It insults readers andultimately makes them less interested in other cultures. One of the virtues ofpolitical multiculturalism is to expose the poverty of this form of blandearnestness. The version of multiculturalism I favor is intensely curious about all culturesin all of their ambiguous, complex, self-contradictory splendor. And for that reason, itopens the field to gifted writers of any background. Talent, not the explodedcategory of race, is its pole star.
Authenticity means depth, insight,communicative value, resonance, rigor, care.
The reader is thecrucial actor ignored, or patronized, by the first two forms ofmulticulturalism. The mind of aparticular student, far from being just one more vessel into which the divineliquor of canonical wisdom is poured, is at the moment of reading the unique theater on which Shakespeare's plays are staged . . . . A bookexists only when a living mind recreates it. The multiculturalism I favor corresponds to andthus frees the many voices in the reader. For that reason, I am as eager to include Irish Catholics in myroster of multicultural experiences as I am Holocaust victims, Namibians, andLatino Americans.