Peripheral Visions

makes the conversation hopelessly confusing. West African legends were for me a part of what might be called “adaptive multiculturalism,” but they are a part of “identity multiculturalism” for African American children. Oddly, I probably had better access as a child to these wonderful stories than did black children of my generation, and I was protected from the suggestion that there is only a single way to be human or even to be a good American. I was even luckier in that some of the models I was offered as a child were women of achievement—enough so that there too I could learn there was no single ideal way to be.
    Identity multiculturalism is promoted as a way to increase self-esteem, particularly in groups that have been denigrated or discriminated against. The Spanish friars who brought Catholicism to the Philippines offered a place in the vast international community of the church, but it was a second-class place in a community where priests, saints, angels, and even God were clearly European. Until the Filipinos rose against the Spanish, Christianity could only be accepted at a cost to the self, reflected in the mutilated carving on my desk, and modern Filipino nationalism has needed to repair the wounds of the past. Identity is parochial before it is inclusive: for the individual it offers the opportunity to say, This is where I come from, the starting point for knowing who I am, necessarily at times ethnocentric or even separatist. Identity multiculturalism is only multi -from the bird’s-eye view of planners, who acknowledge the need in many groups. Adaptive multiculturalism, by contrast, is indeed multi -for the individual. It is often promoted to increase tolerance and civility, but its greatest importance is in offering multiple ways of looking at the same question.
    Between these different kinds of multiculturalism and the many contexts in which they might apply there is plenty of acrimonious and confusing debate about proportions, about how much exposure which child needs to which traditions. Solutions vary from the token inclusion on reading lists of single works by persons of color to the rejection and exclusion from those lists of all works associated with the Western tradition. Most debates fail to recognize that the appropriate proportions vary through the life cycle and that no choice of emphasis is final, for education is never complete.
    I like to imagine a campus demonstration in the name of adaptive multiculturalism. A young woman of Chinese ancestry carries a placard demanding tuition in Arabic. A blond young man complains of the absence of courses on Hindu philosophy. An African American protests the lack of a program in Indonesian music. Others want to study Caribbean history, Native American ecology, and gender in Oceania—as well as Emerson and Virginia Woolf and the French Revolution. The students are as diverse as the population, and—amazingly—what they are demanding is not a greater representation of their own traditions in the curriculum but access to the cultures of others.
    Disparate as the subjects demanded are, they combine to carry a double message: The first is a moral message of respect that sometimes triggers resistance from students impatient at being told what they ought to feel. But the second message is perhaps the most important and practical message of education today, that because there is no single way to be human, the particular patterns of contemporary American culture should be regarded as mutable. These fantasy demonstrators are demanding that the university broaden their knowledge of the range of human possibility, equipping them to question whatever had been taken as common sense, enhancing the capacity of each to contribute a distinctive point of view. This is essentially a pragmatic demand, not a moral one. Because we cannot tell students how they will have to behave or what they will come to believe in the twenty-first century, we need to give them a variety of examples of what adaptive systems look like, a variety of ways of seeing the world.
    This “demonstration” is taking place, quietly, all over the country as students register for courses (and as they tune their radios to “world music”). Its steady influence is masked in the debate by, on the one hand, identity multiculturalism, the understandable demands of many groups that their own traditions be honored and, on the other, the fear that too much diversity may be pathological.