Divided We Stand? : Multiculturalism is tearing apart America, say 2 authors who want a return to unifying values. Not everyone agrees.

Out of context, it sounds like a reactionary war whoop from the film “Falling Down”: “White guilt can be pushed too far.”

But it’s not Michael Douglas as a fed-up-with-multicultural-confusion nutcase spouting that line. It’s Arthur Schlesinger, quintessential liberal, in a 1992 book whose title echoes a growing concern in some circles: “The Disuniting of America.”

In a similar book from what may prove a budding genre, Time magazine critic Robert Hughes worries about “the politics of ideology that for the last 20 years has weakened and in some areas broken the traditional American genius for consensus. . . .”

“There never was a core America in which everyone looked the same, spoke the same language, worshiped the same gods and believed the same things,” the “classic liberal with some conservative tendencies” writes in “Culture of Complaint--the Fraying of America.”

But there was, he and Schlesinger assert, a common culture or creed that bound the country’s disparate groups.

Now, with Serbs and Croats tearing each other to shreds, the former Soviet empire disintegrating into ethnic enclaves and Los Angeles seemingly intent on mimicking the new world disorder, other thinkers have sworn their allegiance to what might be termed the tribe of E Pluribus Unum-- “one composed of many.”

Without necessarily knowing what their like-thinking cohorts are up to, they’re stepping in to defend Western civilization, denounce ethnic nationalism and deplore the alleged breakdown of critical thinking skills that has allowed the rise of “political correctness” and assaults on what they see as America’s unifying values.

It’s time, they say, for America’s hodgepodge of ethnic, gender and ideological interest groups to weave themselves back into the national fabric.

Those who suggest otherwise, Hughes says, “cannot know what demons they are frivolously invoking.” There’s a problem, though.

The very people the Unum folk seek to engage, shrug off their views as the weak self-assurances of an embattled elite.

“These are academic fascists and liars,” declares John H. Clarke, professor emeritus of Africana studies at New York’s Hunter College and a target of the withering critiques that Schlesinger, Hughes and others have leveled against Afrocentrists’ view of history.

“This nation, in spite of what it says to the world,” Clarke says, “was founded as a haven for free white Protestant males, middle-class and up, who agree with the prevailing middle-class status quo. Everyone else in this country who thinks they’re going to get democracy is kidding themselves.”

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It doesn’t take a Schlesinger to tell folks that the comfortable old norms have been unraveling fast: Feminists and other “marginalized” critics rail against a literary canon that focuses on the thoughts of “dead white men.” Multicultural activists flay the traditional image of Christopher Columbus. Lesbian separatists isolate themselves from the “dominant culture,” while some African Americans argue that only a person of similar heritage can direct a movie about Malcolm X--and then the man who does so requests that only journalists of his skin color interview him.

“It’s a black thing,” supporters say.

Conservative-Americans began yowling their protests about all this long ago.

But now moderate-Americans and centrist-Americans and even a few left-of-centrist-Americans have joined in.

Last year Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s magazine, lamented the trend toward identification by hyphen. This “subordination of the noun to the adjective,” he said, “makes a mockery of both the American premise and the democratic spirit.”

George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni, whose “Spirit of Community” just arrived in bookstores with a chapter on “the limits of multiculturalism,” says it was last year’s Los Angeles riots that spurred many to lend their voices to the cacophony.

“What happened in Los Angeles,” he says, “was like a hanging. “It focused our minds.”

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The most prominent--and predictable--front in the conflict has been dubbed the “political correctness” debate. Here, people whom Hughes accuses of the “priggishness of the Puritan marm . . . seeking nits to pick” attack as racist phrases such as “a chink in his armor.”

On a broader level, the Unum tribe says, PC reflects a dangerous retreat from clear thinking about the nature of American culture--and the way students are taught about their common culture.

One incident has been discussed so often as to assume the quality of anti-PC folklore. It pops up again in Schlesinger’s book:

There was, it seems, a student at the University of Pennsylvania who mentioned her “deep regard for the individual” in memorandum.

Back came a note from a college administrator, with the word individual circled.

“This is a red-flag phrase today, which is considered by many to be racist,” he wrote. “Arguments that champion the individual over the group ultimately privileges (sic) the ‘individuals’ belonging to the largest or dominant group.”

Schlesinger argues against that view, writing that the “powerful national creed” that made America’s multiethnic society work is based on the notion of individual, not group, rights. The clamor for recognition of group grievances, he says, threatens to unravel the unifying creed.

But Schlesinger’s thesis doesn’t hold water for some people who never felt included in the first place.

“The biggest crisis in the United States is based on individual rights,” says Clarke. “Most of the non-white cultures of the world came out of collective societies-- we societies, as opposed to me societies.”

Other ethnocentric scholars embrace that view. In fact, they say, it’s exactly because the mainstream traditionally ignored such integral aspects of other cultures that schools must be compelled to teach them.

A 1989 report from the New York State “Task Force on Minorities: Equity and Excellence” put it like this:

“Systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives (has) a terribly damaging effect on the psyche of young people of African, Asian, Latino and Native American descent . . . (and explains why) large numbers of children of non-European descent are not doing as well as expected.”

Many in the Unum tribe say that notion has led educators to abandon the traditional goals of teaching in favor of the “therapy” approach.

So, Hughes writes, literature written by “the pale, patriarchal, penis people” is scorned, while reading itself is exiled to “a strange, nostalgic, Marxist never-never land, where all the most retrograde phantoms of Literature as Instrument of Social Utility are trotted forth.”

Schlesinger, meanwhile, anxiously points out that students can graduate from 78% of American colleges and universities without taking a course in Western civilization. Many prestigious universities, he says, require students to take Third World study courses but not Western civilization.

The most egregious example of this approach, many Unum folks say, is Afrocentrism, a premise holding that all world culture originated in Africa--and, in some teachings, that most of the world’s woes stem from European oppression.

For their part, the Unum tribe apparently agrees with Schlesinger’s view that “the curse of racism was the great failure of the American experiment, the glaring contradiction of American ideals and the still crippling disease of American life.”

Nor do they deny that America’s women and minorities are justified in their rage at how traditional historians treated them.

“No general American history written by a white up to the 1960s,” says Hughes, “can be trusted to give a fair, investigatory view of what slavery and its results meant to black Americans--or, by the same token, of what the conquest of the West meant to American Indians.”

Yet unless one believes in “racist mysticism,” says Schlesinger, one must view African-American history as part of the Western democratic tradition, “not an alternative to it.”

“If some kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to devise an educational curriculum for the specific purpose of handicapping and disabling black Americans,” he writes, “he would not be likely to come up with anything more diabolically effective than Afrocentrism.”

Asa Hilliard, a Georgia State University educational psychologist whose work on Afrocentric curricula helped inspire changes nationwide, said he had discussed his controversial studies with “about 100” reporters recently, and he refused to discuss it again.

“I have,” he added icily, “no respect for Schlesinger.”

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In his critique of why things are falling apart, Hughes lashes out both right and left.

In the 1980s, conservatives increasingly used the language of “Patriotic Correctness” to divide America into Us and Them, he says. The prime example was Patrick Buchanan’s polemical speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention, where he labeled feminism a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

Hughes distances himself from Buchanan and from those neoconservatives “who create an exaggerated bogey called multiculturalism . . .”

Yet he does credit the right with sounding the alarm about multicultural excess while liberals still scrambled to encourage everyone to huddle together in their “otherness.”

“The left,” Hughes writes, “would like to endow ordinary internal differences within a society--of gender, race and sexual pattern--with the inflated character of nationhood, as though they not only embodied cultural differences but actually constituted whole ‘cultures’ in their own right.”

To which some activists would respond: So what do you expect in a country that’s made us feel unwanted?

Lee Werbel, deputy director of Los Angeles’ chapter of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), says, “To me, it’s very interesting that because you’re asking for the same rights that the majority have in this country, you’re somehow a special interest, and factionalizing.”

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Schlesinger, speaking from his New York City home, said he saw “Falling Down”--”a ridiculous movie”--and is appalled at the suggestion that critics might compare him to its lead character.

“I spent all my life fighting for the inclusion (of women, minorities and other disenfranchised people),” the Adlai Stevenson liberal said.

But that doesn’t mean he’s not tired of the “guilt trip” leveled “by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism and fanaticism.”

Pressing that argument in “Disuniting,” Schlesinger wondered rhetorically whether America really means to embrace all aspects of all cultures: If ethnic groups insist on preserving their heritage in the United States, should women be compelled to wear veils, receive clitorectomies or toss themselves onto their husbands’ funeral pyres? And don’t go blaming all the developing world’s problems on colonialism or get teary-eyed about the superiority of Eastern wisdom, he continues: “When the Chinese students cried and died for democracy in Tien An Men Square, they brought with them not representations of Confucius or Buddha, but a model of the Statue of Liberty.”

Instead of stepping away from mainstream America with ethnocentrism, he says, people of every description should be claiming their place in it.

“The upsurge of ethnicity,” he contends, “is a superficial enthusiasm stirred by romantic ideologues and unscrupulous hucksters whose claim to speak for their minorities is thoughtlessly accepted by the media.”

He is hopeful, however, that the vast majority of people once termed “minority” will reject the “cult of ethnicity.”

“I think what will defeat them is sex and love,” he says, pointing to statistics showing that only a quarter of marriages in the United States now are between people of the same ethnicity.

For Hughes, a transplanted Australian, the debate might be said to boil down to a Latin phrase from Horace that he recited as a schoolboy in Australia: Coleum non animam mutant qui trans mare currunt , or, “Those who cross the sea change the sky above them, not their souls.”

The idea struck him as dead wrong, “the utterance of a self-satisfied Roman, impervious to the rest of the world,” he writes.

His move from the virtual monoculture of Australia to the United States reinforced his belief that people are indeed changed by the ways of their adopted land.

“The social richness of America, so striking to the foreigner, comes from the diversity of its tribes,” he writes. “Its capacity for cohesion, for some spirit of common agreement on what is to be done, comes from the willingness of those tribes not to elevate their cultural differences into impassable barriers and ramparts, not to fetishize their ‘Africanness’ or Italianita , which makes them distinct, at the expense of their Americanness, which gives them a vast common ground.”

Moreover, the Unum tribe argues, the sometimes glacial process of Americanization works in ways not easily discerned in the hubbub of the here and now. The Unum ists would find cause for both despair and hope, for instance, in recent issues of Korea Times.

One issue featured a story in which a Korean immigrant abandoned Los Angeles for his homeland, having found the American Dream mired in “rejection and fear.”

Another featured a firebrand column in which a young Berkeley student scolded his fellow students for being so quick to assimilate.

The Unum tribe might argue, however, that the column inadvertently supported their belief that the unifying creed lives on.

The student, after all, based his argument on the ideas of a thinker who is now inarguably a mainstay of American culture: Malcolm X.