Peripheral Visions

This demonstration is not made up of African American students majoring in Black Studies, but of black and white students together taking courses in Chinese, West African, and English cultures. Oddly, the study of history, even that of one’s own group, sometimes serves both purposes, since even the near past is exotic for many American youth. I sometimes send my students to interview their own grandparents and find that this can model an encounter with the “other,” and African Americans often feel a mixture of pride and alienation when they encounter Africans.
    Children develop through concentric worlds, gradually able to move further from home but always seeing each larger sphere through the lens of the previous stage. As a black student of my husband said to him in the sixties, “You have to know where you stand before you can decide who you stand next to.” Identity multiculturalism suggests offering multiple tracks at the beginning of education and makes good sense as a place to start, the best place to develop confidence from which to encounter the new or strange, but it should not be exclusive or set up a single axis of contrast, for bicultural contrasts lend themselves to polarization. Black history belongs early in the educational process for African American children, but should not be limited to them, while all children need to be aware of diversity in Africa and in the African diaspora as well as diversity in other shades.
    If elementary school were the end of learning, pressure to limit teaching to the “majority” culture would be understandable, but fortunately it is not—not unless the whole process is rejected by children convinced that it offers them nothing. Adaptive multiculturalism has more to say about learning through a lifetime, in a continuing process of encountering difference, steadily going beyond any traditional canon. Traditional liberal education was identity-based for the privileged and identity-threatening for others, yet much of the material covered may be essential for the adaptation of those who have been treated as outsiders.
    This is an anxious time in world history, when increases in travel and communication mean that every society must live with difference in a new way. Today, one version of American culture is seen by many as the only basis for national survival, threatened and undermined by multiculturalism. Without a coherent culture, without institutions in their so-called traditional form, we are told, the people will perish. Young people exposed to variety may risk becoming confused or alienated, and fundamentalists object even to the teaching of classical mythology in the schools. Enhancing identity, increasing awareness of difference, we are genuinely playing with fire, for the resurgence of repressed nationalisms can destroy societies, and almost any kind of difference can provide a basis for discrimination or exploitation. But although no one knows the minimum level of commonality for cultural viability or how to use the models offered by the many multiculturalisms of human history, we do know that difference stimulates creativity. When we talk about going beyond the traditional canon, we are talking about opening up a library not of great books but of versions of humanness—some of them never written down in any form at all, but many of them in written form, often in rather surprising places.
    Even the texts of orthodoxy can be taught so as to open windows to diversity, revealing the different, even the exotic. In the first century of the common era, the rabbis were sorting out which texts should be included in the anthology that is today the Jewish Bible and the Old Testament for Christians. Part of the fascination of the Talmud is that it is a record of constant argumentation, of a style of reasoning that mixes logic with metaphor and legend, suggesting in its own way the value of dissent. Debate focused on two books that seemed to some downright ungodly, the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. These two books are attributed to King Solomon but associated with different stages of his life, for the Song of Songs expresses the erotic love of youth and Ecclesiastes the decrepitude and despair of old age. In making a case for including both, Rabbi Akiva argued that the Song of Songs is not about physical love but is an allegory of God’s love for his people. This made it respectable—and ethnocentric, though the metaphor has been easily carried over into