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Oh , Multicultural America There aren’t many textbook rhetorics presenting themselves as multicultural ; Robert Cullen’s Rhetoric for a Multicultural America (1999) is one of them. We can say that Cullen deserves praise for his attempt to bring multiculturalism to rhetorical study and the composition classroom. But the problem is that even in this text Western rhetoric is the default rhetoric, the foundational rhetoric posited as the one that serves all. The result is that the text both homogenizes a people for cultural unity at the same time that it stresses the value of diversity. And throughout, the impetus toward conformity is everywhere evident . For instance, Cullen notes, at one point, that Henry Louis Gates’s spelling of the word “signifyin” is “unusual” (1988, 132). Unusual. In another instance, Cullen offers what is certainly meant to be positive encouragement to student writers. It is the assumption from which Cullen writes, however, that is the problem: “If you are lucky enough to be bilingual, bicultural, or bidialectal (fluent in two dialects of English), you may occasionally have the opportunity to educate the rest of us concerning important words or concepts that don’t translate easily into English” (11). Assumptions are made, in statements such as this one, about who the rest of us are. (I suppose that Cullen means native speakers of an acceptable variety of English.) Given the racism inherent in the teaching of writing and the nation at large, it may be time to get past assumptions about the “rest of us” and the responsibility of the “you” to educate this “rest of us.” It is past time the rest of us took responsibility for ourselves. To be fair, instead of arch, Cullen’s textbook does offer multiculturalism as an important knowledge for students to have, but the problem is that it is not for first-year composition students. Knowledge of multicultural choices in writing is something additional, supplemental, something for afterwards, after one has learned the basics of Western rhetoric. Or, as Cullen writes, “In my experience, cultural disagreements about how to organize writing have surfaced more often in advanced work like a master’s thesis than in introductory courses, where options are more limited and the assignments more specific” (86). How sad it Oh, Multicultural America     111 is to think that the first year composition course is so terribly limited. Perhaps it is time to ratchet up the content of our classes. There is, I think I can safely say, a level of careful conservativism in Cullen’s book that is consistent with textbook rhetoric. It is what Geoffrey Sirc (2002) calls “Post-Happening,” devoid of the spirit of the improvisation and change. Teaching for change needs to be more dramatic than that which any current textbook company will package. Multiculturalism is a failed project precisely because it has been enacted as a nationalist add-on to academic thinking. It is, in this sense, just one more educational fad. Instead, I want it to be the one educational initiative (the other is Derek Owens’s [2001] sustainable pedagogy) we dare not fail to get right. Too much is at stake. The health of all of us depends on it. Maybe I am a more impatient man than Cullen, and maybe I am not above writing impatient things, even if I do not want to cause suffering. I have my limitations, but I do not want to read an assertion such as “Naturally signifyin(g) is not taught in schools” (134) without screaming , “There’s nothing natural about it!—and what’s with the ‘g’ in parentheses anyway?” What is natural in Cullen’s text is the Western rhetorical tradition, and while the Western tradition is of course worthy of serious study, its centrality in a text entitled Rhetoric for a Multicultural America is a problem. In his chapter on Classical rhetoric, Cullen writes: “This chapter offers a quick overview of the history of rhetoric—a history that has strongly influenced your education and that has helped shape our most important institutions, including Congress, the courts, the media, and many religious organizations” (167–168). Exactly. Rhetoric is the vehicle of our nationalism, and European American culture clearly has primacy. Here, as throughout this text, white American culture is the foundational point of departure for the students’ investigation of rhetoric. Some of Cullen’s assignments also assume the same cultural starting points. For instance, consider the following: “Write a detailed analysis of a short piece of writing that aims...

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