From: sieh@panix.com (Lui Sieh)
Subject: WSJ 12/3 Article 
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 01:41:50 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix & Internet, NYC

In article <1992Dec8.200924.17725@cheshire.oxy.edu> ac@cheshire.oxy.edu 
(Aileen Cho) writes:
> Lui, could you possibly post it? I'm in the midst of finals...ick...
>Forget the picture. 

A little late but better than never.  Typos are mine of course.
//Lui
----------------------------[BEGIN ARTICLE]------------------------------
MOSAIC OF HOPE:  ETHNIC IDENTITIES CLASH WITH STUDENT IDEALISM AT A
CALIFORNIA COLLEGE
-Occidental Offers a Glimpse of America's Future as It Struggles for
Community
-The White Majority Shrinks
by Dennis Farney

[The American Civilization: Last of a Series]

LOS ANGELES--Occidental College, like Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, surveys
the world from high upon its hill.  But Occidental gazes down upon an America
more diverse, more fantastic, than in any Jefferson dream or nightmore.
  Jefferson feared that even a simple biracial America, white and black as
equals, would not long endure.  He advocated black freedom but remained
paralyzed by its implications.  "We have the wolf by the ears," he despaired 
of slavery, "and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."
  Nearly two centuries later, the sprawling city below Occidental is an
astonishing - and ultimately more hopeful - mosaic:  black and white, brown
and yello, Latino and Korean and Chinese and Armenian and more.  Here, in the
words of American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Novak, is represented
"the nervous system for the world" - the most diverse, the most encompassing
society that history has ever known.  And here, at continent's end, remain
the ultimate American questions.
  Can Americans live together?  And, assuming that, can they create something
grander, more noble, than the sum of their disparate parts?  Can Americans
create an American civilization?
  This college, 15 miles from the fireblackened heart of last April's riots,
will be part of the success or part of the failure.  Fo Occidental has been
structured deliberately as Los Angeles was structured only accidentally.  As
an experiment in diversity.
  Occidental, as a prestigious private liberal arts college, wsa founded in 
1887 to educate the white elite.  One of its best-known graduates, class of
'57, is Republican supply-sider Jack Kemp.  Its very name bespeaks bone-white
Greek temples and the accumulated weight of Western civilization.  But in
1987 Occidental embarked on a bold new course.  It went "multicultural,"
aggressively recruiting minority students and revamping its curriculum to
give more emphasis to non-Western cultures.  Today, more than 40% of its
1,650 students are minority.  Occidental is reacing out for an emerging
America -- an America which, if present demographic trends continue, could
cease to be majority-white around the middle of the 21st century.
  The goal is "a community in which students may in some small measure
experience a world that could be," says President John Brooks Slaughter, who
is black.  Anthropology Professor Mary Weismantel calls Occidental "a 
laboratory for the future of America."
  It's an apt analogy.  Here, in microcosm, are the conflicting forces of a
new America-in-the-making:  community versus fragmentation; trust versus
mutual ethnic wariness.  here, too, an idealistic impulse is colliding with
the most elemental force of the 20th century.  That force is ethnicity, the
tinderbox for a century of civil wars, pogroms and genocide.
  "These tribal identities are not just quaint things - 'Oh, how wonderful
that we're all different,'" says Harvard history Professor Stephan Thernstrom,
editor of the Harvard Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups.  "They are why people are
killing each other all over the world."
  So perhaps it is not surprising that the Occidental experiment, while making
progress, is proving more difficult than its architects anticipated.  "We're
diverse.  We don't have community," concedes President Slaughter.
  "We were expecting sort of a perfect salad," says David Axeen, the dean of
faculty, "That's not happening."
  A perfect salad; Out of diverse ingredients, a whole.  A lofty vision - but
in retrospect, says President Slaughter, an overly "romantic" one.
  It's not enough, he says, to simply throw diverse people together.  It's 
not enough "to walk away from here saying, 'Oh, yeah, I had a black friend.'
That's not multiculturalism...What we're talking about is difficult to achieve;
A sense that everyone can share common goals, that people can be expected to
shed their personal ambitions for the commonweal."
  A visitor here does observe many friendships that corss racial and ethnic
lines.  There is tolerance - and, for many, something that transcends 
tolerance; caring.  "Because of Oxy," says Sophie Martin, a white theater 
major from the New York suburbs, "it's impossible for me not to care."
  And yet....And yet the Occidental experiment is colliding with an instinct
embedded in the human heart - an instinct, ultimately, to cluster with one's
own kind.  "Our student union is virtually segregated," observed a group of
Constitutioanl Law II students in a class paper.  At lunch time, whites tend
to congregate with whites, blacks with blacks, Asians with Asians, Latino
with Latino.
  Out of the grassy Quad and in the residence halls, the pattern persists.
Ethnic groups not only clump together but exert peer pressure against members
who too eagerly move beyond their confines.  Asn Asian-American who too 
obviously embraces Anglo culture risks being labeled a "Twinkie" - yellow on
the outside but white on the inside.  An ancient force remains at work,
reflects junior Chris Rand:  "That natural feeling...that tribal phenomenon."
  That force can erupt in ugly ways.  In recent weeks the campus has been
troubled by a rash of hate graffiti.  Swastikas have been scrawled on the
doorways of Jewish students; racial slurs have defaced residence hall walls.
Although hardly unique here, the incidents stand out starkly against 
Occidental's lofty aspirations.  They also dramatize one of the most heated 
debates within academia:  Does multiculturalism bring Americans together -
or push them apart?
  
DEEPENING DIVISIONS

  "Multiculturalism is another name for social justice," argues Eric Newhall,
an Occidental English professor and a driving force behind the experiment
here.  But critics see it differently.  They argue that academic multicultura-
lism, by definition, emphasizes the very racial and ethnic differences it 
seeks to bridge - deepens the very divisions it seeks to heal.
  "Multiculturalism is a good thing when people live it.  It's a destructive
thing when it becomes an ideology," concludes Joel Kotkin, an author and
student of ethnicity with the Center for the New West.  Ironically, he asserts,
that ideology is more likely to flourish inside the classroom than outside.
"Intellectuals and advocates have an interest in _maintaining_ differences."
  Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., author of "The Disuniting of America,"
shares similar concerns.  He spoke on campus last year and came away feeling
that Occidental is "striking a good balance."  But he cautions that multi-
culturalsim can easily degenerate into "feel-good history" that distorts the 
past to boost ethnic self-estemm.  Or into "political correctness" that
suffocates intellectual debate.  Or into teaching that depreciates the
Western traditions that, for better or for worse, lie at the heart of the
american experience.
  At bottom, he warned in his speech here, a growing "cult of ethnicity"
threatens the pivotal idea "hat has thus far managed to keep American society
whole."  That idea is that Americans are - must be - one people, indivisible.

'WHAT IS THE AMERICAN?'

  Assimilation hsa been America's genius and its triumph.  Two centuries ago
a French immigrant who gave himself the extravagant name of J. Hector St.
John de Crevecoeur asked a question that resonates even today:  "What then 
is the American, this new man?"  And answered himself:  "here individuals of
all nations are nelted into a new race...."
  But in a modern nation precariously balancing its ethnic heritages against
its search for community, how much assimilation constitutes "good enough"?
Integration as defined in the 1960s, with minority cultures melting into a
dominant white culture?  Or something different?
  Here at Occidental, as in the city and nation beyond, one senses that the
answer is going to be something different.  And, just possibly, something
better:  Richer, less homogenized, more vibrant.  But this assumes a great
deal.  It assumes that Americans can transcend the racism and the nihilism
that erupted in riots last April after a suburban Los Angeles jury acquitted
white police officers of beating Rodney King, a black man.
  Those riots sobered Occidental.  They tore at its students.
  Yuri White, Korean-born but reared in picket-fence America, saw her mother's
clothing store looted, then burned.  Now her anger has hardened against a 
"system" she sees as pitting minority against minority.  She looks back upon
her picket-fence days as upon a distant world.  "I'm against everything I 
once lived."
  Luz Torres saw the flames come within blocks of her family's home.  And
then - so quickly, it seemed - the attention of the city and the nation moved
on to other things.  "Is it forgotten already?"  she asks.
  Sheli Henderson, a black sophomore who dreams of becoming a U.S. senator,
rushed to the First African Methodist Church - and was trapped there for
hours by the violence raging all around.  The acquittals deepened her
conviction that racial prejudices are woven into the very fabric of society.
"We won't see it," see says when asked to imagine a considerably more tolerant
America. "Our kids won't."
  But some salvaged hope from the worst of times.  Angel Cervantes, a campus
militant for Latino causes, went down into the riot zone with Geoff McNeely,
an Anglo football player for the Occidental Tigers.  What lingers in Angel's
memory are the fire-lit intersections where ordinary citizens of all races
risked their lives to direct traffic.  "What I saw that night was true
multiculturalism," he says.
  When it was all over, Aileen Cho, American-born of Korean immigrants, wrote
a poem.  It depicted an Asian American woman and African American man, abruptly
estranged in an American that had brought them together:
 	
	I tried to read his face,
	my narrow eyes narrowing
	while people who looked like him
	hit people who looked like me
	on the screen....

  This college, like America itself, is a web of subcultures.  Each subculture
is a code, as intricate as DNA, prescribing not only how to act - but how to
perceive.  Students here aren't pasively absorbing some monolithic American
culture.  Out of their multiple perceptions, they are redefining the American
culture.  They do so against the backdrop of a nation amid its most sweeping
demographic transformation in three-quarters of a century.
  The bedrock fact is that America's white majority is shrinking, both in
relative size and in relative importance.
  Los Angeles County, in exaggerated form, prefigures a changing America.  
There are more Hispanics in the county, more 3.4 millsion, than there are
peple in Iowa.  There are more Asians, over 900,000, than there are people in
Montana.  Together, blacks (some 935,000), Hispanics and Asians constitue
nearly 59% of the population.  "The term 'minority' is becoming increasingly
obsolete," concludes demographer Peter Morrison of Rand Corp.
  The state of California is on a similar track.  In 1986, the state's 
demographic research unit estimated that California would have a "minority
majority" by the year 2007.  Two years later the unit revised the date down-
ward , to 2003.  Now fresh data indicate the year could be as early as 1996.

THE GREAT REALIGNMENT

  America is moving toward a "minority majority," too.  Current Census Bureau
projections, to be updated Friday, assume this could well occur around the 
middle of the next century.  However, changes in the mix of immigrants --
currently heavily minority - or changes in relative fertility levels could 
delay the event by decades.  Some skeptics, including Harvard's Mr. Thernstrom,
question whether it will occur at all.  In any event, Hispanics are expected
to supplant African-Americans as the nation's largest minority group by the
year 2015.
  This great realignment, unimaginable in almost any other nation on earth,
will affect every aspect of American society.  But how profoundly?  That
depends heavily upon the engine of American assimilaton.  In his Occidental
speech last year, Arthur Schlesinger warned that the engine could falter amid
an upsurge of ethnicity:
  "In a nation marked by an even stranger mixture of blood than Crevecoeur
had known, his celebrated question...is asked once more, with a new passion -
and with a new answer.  Today many Americans disavow the historic goal of 'a
new race of man.' ... A cult of ethnicity has arisen ... to denounce the idea
of a melting pot, to challenge the concept of 'one people' and to protect,
promote and perpetuate separate ethnic and racial communities."
  But there are other views, and more sanguine.  Harvard's Mr. Thernstrom 
notes there were similar alarms, even fears of "race suicide," when America
opened its doors to a surge of eastern and southern Europeans early in this
century.  "One worrier," he has written, "calculated that after 200 years
1,000 Harvard men would have left only 50 descendants, while 1,000 Romanian
immigrants would have produced 100,000."
  It isn't working out that way.  Birth rates among those immigrant groups
moderated - but more important, the immigrants assimilated.  "The capacity
to Americanize immigrants and to enlarge the meaning of America is unprece-
dented in history," agrees scholar Michael Novak.  "Why do people think it's
going to stop now?"

GRADING AMERICA

  Enlarging the meaning of America:  That is the work in progress on this
hilltop campus.  It is an old task, as old as Amerca is old.  And yet it is
as fresh and new as the voices of the students here.  And what they say, 
however haltingly, is this:
  America is not about genetics.  America is about ideas, the enduring ideas
of freedom and opportunity.
  America "_connects_ you, right away," says senior Angelica Salas, who was
smuggled into this country - twice - from her native Mexico.  "You are
connected by these ideas."
  America is not about divisions.  America is about transcending divisions.
  Sophomore Chris Coker - white, fraternity man and Young Republica - says
classroom discussions here have sometimes made him feel like "the white
oppressor," personally responsible for history's ancient wrongs.  Nevertheless,
he recently ventured into potentially hostile territory, a Latino group headed
by Angel Cervantes.  He wsa consciously reaching out, and there came a moment
when it appeared he had failed; Someone, he recalls, talked of "kicking some
white ass."  But the outburst was greeted by embarrassed silence.  And after-
ward, members of the group came up to apologize.
  America, in the last analysis, is not about the past.  For as Thomas
jefferson insisted, "the earth belongs to the living, and not to the dead."
America is about the future.
  That future, unknowable, is the subject when a visitor joins an Occidental
discussion class entitled "The American Dream".  The students, as diverse
as their America is diverse, are gathered around a double conference table. 
And their visitor asks:  Suppose they were to grade the American civilization,
grade it just as their professor grades them?  How would they grade America?
  It is freshman Jona Goong, a Hawaiin of Chinese ancestry, who says it best.
  "If I were to grade Amerca," she says softly, "I would give it an 
incomplete."
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