Sam Smith – Impressive as the Black Lives Matter movement is, there is another approach to black status in modern America that might be even stronger, namely that blacks not just achieve equality for themselves but that they become leaders of other cultures, such as latinos and poor whites, in achieving mutual goals.
As a white guy who entered adulthood in the 1960s, I know this is possible. My inspiration in those days came in no small part from national and local black leaders who saw their role not just to produce justice for blacks but to improve the whole system under which we lived.
It is a role that hardly gets mentioned these days as we become heavily absorbed in the status of identities over their mutual interests. And so we end up, for example, with a master con man like Trump teaching too many working class whites that their problems are ethnic rather than economic.
As we struggle for a better America, we need the wisdom and experience of ethnic minorities to guide all of us and well as to save themselves. This is far from an impossible task as other minorities, such as Jews and Irish, have shown us.
I addressed this a couple of decades ago in my book Shadows of Hope
Once we accept the unpleasant persistence of human prejudice, once we give up the notion that it is merely social deviance controllable by sanctions, we drift away from a priggish and puritanical corrective approach towards one that emphasizes techniques of mitigating harm, towards what Andrew Young has called a sense of “no fault justice" and towards emphasizing countervailing human qualities that can serve as antibiotics against hate and fear. We move from being victims to being survivors. We start to deal with some of the real problems of creating a multicultural community; we actually start to envision it, to build it not on false politeness but upon realistic interdependence.
Such communities, the sine qua non of a functioning America, will not be constructed by laws, pronouncements from deans of freshmen or civil rights leaders. Nor can we continue to treat multiculturalism like some overbearing parent saying to her toddler, "Now go make friends with that nice Nancy.' It didn't work when we were six and it's not working much better now.
Multicultural communities will be constructed not by the hustlers of the diversity trade but by a growing local and personal regard for common sense, fairness and, yes, reasonable self interest. The new multicultural community will work because it is jointly and severally proud of itself, leaving behind the self-hate that so often accompanies the hatred of others. It will work because there are adequate jobs for people of every group -- thus eliminating one of the primary causes of ethnic triage, and it will work because our educational system will teach not a prudish diversity but simply the way the world really is, which among other things, is very diverse. Our children will learn to enjoy and incorporate this diversity and as they do so will undoubtedly find it odd that their elders couldn’t get any closer to the matter than a rigid and legalistic sensitivity.
Perhaps this is why ethnic restaurants are among the most successful practitioners of multiculturalism in America. Why is it so hard for universities to deal with multicultural issues while the Arab carry-out across from my office offers a "kosher hoagie?" It is, in part, because most of us are like Bismarck who said when offered German champagne that his patriotism stopped at his stomach. It is also that the ethnic restaurant offers a fair multicultural deal: a good living for the owner in return for good food for the patrons.
For multiculturalism to work, we need a willing suspension of our politics as well as the creation of places where this can happen, both neutral places and places where we can participate in another culture that will leave us feeling that something good has happened. Outside of restaurants and ethnic nightclubs, this is now rarely available in America. We are not taught the pleasures of diversity, only its problems and burdens. We are seldom invited to enjoy other cultures, only to be sensitive towards them and -- unspoken -- to feel sorry for them. Thus, inevitably, we tend to think of multiculturalism in terms of conflict and crisis.
The restaurant analogy is not trivial. Political scientist Milton L. Rakove, credits Irish dominance in Chicago partially to the fact that the Irish ran saloons that "became centers of social and political activity not only for the Irish but also for the Polish, Lithuanian, Bohemian and Italian immigrants. . . As a consequence of their control of these recreational centers of the neighborhoods, the Irish saloon keepers and bartenders became the political counselors of their customers, and the political bosses of the wards and, eventually, of the city." As one politician put it, "A Lithuanian won't vote for a Pole, and a Pole won't vote for a Lithuanian. A German won't vote for either of them -- but all three will vote for an Irishman."[i]
