Sämi Ludwig
 
Thin Pluralism: Some Observations on American Multiculturalism
“But what is the relevant ‘society’?” (Will Kymlicka 93)
“The next time somebody asks, ‘What’s my nationality?’ though, I’ll say, ‘Who cares?’ Because it’s more important who I am inside than outside.” (Tennessee Reed 115)
“Hey, I am mixed. I am not going to pretend anymore. I am not going to go to Castlemont, a predominantly Black high school in East Oakland, and argue with teenagers about my race. I am not going to drive myself to the point of suicide trying to be white, either. I am just going to be me.” (Karla Brundage 122)
“My light skin may signify beauty, may signify ugliness, may signify bourgeois aspirations, but it never signifies me. [....] When people assess my actions based on my surface appearance, they ignore who I really am.” (Allison Francis 123, 125)
 
In the course of the past year, foreign observers have been stunned by the way in which the U.S. American public and the United States government have reacted to the terrorist attacks on Washington D.C. and the World Trade Center. It was said that nothing less than reality itself had changed and “nothing will be the same again.” Surprisingly, as Marc Chénetier observed in a private conversation, “It’s never been more the same than after September 11.” Non-U.S. citizens who were shocked about this event and empathized with their American friends often feel that their compassion has been abused, that in the United States the process of mourning has been turned into a simple trumpeting of U.S. patriotism and, worse, imperialism. It is perceived that instead of making a step forward, U.S. identity took a step backward. The ideological patterns manifesting themselves in the public discourse suggest that Puritan values again determine U.S. behavior—the struggle of the righteous settlers in the wilderness is now projected onto a world-wide scale. While the Massachusetts pilgrims were attacked by King Philip, U.S. citizens nowadays feel under siege by terrorists, who are framed in a similar binary metaphysics of evil, otherness, non-humanness. The case of John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” illustrates this attitude. It can be compared to the sensationalism of classical captivity narratives and the ultimate, utterly incomprehensible sin of going native among the Indians. The Americanist gets the impression that, maybe, the old literary histories weren’t so wrong when they claimed that U.S. culture was based on Puritan ideology.
This article arises from a profound disturbance about America’s reaction to these events, and a growing awareness that the recent developments are asking for a reassessment of U.S. multiculturalism as a positively charged term. Can it really provide a model of pluralism which the rest of the world should emulate? How does it manifest itself from a post-9/11 perspective? Multiculturalism seems to have little impact on foreign policy. If the United States traditionally sees itself as a “nation of nations,” how can we reconcile this self-image with the fact that Americans have recently been very bad international team players, refusing to ratify international agreements on environmental protection, land mines, chemical and biological weapons, the International Criminal Court?  Somehow the transfer from multicultural democracy to international cooperation is not made. Hence this paper argues on two levels: while it is fairly obvious that current U.S. politics is not particularly inspired by multicultural ideas, this international “failure” points to the necessity of a qualitative reassessment of the very properties of American multiculturalism as such.
My aim in this paper is to question some taken-for-granted attitudes by analyzing a few concepts which are crucial when we discuss the qualities of “multiculturalism.” I will start with a classical text comparing American and Swiss attitudes, James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village,” and then focus on language and identity, “roots,” “ethnicity,” and sentimental folklore, arguing that Americans have more in common than they usually claim to have and that their critical preoccupation with “difference” tends to make them forget how unified their culture really is in many ways—a fact which manifests itself much more powerfully to outsiders.
 
1. Jimmy Baldwin in the Swiss Village
In his famous essay “Stranger in the Village” of 1953 James Baldwin reports on his personal experiences in a small village in the Swiss Alps, where people lived who “had never seen a Negro” (79). The American intellectual notices the village’s remoteness, its “inaccessibility” (79),  and emphasizes its lack of civilization in ways that are, actually, fairly condescending: “In the village there is no movie house, no bank, no library, no theater; very few radios, one jeep, one station wagon; and, at the moment, one typewriter, mine, an invention which the woman next door to me here had never seen” (79-80).  There is a “Ballett Haus” without ballet performances and “only one schoolhouse […] and this for the quite young children; I suppose this to mean that their older brothers and sisters at some point descend from these mountains in order to complete their education” (80). Baldwin describes a rather enigmatic school system.
Significantly, Baldwin’s main concerns in this environment are racial. He describes the villagers’ reactions to him, the children shouting “Neger! Neger” while having “no way of knowing the echoes this sound raises in me” (81). Though they want to touch his hair and his skin, he observes that their wonder is not unkind or racist (81, 85). People greet Baldwin in French, saying “salut” and “bonsoir” (83); some men drink with him, want him to learn how to ski, and ask questions about his “métier” (85). Still, some children are afraid of him because they know that the devil is a black man; some “women look down or look away or rather contemptuously smirk” (85). Sometimes Baldwin even feels “paranoiac malevolence” and people accusing him as “le sale nègre” behind his back (85). Obviously, the villagers don’t really know him.  He is a representative of “otherness,” different, like the crippled tourists who come to the village because of its hot springs (80) and the fantasies enacted in the village carnival, when the children have their faces blackened to collect money for the missionaries in Africa (82). He is part of their marginalizing projections.
What does Baldwin conclude from this intercultural encounter? He describes himself as “a suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials, to everything they have—however unconsciously—inherited” (83).  In a move which is emblematic of his intellectual preoccupations, he then turns from his experience of alienation in the Swiss village to racial categories comparing “the white man” and “the black man.” His main concern is with “the history of the Negro in America,” where he is “no visitor […] but a citizen” (88). He sees white Americans (and thus U.S. mainstream culture) as beyond “European innocence” because it had to cope with the black man, who is not “a stranger any longer for any American alive” (89). This element of learning and knowledge Baldwin considers a great achievement, a “black-white experience” of “indispensable value to us in the world we face today” (90). Hence American multiculturalism is presented as a kind of role model for the rest of the world.  We are ahead of you. We have been through the experience. You can learn from us.
At this point I feel the urge to clarify some misunderstandings in Baldwin’s encounter with the boorish Swiss of in the remote village of the 1950s because I believe there was more involved than Baldwin’s being a “Negro.” His biographer James Campbell writes that the village was “near Lausanne” (74), a geographical mapping which does not sound very convincing because Baldwin’s village is described as very Catholic.  Moreover, why would children in a French-speaking village call him “Neger” in German? Here is the answer: Campbell identifies the village as “Loeche-les-Bains,” adding that it is also called “Leukerbad” in German (74). The multicultural point I want to make is that the uneducated villagers from Leukerbad had to speak to Baldwin in a foreign language—and it seems that a fairly large number of these German speakers there were actually capable of expressing themselves in French. It is also possible that some of the indigenous people cut Baldwin because they did not speak French and felt embarrassed. Hence “Stranger in the Village” is a typical example of the kind of racial paranoia Studs Terkel calls “the American obsession.” Baldwin projects that he is a stranger because he is black and totally ignores the fact that he is a tourist staying in a foreigner’s chalet  and does not speak the local language.
My point is that identity is strongly based on phenotype in the United States. It is a matter of looks. Clearly, the United States is a multiracial country. But is it therefore automatically also multicultural? If we associate culture with “cultural literacy” and the ability to operate successfully within a particular culture, can we apply this definition also to American multiculturalism and extrapolate from it some kind of “multicultural literacy”? This leads me to language as a crucial cognitive ingredient of culture and to the example of multilingualism in my own country of origin.
 
2. Language and Identity
Last year a senior postcolonial scholar from the Unites States stayed with us at our home, who congratulated us on raising a multicultural family because my wife and I have adopted two children who look “Vietnamese” and “Ethiopian.” The comment made me realize that both of us imply different things when we say “multicultural,” because it illustrates how race (even as “race”) pervasively determines U.S. notions of cultural identity. In Switzerland multiculturalism is rather defined in terms of the four official languages spoken in the country, which offer the inhabitants an opportunity to become literate in more than one culture. Mere looks do not really provide “multicultural” skills—though they may, of course, expose people to racism.
It would be naïve to claim that in Switzerland people are not judged by their looks, but, probably because of the relative racial homogeneity, difference in Switzerland primarily manifests itself in people’s voices, particularly in the dialects they speak. You are framed by your language, which tells me about your origin. Linguistic experts can sometimes locate speakers within two or three villages. Dialect is a key to becoming accepted and even representative of Swiss national identity. A powerful illustration of this is the Swiss track athlete Dave Dollé.
[PICTURE DOLLé]     
When Dollé ran the 100m dash at Olympic Games and World Championships, he looked like an African among the other athletes. This visual framing locates him doubly wrong: Dollé has an American mother—which still points to the wrong continent. But when he speaks on the radio, I know that Dollé is as Swiss as I am—there is not the slightest acoustic doubt about his strong Zurich dialect, which sounds very authentic, even painfully so to a Swiss person from a rivaling local area. In Switzerland dialect marks your identity; it indicates that you have roots, that you have grown up in a certain local area which has made an imprint on your life and defines the way you express yourself.  Dialect is the sound of ethnic belonging.  After you’ve heard him, Dollé comes across as much more Swiss than most Caucasian-looking foreigners who live here,  say Germans who do not speak our dialect. A good illustration of this latter case is Shawn Fielding, an ex-Miss Texas and the celebrity wife of Thomas Borer, the former Swiss ambassador in Berlin.  Though she definitely spiced up the diplomatic protocol—representing the country in dresses featuring Swiss flags on national holiday celebrations—I have never heard Fielding say anything coherent in either German or French.
[PICTURE FIELDING]
The Swiss were amused and entertained, but they considered her about as much Swiss as a foreign player on the local sports team.
Of course, there may be visual mis-framings at first sight—there is a difference whether we see Dollé on TV or hear him on the radio, but identity and reality are not first-sight phenomena. Their experiential roots go deeper than mere appearances. Speech provides us with cognitive information; it tells us about a person’s past experiences, about his or her interiority. Its depth profile is marked by somebody’s history and inside attitudes rather than attributive outside perception. Such an approach implies that a person’s words express more truly who he or she is and stands for—an observation which leads me to the issue of “roots” in the context of cultural identity.
 
3. Roots and “societal culture”
I once offended a good Jewish American friend when (mainly having mobility in mind) I claimed that “Americans have no roots,” and she replied: “Of course I know my roots.” My point was that roots have something to do with nurture and being connected with one’s environment in a contiguous relationship. You don’t learn roots through books or academic research. Roots have to do with your socialization, your growing up, and the experience you are living every day. Of course, Americans have roots—but maybe not the ones they are professing. Thus, what is the quality of Jewishness in the United States, when most American Jews speak neither Hebrew nor Yiddish? What are we to think of Italian Americans who don’t speak Italian? Or Irish Americans wearing T-shirts that go “Kiss me, I’m Irish” on St. Patrick’s Day?  Of course these ethnic categorizations are still powerful—some self-espoused and some imposed—as when Paul Lauter reminded me that Jews are often made aware of their Jewishness by being discriminated against. At this point, however, one would have to discuss what kind of multiculturalism we are talking about and to what extent this implies some kind of ideal of tolerance and active participation in democratic pluralism. Pluralism in itself is not a virtue, or we would also have to categorize slavery as “multiculturalism.” If we want to see multiculturalism as a positive value, we have to define it more clearly.
The argument in this paper is that there is definitely pluralism in the United States, but that the genuinely multicultural quality of this pluralism is debatable. In his influential treatise, Multicultural Citizenship, Will Kymlicka points out the importance of “societal culture,” which he defines as “a culture which provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres. These cultures tend to be territorially concentrated, and based on a shared language” (76). Kymlicka criticizes the “abstract or ethereal picture of cultures. In the case of a societal culture, this shared vocabulary is the everyday vocabulary of social life, embodied in practices covering most areas of human activity. And in the modern world, for a culture to be embodied in a social life means that it must be institutionally embodied—in schools, media, economy, government, etc.” (76). Cultural identity in such an experiential sense is not just a matter of academic knowledge or symbolic identification; it involves “not just shared memories or values, but also common institutions and practices” (76). Roots in this sense are not memorized aspects of some distant origin, but involve the feedback of daily life.
Once such a societal perspective is taken into account, American multiculturalism must be relativized in significant ways. Hence Kymlicka finds a “kernel of truth” in Ronald Dworkin’s suggestion “that the United States contains a single ‘cultural structure’ based on a ‘shared language’” (77). Even though generally critical of Dworkin’s work, Kymlicka agrees that “[t]he vast majority of Americans do in fact participate in the same societal culture, based on the English language” (77). This also implies that American multiculturalism is framed by a certain hierarchy: “If there is not a single culture in the United States, there is a dominant culture that incorporates most Americans” (77). Immigrants to the United States “bring with them a ‘shared vocabulary of tradition and convention’, but they have uprooted themselves from the social practices which this vocabulary originally referred to and made sense of” (77). The U.S. government, furthermore, supports this development: “[I]mmigration policy in the United States is intended to integrate immigrants within the existing English-speaking culture” (78). Hence Kymlicka concludes that “this commitment to ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘polyethnicity’ is a shift in how immigrants integrate into the dominant culture, not whether they integrate. The rejection of ‘Anglo-conformity’ primarily has involved affirming the right of immigrants to maintain their ethnic heritage in the private sphere—at home and in voluntary associations,” i.e., “it has not involved the establishment of distinct and institutionally complete societal cultures alongside the Anglophone society” (77).
From the point of view of “societal culture,” the constituent elements of American multiculturalism can at best be called “subcultures.”  They have to do with origins and certain private practices, but their common denominators remain “American”—be it through popular mainstream activities such as sports, music, picnics, movies, or in the framework of the law, politics, government, education, economics. More narrowly “ethnic” activities are rarely shared; their private character manifests what Werner Sollors would term “pure pluralism,” a side-by-side coexistence rather than common activities. Such an approach is also encouraged by the U.S. legal system and its minority politics, which make it more profitable to argue one’s case in terms of separate ethnicities.
Of course there are also very powerful tendencies promoting cooperation among various American minority cultures, most advanced probably in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ishmael Reed, in particular, and his “Before Columbus Foundation” have been at the forefront of creating such a MultiAmerica of cultural promiscuity. They have tried to turn physical togetherness into deeper forms of intercultural sharing by facilitating and intensifying cooperation among American artists of different ethnic backgrounds,  and created the “American Book Awards” to oppose the New York-based National Book Awards. Reed’s multiculturalists “are by no means separatists” (MultiAmerica xxii). He insists: “[W]hat the media refer to as ‘blacks’ are among the least ethnic of America’s ethnic groups. ‘Blacks,’ in the United States, have a multi-ethnic heritage” (“Is Ethnicity Obsolete?” 226). Still: “Blacks have difficulties claiming the multi-ethnicty of their heritage because such a claim renders millions of people less ‘white.’ We threaten people. We can’t define ourselves fully because it threatens people” (227). Reed and his Bay Area colleagues argue, rightly, that American culture is multicultural and that their art is not minority art but represents the cultures of the majority of the population. This leads to their second point, namely, that this ethnically diverse framework should also be applied to mainstream culture (which is also Sollors’ point in his “Critique of Pure Pluralism”). 
The problem with this approach is simply whether it is strong enough or not. When it comes to American identity on the national scale, the old patterns of U.S. ideology still rule supremely, as the discourse in the aftermath of 9/11 has shown. I fear that we may have deceived ourselves about the United States’ multicultural capacity, its ability for multicultural dialogue. U.S. Americans may have been deceived about all of their internal diversity and indulged in what Michael Ignatieff calls a “narcissism of minor differences” (see Kymlicka 88). Preoccupied with themselves in a culture of capitalist competition, the inhabitants of the United States tend to downplay what they all have in common in terms of societal culture: infrastructures of education, law, money and banking, newspapers, transportation, national TV shows, public holidays, building codes, how the telephone is organized, etc.
When it comes to the organization of political structures, U.S. Americans are often even more entrenched in their habits and unable to imagine models beyond the two-party system. This is possibly because they constantly have to renew their promise of belonging together, as the Swiss lawyer Gret Haller observes in her recent book on transatlantic differences (55).  The protean structure of U.S. capitalism and the fluidity of its ideology of deregulation create so much change that sought-after commonalities become the object of almost religious declaration—and consequently tend to fall into readily available patterns that are far less innovative than we would assume: U.S. exceptionalism, a holy mission in a hostile environment, Manifest Destiny, etc. Many Americans are so preoccupied with their daily struggles that they simply cannot imagine alternative systems of organization. The powerful foundations of their culture are distinctly “U.S.”  I remember vividly how I showed a new Swiss Franc bill to one of my neighbors in California, an artist who was quite interested in all kinds of experimental life styles. He felt it in his fingers, looked at it, liked the strange size, the color of the artwork, the different graphics, and then he asked: “And you mean, you can really go to a store with this and buy things?” “Yep,” I said. He had a difficult time imagining that anything but the dollar would be “money.” Hence my suggestion that the real “roots” which provide the circulation of red bloodedness in the United States are predominantly in the United States and should be acknowledged as such.
Tracing biographical roots of the past often turns into a sentimental preoccupation. If 4th generation Italian Americans are returning to Southern Italy to come to terms with their identity through a better understanding of the wonderful Mediterranean landscape,  this is a fascinating exercise of personal remembering. Though artful, it is as artificial an exercise as when I would decide to identify with medicine only because all of my close ancestors were physicians—a sentimental effort which still does not make me a medical doctor. Such private acts of identification can, of course, be intense, but they are not relevant in a societal sense. Ultimately, the territory of identification should be the one in which we live.
 
4. Ethnic Identity
One of the key terms of confusion is the notion of “ethnicity” and the way it defines identity.  Ethnicity has in many ways replaced “race” in the critical discourse, particularly after the deconstruction of “race” as an essentialist concept and its unmasking as what Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls “a dangerous trope” (“Writing ‘Race’” 5). Noting that “[r]ace, as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction” (4), Gates argues that it has turned into
a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which—more often than not—also often have fundamentally opposed interests. Race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application. The biological criteria used to determine “difference” in sex simply do not hold when applied to “race.” Yet we carelessly use language in such a way as to will this sense of natural difference into our formulations. (5)
The concept of “ethnicity” clearly does more justice to this conceptualist notion, acknowledging constructedness (what Sollors terms the “invention of ethnicity”). The fact that Sollors presents a structuralist approach to ethnicity—“ethnicity is typically based on contrast” (“Ethnicity” 288)—pays homage to its origin in a particular (structuralist) theory: ethnicity is presented as contained in a system of binary oppositions.
I think that, however, rather than offering a solution to how we should cope with differences of phenotype, this approach to “ethnicity” has actually racialized culture by confusing hardware and software, body and voice, and placing the issue in the realm of concepts. By saying that “race” is not a matter of biology but of theoretical construction, and therefore replacing it with a cultural notion of “ethnicity,” critics have severed phenotype from culture and yet at the same time tacitly assumed that certain kinds of people have a certain kind of culture. An intrinsic assumption of this reasoning is that it is “natural” for people of a certain biological origin to have a certain kind of ethnic identity. With this transfer from the “prison-house of language” (cf. Jameson) to a deconstructionist “prison-house” of culture, essentialism comes back with a vengeance. 
Adoption is probably an extreme case where “looks” may clash with “culture,” but I think it forces us constantly to questions our essentialist cultural projections. The social worker in Boston asked us: “And what are you doing about Julia’s Vietnamese background?” He was suspicious that we had taken away our daughter’s original Vietnamese name and were depriving her of her cultural heritage. But Julia’s only connection to Vietnam is her birth mother—there is absolutely no “cultural” link beyond this causality, except what others impose on her because of her looks. Moreover, Julia was born in Southern California and originally named “Lisa” (now her middle name) by a Vietnamese refugee who chose this name to claim America for her (hence there is no original ethnic name to deprive her of). Julia’s “other” passport (in addition to her Swiss one) is American—so shouldn’t we rather be obliged to teach her about Southern California, where she was born? Heritage is a complex affair of one’s personal history, and identity even more so.
To stay in the family, what about our son Jonathan, who looks Ethiopian but was born in Switzerland and is growing up here as a Swiss German speaker? The “ethnicity” approach would turn him into what is called an “oreo cookie” in the United States, a negative labeling which implicitly corroborates notions of essentialist identity, where the inside is expected to correspond to cultural categories associated with one’s body. Such an attitude ultimately foregrounds visual appearance and limits ethnic identity to descent recognizable as biological origin or race. Isn’t a person’s identity much rather a matter of his or her cognitive development and the cultural knowledge growing out of a personal experience?  Though Jonathan’s health insurance claims that his mother tongue is “Amharique,” I can assure you that he doesn’t speak a word of it. He’s never been out of the country. Neither is his religion Orthodox, as his birth certificate claims—he was baptized a Protestant last summer and most probably did not yet understand this ritual of welcoming him in the community. Does it make sense to put my children in any framework of original “ethnicity” at all? Or is it simply preposterous to claim that there is anything Vietnamese or Ethiopian about them which is more genuine than their Swiss identity? I believe that their language, their values, their upbringing will define their awareness of themselves more strongly than even the beauty of their skin.
Hence my problem with “ethnicity” is that it tends to privilege phylogeny over ontogeny, descent over cognitive development, and thus returns to “race” in a conceptual guise which muddles up rather than clarifies the situation. This doubleness can already be seen in the etymology of the word: The Oxford English Dictionary traces “ethnic” to the Greek words <ethnikos>, meaning heathen, and <ethnos>, nation. Its further meaning of “gentile” is also very problematic because the “goyim” are usually the Christians and not the heathens. Hence in the term “ethnic,” we have an outside attribution of identity (heathen) combined with an inside definition (nation). Maybe we can explain this if we see Christianity as an identity by consent, which goes across national identities; the heathen ethnic definition (=nation) may then, in contrast, be understood as one of biological descent, and thus lack of choice.  The vocabulary of “ethnicity” invites us to confuse all of these things.
 
5. Folkore and the State Department
After having pointed out the many complexities of defining “ethnicity” as such, let me return to the role of multiculturalism within the wider framework of U.S. cultural politics and international policy. I see what Will Kymlicka calls the “ethnic revival which rocked the United States and elsewhere in the 1960s and 1970s” (61) as an emblematic scene of such forces. He explains: “The ethnic revival aimed, in a large part, to make the possession of an ethnic identity an acceptable, even normal, part of life in the mainstream society. In this view it was strikingly successful, which helps explain why the ‘revival’ lost its political urgency” (98). It is therefore
not a repudiation of integration into the mainstream society. Even the most politicized ethnic groups are not interested in reconstituting themselves as distinct societies or self-governing nations alongside the mainstream society.
       On the contrary, the entire revival is essentially a matter of self-identity and self-expression, disconnected from the claims for the revival or creation of a separate institutional life. (67)
What this means is that from the angle of societal involvement, much of American ethnic identity deals with roots as folklore. It has to do with ethnic foods, a few phrases from the old language, some symbols, family relics, but it does not involve literacy in the old “ethnic” culture of origin nor any serious ability to function in it. Ethnic roots are dissociated from the institutional structures of the larger society—which is not to say that such identification is hypocritical or irrelevant.  The question is, however, whether they matter as determinants of people’s lives in a socio-economic sense or merely reflect sentimental attachment. U.S. multiculturalism can be seen as part of the ideology of “deregulation”; it is an informal multiculturalism, fenced in by domestic societal practices which don’t really point beyond the playpen of U.S. borders. Ethnic discussions in the United States accordingly reflect U.S. issues, and solutions reflect U.S. patterns of difference.
The “relevant society” in the United States is monolingual. Kymlicka writes that the current policy ideal in the United States is to “make immigrants and their children as close as possible to unilingual native speakers of English (i.e. that learning English requires losing their mother tongue), rather than aiming to produce people who are fluently bilingual (i.e. that learning English involves gaining a language, in addition to one’s mother tongue)” (97). He calls this a “misguided policy” which “also deprives society of a valuable resource in an increasingly globalized economy” (97). Immigrants enter with cultural knowledge from all over the world and within two generations much of this know-how is lost, except in certain pockets of cultural hard-headedness. As a reason for this breakdown in the transmission of non-English languages, Kymlicka indicates societal irrelevance: “[P]eople lack the opportunity or incentive to use and develop [these languages] in cognitively stimulating ways” (212). Culture gets lost simply because it is no longer used; it has no real practical function.
In order to better illustrate some of my reservations about the way in which U.S. society defines its pluralism, let me end with some comments on the memorial service in Yankee Stadium after 9/11 as a problematic manifestation of U.S. multiculturalism. The terrorist attacks were a great tragedy and the world was sympathizing with the American victims—yet many outsiders were appalled to see how, in the wake of events, mourning was instrumentalized to promote simplistic forms of patriotism and military aggression. In a Manichean framework the United States was defined as a nation with God attacked by “evil”—without any discussion of possible historical causes of terrorism or U.S. foreign policy in the past and possible political origins of anti-American aggression.
This is how the young sports writer Rebecca Diakunczak described the memorial service:
Yankee Stadium was turned into a house of worship, during a memorial service for the victims and those affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center. To ensure safety, backpacks, bags, umbrellas and bottles were not allowed in the stadium. During the service, American flags were handed out. The stadium was filled with flowers and red, white and blue banners. A prayer was said by Cardinal Edward Egaan [sic], New York’s Roman Catholic Archbishop. Leaders of the following religious groups also attended: Muslims, Jews, Protestants, Sikhs, Greek Orthodox and David Benke, the president of the Lutheran Church. Muslim Izak-El M. Posha, “Do not allow the ignorance of people have you attack your good neighbors. We are Muslims, but we are Americans.” We Muslim, Americans stand today with a heavy weight on our shoulders that those who would dare do such dastardly acts claim or faith. They are not believers in God at all.” (original punctuation)
It was painful to see this array of religious dignitaries performing for a general American public, when they represented little known minority groups with no significant influence in the country except for providing “color.” Their main functions seems to have been to give the watchers on TV a self-congratulatory sense of inclusiveness. Yet one wonders whether members of these very minorities, of which many were at that very time being harassed by police forces, would be considered worthy of getting security clearance from the national government in order to help provide the very safety the country was (and still is) seeking.  As an outsider, I could not refrain from noticing the great gap between the flattering multiculturalism of the self-image and the institutionalized political structures.
Diakunczak ends her feature as follows: “The terrorists may have destroyed buildings and lives, but they did not destroy the American spirit. All Americans, including opposing teams, have been brought closer together, and this unity has made us all stronger. For more information about the response of athletes to the terrorist attacks, log onto the www.sports.com.” She moves directly from terrorism to all-American sports and its main-stream imagery of oppositionalism and spectatorship, which is propped onto the political issue. A similar, and in many ways even more worrying, transition from mourning to retaliation can be found on the homepage on the Yankee Stadium memorial service provided by the U.S. State Department, which gives a single button for additional links, called “Response to Terrorism.”
Personally, I get the impression that much of the informal kind of “American” multiculturalism has been co-opted by the hegemonic bullying of “U.S.” institutions. This behavior is by no means only a matter of imperialist politics or popular low-brow chauvinism, but it also involves academia and issues of language, publishing, and hiring. Thus in a recent international collection of articles on Asian American cultural studies, my Spanish colleague Rocío Davis and I have noticed the “dangerous provincialist tendencies in certain areas of scholarship and publication, which often tend to follow narrow fashions of intellectual interest and, particularly in the field of ethnic literatures, even the hedging tendencies of cultural nationalism” (11). Paul Gilroy, for example, is criticized in American Literary History  for his “Eurocentric” views by Simon Gikandi: “[W]hen it comes to his European identity, Gilroy seems to embrace the camp mentality he has set out to deconstruct and denounce in his book” (601). Gilroy’s exploration of a European alternative of cosmopolitanism is commented on: “[B]ut isn’t the idea of Europe—or even humanism and cosmopolitanism—part of a camp mentality?” (609). The proposal of an alternative multicultural model is approached in terms of opposition rather than comparison and the exchange of ideas. Unfortunately, American critics generally tend to be preoccupied with their own powerful domestic discourse. Often they are only aware of foreigners’ publications on the United States when they are published in English, preferably by an established U.S. press.  The hegemonic market of, and in, U.S. American academia is large and self-sufficient, but still far away from an intercultural dialogue beyond its own national concerns.
A striking illustration of what makes foreigners so uncomfortable about the current position of U.S multiculturalism can be found in Richard Slotkin’s article “Unit Pride: Ethnic Platoons and the Myth of American Nationality.” In his fascinating survey, Slotkin looks at changes in the representation of fighting units in American literature and movies as an indicator of ethnic integration and new national definition. As a non-American I look at the American platoon as an abrogated kind of multiculturalism, one co-opted by the function imposed on it. If you are on the ground, it is irrelevant whether the bomber crew is polyethnic. As Slotkin writes: the “central irony” is that “it is the enemy who teaches us what we have in common” (479). Later, he adds: “Indeed, the degree of toleration with which internal racial and ethnic differences are treated in the platoon movie is proportional to and dependent on the extreme dehumanization of the external enemy” (483). This is a pluralism defined within a framework of oppositionalism (not in sports but of war, this time); it “still necessarily preserves the idea that war fighting is a necessary and morally positive attribute of national existence” (494).
We can transfer this observation to mainstream media: for a person looking at the United States from the outside, it makes no difference what ethnicity the journalists on the national networks are, as long as their discourse echoes Puritan commitments to some “errand in the wilderness.” Judging American foreign policy statements, one is reminded of the fenced-in settlers described in William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain: “The jargon of God, which they used, was their dialect by which they kept themselves surrounded as with a palisade” (64). In comparison to other nations, multicultural literacy in the United States is low: a Swiss newspaper recently reprinted a whole sketch in English, simply expecting its readers to understand the American author James Sherman’s White House puns on “Who is Hu?,” “Yassir,” and “Kofi” (coffee). On German mainstream TV, Harald Schmidt did his late night show in French. For a whole week the David Letterman of Germany tried to talk his way through the program in the neighboring country’s language, together with his stammering sidekick on the computer and a set of amused French guests. It was a great joke because he dared to make a fool of himself. Such multicultural risk-taking is unheard-of in U.S. network broadcasting. Sometimes the America veers far away from its genuine possibilities of multiculturalism.
In its most negative formulation, the simple equation would be that the United States is multiracial—Europe is multicultural. As a society, Europeans can cooperate across languages and nations, building high-tech products such as the Airbus and Ariane rockets. The European Union is expanding its eastern boundaries through peaceful commitments. Which does by no means imply that there are no problems of xenophobia, and “race” and “racism” (in the old, unsophisticated definition). But when it comes to multicultural literacy and the ability (and willingness) to organize multinational cooperation at the beginning of the 21st century, I guess Europeans have as much to offer, if not more, than the United States, in terms of multicultural negotiation and integration. This is the experience of Gret Haller, who has worked for the Council of Europe as an ombudsfrau for human rights in Bosnia. Comparing differences of transatlantic political culture, she warns of a “deregulation of human rights” (9) which is not based on institutionalized principles but on political interests and “pragmatic” short term solutions. Rather than bilateral contracts, Europeans generally try to draw international agreements and create international organizational structures. Their foreign aid is more centered on building institutionalized infrastructures than on military containment.
Haller’s focus on legal practices seems crucial to me as a significant area to locate differences. How are we to explain Afghan prisoners categorized as “illegal combatants” and then abducted to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in an effort to circumvent international (and even national) legal procedure? Moreover, how are we to understand the continual “internationalization” of such law, when it manifests itself as a mere imposition of U.S. law in international legal conflicts?  Thus in the case of the Swiss banks and the “lost” Holocaust accounts, for example, the settlement was made in New York, although the parties involved were Swiss and Jewish. To be sure, it is questionable whether the righteous bankers ever would have yielded without the immense American pressure and their ensuing fear that this lawsuit would jeopardize the banks’ future profits in the U.S. financial market. Yet from the point of view of the territoriality of jurisdiction, one wonders why this case was not settled in a Swiss court, an Israeli court, or, to follow regular procedure, an international court? While the United States consistently refuses to subject itself to international law, it equally consistently tends to impose its own legal practice onto foreign countries,  partly out of ignorance and partly as an act of hegemonic policy.
In the future, U.S. multiculturalism will have to pass the test of international cooperation—which requires a different foreign policy, one backed by a thicker multicultural involvement. Merely domestic approaches to diversity, often limited to phenotypical identity politics, cannot provide the multicultural literacy necessary for functional dialogic relationships. Hence, this paper argues that, for a start, ethnic identity should be approached as a cognitive rather than a racial-conceptualist one—racism can also be criticized within an experiential, cognitive framework. Otherwise much of much of the rich cultural diversity of the United States will remain folklore and of little societal relevance—informal and therefore of only marginal international use.
 
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