has not acted as a good Baptist should. ­

- - - - - - - - - -'- - - - - - - - ­

I..

86 Multiculturalism: Humanist Perspectives

The changes really are quite radiCal in many ways but in other ways things remain the same. I have been on the Board of the ACLU of Southern California, probably the most powerful affiliate of the ACLU, off and on for thirty-five years, and the same thing that happened in the university happened on the Board of that or­ ganization with a wide variety of nationalities, races, and what have you coming in and taking power. Still, the basic policies of the ACLU remain although they have broadened their outlook somewhat in accommodating to the new elements in American so­ ciety.

Postville has its troubles, and it has a long way to go to reach a multi cultural condition, but at least they realize we live in a multi cultural world., Not everybody is ready for it, and there is a stroM reactio..!!.:. I find it interesting and worthy of note that most of the Republicans on the House Judicial Committee who led the im­ peachment drive of Clinton came from rural areas, and that south­ erners are disproportionat;"since that remains the most rural and least multiCultural region of all the country in spite of Atlanta or Charlotte or Birmingham. In a sense, Trent Lott (who ran a racist campaign in Mississippi, switching to the Republicans when he felt his values threatened'by the Johnson push for blacks, and who still has strong ties with the old White Citizens Councils) is fighting to preserve the world he knew before multiculturalism emerged ~ such force. This in part is what the country is now debating.

Multiculturalism, however, is more than simplY something . American. Iri the long run, it is adopting what we are trying to do in the United States, to a better understanding of what goes on i1l_ the rest of the world. While people 'everywhere are human, and many countries are pluralistic, multiculturalism is' something that

. requires deliberate effort. It takes education, lobbying, under­ standing, and ideahsm. Multiculturalism, I think, is Humanism w!:!.!..,_ lar~ Our argument for tolerance, acceptance of diversity, and emphasis on what an individual can do, regardless of race, color, creed, sexual orientation, marital state, physical ability, and the

__ H, ; "7-1 \;",

I .f

Bullough: Multiculturalism and Me 87

like, is the key to multiculturalism. It has allowed individuals and groups who in the past have been relegated to positions beneath their abilities, to participate and achieve. I think it has been an in­ teresting experience and I hope that we can continue in the direc- , tion we are going. It does not eliminate using the criteria of me£! or ability, but it does say that merit and ability is not restricted to white males who graduated from Ivy League Colleges. We can continue living in our old neighborhoods if we want, but one does not have to become something he or she is not comfortable with; increasingly instead each erson has an op ortuni to contribute to society on their own merit. It also means we have to rna e a continual effort .' to break through our own parochialism and be­ come more aware of the world around us. Hopefully, multicultur­ alism is here to sta althou h our socie is still not full accepting of the implications which real multiculturalism might bring abou . We just might end up with a new version of a pluralistic society. with strong multiculturalist element.

~ Note

~

I. My description of Postville is based on a Los Angeles Tim!!s story, January 26, 1999, pp. AI, A8.