The regents' round table - plans for more racial sensitivity in New York school curricula

National Review, Dec 8, 1989 by Lawrence Auster

But one searches in vain for any sign of amicability in a document that is based on a race-oppression model of intellectual life. "The curriculum in the education systems reflects . . . deep-seated pathologies of racial hatred. . . . Because of the depth of the problem and the tenacity of its hold on the mind, only the most stringent measures can have significant impact." Doesn't sound vey amicable to me. But how could it be otherwise? Since "European American" culture is by definition exclusive and oppressive, it obviously cannot coexist with the oppressed cultures that seek equality with it until it has been stripped of its hypocritical pretensions to universality and legitimacy--i.e., until, as a national culture, it has ceased to exist.

The multiculturalist movement, in its totalist aims, is profoundly inimical to Western and liberal values. Yet, amazingly, it has managed to gain acceptance within the liberal establishment by retaining the aura of social justice, the patina of humanitarianism, that properly belongs to the older liberalism it has supplanted. How long are liberals and convervatives, both of whom oppose the traditional kinds of radicalism, going to keep on acquiescing in cultural radicalism?

A final note: On the train heading back to New York from the Regents' meeting in Albany, I struck up a conversation with a very bright young woman, a college senior majoring in English, who told me she was planning to be a teacher. She said she recently took an education course, "but all we talked about each day was race. We didn't learn anything about education." She said the experience has made her think twice about her career aims. Now she thinks she might teach in private rather than public school--or perhaps not go into teaching at all.

Mr. Auster is a freelance writer living in New York City.