Customer Reviews

Reinventing the American People: Unity and Diversity Today

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The book skillfully begs the question of what is the root cause of America's failure at multiculturalism? Robert Royal's piece sets up white male racism as a "strawman" and then the others use their pieces to help him knock it down. However together they all effectively sidestep the 800-pound gorilla in the back of the room: white nervousness and deep-seated attitudes towards other races, and all the sensitivities that go with that -- especially towards those crossing our borders with darker skins or who practice the Muslim religion.

And here we mean the status quo techniques of white supremacy: tribal xenophobia, cultural intolerance, race prejudice, circling the tribal wagons, coded race language, thinly veiled but racist political ideology, and continued embedded feelings of white superiority, privilege and entitlements. These attitudes are the fundamental predicates of the multicultural and immigration debates, are self-destructive and cannot be ducked, dodged or finessed as has been done in this spirited and interesting volume? But the white-centric point of view (and worldview) of all of these pieces make a realistic discussion (not to mention solutions) all but impossible. There are no authentic multicultural inputs here?

Before the problem of multicultural assimilation can be solved, white attitudes must change and change rather drastically, and these changes must replace the current long-standing racist norms (which this book takes as a universal given) with new authentic multicultural norms in which assimilation becomes a two-way, rather than just the current one-way cultural street. Other cultures must feel that they have a stake in the U.S., or at the very least can eventually become stakeholders in the American way of life -- rather than just be seen "assigned subjects" who are spoken of in the third person? The present norm of one-way assimilation into whiteness, via stealth passive-aggressive white racism cannot (and will not) be the wave of the future. Whites must let go of the status quo racist worldview and trust that our institutions will perform as they were structured to do, no matter what cultures are merged together to make up the new multicultural American polity and community.

Other cultures are not stupid, they see and understand that it is these unacknowledged archaic attitudes of the majority population (white cultural hegemony) that is driving both the multiculturalism and the immigration debates. White people need to grow up and be reinvented. Our culture could use a new confident adult white anti-racist norm. Three Stars