All Colors Flow into Rainbows and Nooses: The Struggle to Define Academic Multiculturalism

All the colors change and become each other, merge and separate, flow into rainbows and nooses.

—Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

The culture wars raged within and without the walls of the academy for more than thirty years. From civil rights protests to legal battles over affirmative action to the heated debates about Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial to the bitter exchanges created by changing the canon, these struggles deeply questioned the meanings of the nation's identity. Within the academy, the emergence of African-American, Native American, Asian American, Latina/o, disability, gayand lesbian, queer, whiteness, and women's studies radically realigned disciplinary and departmental boundaries. Little doubt remains that the ongoing project to dismantle the cultural and epistemological heritage of Eurocentrism constitutes one of the most important and tumultuous intellectual movements of the postwar era. The next great challenge, it now appears, is how to think about (inter)national identity in the midst of this vast and contentious multiplicity. As Henry Louis Gates observed in 1992 (echoing W. E. B. Du Bois), "the problem of the twenty-first century will be the problem of ethnic differences . . . the matter of multiculturalism" (xii).

And yet, one of the dilemmas that immediately arises when attempting to discuss "the matter of multiculturalism" is that the sheer scope of the concept seems to militate against any precisely detailed definition. "Multiculturalism" has become a term commonly used by a remarkably diverse array of institutions—scholars, school boards, journalists, NGOs, left- and right-wing politicians, governmental bureaus, church councils, advertising agencies, civic groups, legal defense funds. . . . Because these entities maintain such starkly different ideological agendas, any search for consensus almost immediately flounders on a sea of apparently ceaseless semantic flux. In order to start a dialogue that will hopefully continue beyond the margins of this article, I will narrow the scope by concentrating on defining the meaning(s) of "multiculturalism" within the academy. And yet, even within this limit, the pursuit of clarification quickly becomes threatened by the vast matrix of different cultural perspectives (black, white, Navajo, Hopi, Lakota, Chinese American, Japanese American, Korean American, queer, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Newyorican, Dominican, feminist . . .) that cut across a wide array of disciplines (philosophy, literature, history, sociology, anthropology, law, art, film, journalism, education, political science, architecture . . .). Because one article cannot possibly encompass this scope, I will attempt to suggest the wide-ranging diversity of academic multiculturalism through the use of synecdoche in the hope that a few carefully chosen examples can invoke a larger, more elusive totality.

Given that the acrimonious left/right battles of the culture wars seem to have subsided for the moment, I want to focus specifically on those cultural studies scholars who continue to express a deep distrust of multiculturalism. Michele Wallace, for example, spoke for many scholars in the 1990s when she wrote that "by now I suppose everybody knows on the right, left, and in the middle that multiculturalism is not the promised land. . . . collectively, people of color aren't necessarily empowered by multiculturalism" (1994, 259). (The fact that this statement was published in a collection devoted to defining multiculturalism only begins to suggest the extent of the distrust.) Some scholars undoubtedly hesitated to support this new concept because multiculturalism was/is too often presented as a political panacea at a time when violent racism remains rampant. In a decade bracketed by Rodney King's attackers being set free by an all-white jury and Abner Louima being brutally assaulted in a New York City police station, any suggestion that racism could be eradicated by founding a National Multicultural Institute or by implementing George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" has understandably been greeted with skepticism. And yet, despite its often disingenuous appropriation by corporations and politicians, despite vociferous attacks from the left and the right, multiculturalism has survived the 1990s and now appears to be gaining...