It insults readers and ultimately makes them less interested in other cultures. One of the virtues of political multiculturalism is to expose the poverty of this form of bland earnestness. The version of multiculturalism I favor is intensely curious about all cultures in all of their ambiguous, complex, self-contradictory splendor. And for that reason, it opens the field to gifted writers of any background. Talent, not the exploded category of race, is its pole star.
Authenticity means depth, insight, communicative value, resonance, rigor, care.
The reader is the crucial actor ignored, or patronized, by the first two forms of multiculturalism. The mind of a particular student, far from being just one more vessel into which the divine liquor of canonical wisdom is poured, is at the moment of reading the unique theater on which Shakespeare's plays are staged . . . . A book exists only when a living mind recreates it. The multiculturalism I favor corresponds to and thus frees the many voices in the reader. For that reason, I am as eager to include Irish Catholics in my roster of multicultural experiences as I am Holocaust victims, Namibians, and Latino Americans.