Multi-peopleism
A critique of multiculturalism and my alternative
I first ran into multiculturalism around 1980, when I owned a mail-order Jewish book-and-gift business, Judaica USA. Within one year the number of children's novels about Jewish children dropped precipitously. Approximately 10% of the children's book market had been books for the Jewish market--a very large percentage considering the proportion of Jews in the US population. Jews were known to be the largest buyers of books.
In catering to the new multicultural market, the publishers apparently decided to keep the percent of books for non-white, non-Christian children the same and to use most of that percentage for books for African-American children.i
When multiculturalism was introduced, immigration was still strictly managed. The numbers of immigrants from Central and South America were low, Asians had been specifically excluded for a long time so the number of children was low, and there were still very few Muslims in the USA. Arabs were largely Christians who had escaped from the Middle East after the British and French created individual nations after World War I. This had been done without regard to the ethnicity or tribalism of the regions concerned, leading to the persecution and even massacre of Christians.
As a purveyor of Jewish books, my business was drastically affected by this change. Over the fifty years since, we have seen how pretending that all cultures are equally valid has damaged the world and set the West up to become part of a Muslim one-world "caliphate." The emphasis on multiculturalism created an environment that led to a lack of will to call out a culture that focuses on death and repression by unelected religious leaders. In turn, this has created a "soft revolution," a slow and subtle change in values and beliefs because for years it has been "wrong" to oppose that culture and those values.
Cultural Differences
All cultures are not alike. During the ten years I taught English to immigrant adults in the USA, I taught people from 48 nations. And I found tremendous differences between students from different places. Here are just a few examples.
The most blatant cases of cheating in my ten years were with Pakistanis and Saudis. A Saudi student told me that copying from others is expected in his country.
My Cambodian students were employees at a factory that was taking advantage of a grant to offer English to foreign-born employees. These students had grown up in youth camps under Pol Pot's communist regime, where the rule was cooperation in all things. When I tried to explain the concept of cheating they did not understand; not helping others seemed weird to them. I think that this trait made them excellent employees in the factory because focusing on the end result and helping others to meet that goal was second nature to them.ii
I was unable to reach a few students. Although they appeared to be of average intelligence, they did not seem to grasp the concept of cause-and-effect. They appeared to react to whatever happened, did not seem able to plan, and were confused by simple assignments that required thought and planning. They seemed only able to learn by rote. A few students like this were from Central Africa and one was from Brazil. Every student of mine from the Dominican Republic (all workers at the factory) had this trait.
My Hindu Indian students were wives whose husbands were on work visas for hi-tech companies and did not have visa status permitting them to work and men with hi-tech jobs needing to improve their conversational English. They were all highly educated, gracious, gentle people.
Many of the village Mexicans were very poorly educated and just wanted enough English to cope with their manual labor jobs. They tended to be terrified of failure. I learned that, although technically corporal punishment is illegal, in remote villages beatings were common for school mistakes. This may be a reason so many Mexican laborers do not attempt to learn English. Many of those village people are very traditional and discourage girls from attending college. They tended to spend any financial windfall with their community in a big party with lots of food and music rather than saving or planning for the future.iii The Mexicans from the cities who ended up in my classes were different: they were educated professionals who were improving their English in order to move up in their careers.
In Cameroon, which has a very low literacy rate, books are very uncommon; even in schools sometimes only the teacher had a book. Learning for them is through listening.
My student from Mali, a refugee journalist whose friends had been massacred by radical Islamists for their political views, said that in his country, villagers lived in straw huts with dirt floors and shared one-dish meals where everyone ate with their hands out of the same serving dish. He said people tended to be relaxed and content. He told me, "Americans are rich with things but poor in spirit."
All of these people were human. All of their lives had the same infinite worth. But their cultures were very, very different. The differences between cultures cause problems. Here are some examples.
In many countries, private property is unknown or disrespected. Immigrants from those countries have no problem with stealing. If you don't respect private property, then you can simply take what you want.
In some countries, when a wife or daughter behaves in a way that the father believes dishonors the family, such as dressing in a way that was forbidden in the home country, the father has a religious obligation to kill the offender. Honor killingsiv are not uncommon in Muslim communities around the world and even occur in the USA.
England has a big problem with rapes by immigrants, primarily from Pakistan, a primarily Muslim country. In Pakistan, outside of major cities, women only leave home completely covered in a burqa and killings of women and girls are not uncommon. Just as Hamas terrorists called young Israeli women "prostitutes" and gang-raped them before killing them on October 7, 2023, the Pakistani gangs in England probably assume that young women wearing western clothes are "asking for it."
The Problem with Multiculturalism
"Multiculturalism" was a simplistic but wrong solution to a real problem. A better response would have been "diversity" in the largest, most positive sense: that all people should be respected as human. The individuals, not their cultures. The movement should have focused on people while validating traditional Western values of individual rights and liberties (including private property rights) and the moral code taught by Judaism and Christianity. Had this occurred, the United States and European countries would have provided cultural education such as that available to my grandparents, who immigrated to the USA in the late 1800s.v At that time, learning American values and civics were part of becoming a citizen, and passing the citizenship exam involved real learning.
Forcing Assimilation
Mistakes were definitely made under the "melting pot" philosophy that was prevalent in previous generations. That movement was handled by deliberately embarrassing school children who used their first language in school, spoke with accents, brought ethnic foods for lunch, and dressed ethnically. I once read that years ago, social workers and teachers were taught to force children to assimilate by denigrating their origins. Children caught speaking their native languages during recess were punished, sometimes corporally. Lunches containing immigrant foods were confiscated. In some places Jewish children's lunches were replaced by a school-provided ham-and-cheese sandwich. This had the double effect of making them ashamed of their origins and forcing them to break the Jewish kosher laws that forbid both mixing meat and milk at the same meal and eating pig.
This was the same mentality that had Native American children forced into boarding schools far from home, often where students came from several tribes that had perhaps been ancestral enemies and certainly did not speak the same language. Since these schools were in remote places, they often attracted teachers who were unable to keep jobs in more populous places: teachers with alcoholism and a tendancy to violence. There is evidence that the prevalence of alcohol and drug abuse, as well as violence, within Native American communities today stems from students being demoralized by the efforts to eradicate their cultures and from learning these behaviors from their teachers at the boarding schools.vi
A product of this type of education, author Philip Roth grew to hate his Jewish heritage. An example of this humiliation appeared in his famous book, Portnoy's Complaint. The main character was asked in kindergarten to name a specific kitchen implement that the teacher held up: a spatula. This child, whose first language was Yiddish, knew the tool was a spatula. But he was also sure it was a Yiddish word. He chose to say he didn't know, preferring the ridicule of classmates to the ridicule of his teacher for using a forbidden language.
The foods that girls prepared in the mandatory Home Economics course I took in the mid-1950s included mostly foods mixing meat and milk, containing pork, or using shellfish. Not only were these foods forbidden under Jewish law, but they were recipes that none of my Christian friends normally ate. In retrospect, I have a strong suspicion that the curriculum had been set up years earlier, when the "force to assimilate" philosophy was strongest.
I also remember receiving a low grade in music in fifth grade. For the last two music classes before Christmas my class sang traditional carols from memory. When the teacher didn't pass out the words, I asked for them. The teacher ridiculed me, assuming I was trying to make her look bad. But in New York City, where I had lived until that year, there was a large Jewish population and Christmas carols were not sung in school. I knew the melodies from hearing the songs on the radio, but had never paid attention to the words.
A Solution
A generation of teachers has been educated to promote wokeness and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion philosophy, causing great unrest. That philosophy is being removed by the Department of Education and the Trump administration. What will replace it?
I would like to see multi-peopleism: respect for the humanity of all, but education for America's traditional values. Barbara Cohen's classic children's story, Molly's Pilgrim, tells of a third grade classroom's interaction with a Jewish refugee child from Russia. The book illustrates how differences can be acknowledged and and children taught to respect them.
Additionally, American values and culture need to be taught as the positive things they are, both in schools and in citizenship programs for immigrants. Private property, respect for all lives, and traditional capitalism--the kind where small businesses flourish and quality is policed by reputationvii--need to be taught and respected by people across the political spectrum.
Is this a naive pipe dream? Probably. But by keeping these ideas in mind and living our private lives within this framework as much as possible, we can all help nudge our culture to improve.
i "Jewish" was conveniently left out of the definition of "multicultural." As we now know, that is because Jews are seen by the academic inventors of multiculturalism as white oppressors, while people of color are seen as oppressed. This in spite of the fact that the majority of Israeli Jews are as dark as most Arabs, Ethiopian Jews look Ethiopian, and Indian Jews look Indian. In the USA, many Jews, such as myself, do not look like people of European descent. We tend to have darker coloring, non-mainstream-European hair and features, and are shorter and broader.
ii There was a qualitative difference between their cooperative work and the Saudi-Pakistani cheating. In the former, the end result--everyone learning--was the goal. They worked together until everyone learned. The Saudis and Pakistanis did not learn, they simply copied from other students. The very independent USA could benefit from learning from the Cambodian model. Group projects in the USA often consist of one or two students doing all the work, i.e., learning, and everyone in the group receiving credit for it, including those who did nothing and therefore learned nothing.
iii I wonder whether this trait was because during the Inquisition, which moved from Spain and Portugal to their colonies in the New World, a person who turned in someone that they thought was a heratic got half of the person's estate if (when) the person was convicted. It was dangerous to be successful and to live at a different level than one's neighbors. Sharing successes was therefore a way of endearing oneself to the neighbors while spending that money on everyone, instead of letting the family stand out. These Inquisition laws may also be at the basis of the stereotype of the lazy Latino whose motto is "manana" or tomorrow.
iv https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364649122_Honor_Killings_in_the_United_States_From_1990_to_2021_Primary_Victims_and_Corollary_Victims
vIn big cities, schools and social welfare centers provided classes in English and citizenship for immigrants. By the time I took classes in teaching English as a Second Language, citizenship was not part of the curriculum.
vi https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5446670/
vii In traditional capitalism, where the right to start and run a business is mostly unfettered, the customers decide what products to buy and which shops to use. Shoddy merchandise, poor customer service, and unrealistic prices mean fewer customers. The financial incentives to provide quality goods at a reasonable price with a smile are huge. Generally, traditional capitalism means prosperity for business owners. But steady jobs with products that employees can be proud of lead to happy and prosperous employees as well. Today, however, with multinational corporations controlling most of the marketplace, individual happiness with products or service are irrelevant. Businesses are incentivised to overprice, produce shoddy products, and use cheap workers who often have poor attitudes; and customers are powerless to change the situation. But this model of business is not true capitalism; it is based on a model of exploitation and greed.
It takes a lot of maturity to understand that not all cultures are healthy.