Judge Bork on Ebonics

[azur@netcom.com (Steve Schear)]

The following is from pages 300-307 of Robert Bork's brilliant
book, "Slouching Towards Gomorrah".  This is a book which should
be read by everyone--and especially by liberals.

Here are Judge Bork's thoughts on multiculturalism, bilingual
education, and "Black English", otherwise known as "Ebonics".

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The natural centrifugal tendencies of ethnicity were once
counteracted by a public school system that stressed indoctrinating
immigrants to be Americans. The schools were agents of cultural
unification. They taught patriotism and standards derived from
European cultures. Part of our national lore, and glory, is the fact
that youngsters speaking not a word of English were placed in
public schools where only English was used and very shortly were
proficient in the language. That was crucial to the formation of an
American identity Now, however, the educational system has
become the weapon of choice for modern liberals in their project
of dismantling American culture. Our egalitarians view every cul-
ture (other than European) as equal. They resent and resist
attempts to Americanize immigrants, and the crucial battleground
is language.

That is the reason for bilingual education. Initially, some well-
meaning souls saw bilingual education as a way of easing the
immigrant child's entry into American culture. The child would
take courses in English but learn many subjects in his native
tongue, usually Spanish. Within two or three years, the argument
ran, the child would be able to take all of his courses in English. It
is now clear, however, that the program is designed not to facilitate
but to delay entry into American culture, and, to the degree possi-
ble, make certain that assimilation is never complete.

So many languages are spoken by immigrants that it is impos-
sible to provide bilingual education for all. That is why bilingual
education is so often in Spanish, the language most immigrants
speak. But that fact gives away the real reason for the programs.
Vietnamese and Polish children were put into English-speaking
classes and were competent into English long before the Hispanics
in bilingual schools. That leaves the partisans of bilingualism only
the choice of saying that Hispanic children are not as capable as
others or admitting that they, the educators, are driven by hostility
to American culture, and the rewards to be had by teachers' unions
and educational bureaucrats. The rewards would not be there,
however, if ideology had not created the situation.

Often, the bilingualists do not care whether immigrant chil-
dren learn English. The key to success for the students is "self-
esteem. . . . Children do badly in school because of their feelings
of 'shame' at belonging to a minority group rather than the 'domi-
nant group.' For the children to do better, teachers must "con-
sciously challenge the power structure both in their classrooms
and schools and in the society at large." As Richard Bernstein
writes, "Bilingual education ... is an act of rebellion against white,
Anglo cultural domination." And the "animus against assimilation,
is not an implicit part of the emerging educational philosophy. It is
explicit, open, out there, a standard belief. 'The psychological cost
of assimilation has been and continues to be high for many U.S.
citizens,' declares the National Council of Social Studies (NCSS),
in Washington, D.C., in its 1992 'Curriculum Guidelines for Mul-
ticultural Education.' "It too often demands self-denial, self-hatred,
and rejection of family and ethnic ties." This pathetic whine is
not insignificant since the NCSS is the country's largest Organiza-
tion devoted to social studies education.

Public dissatisfaction with the linguistic fracturing of society
has led to calls for an English-only amendment to the Constitu-
tion. The frustration is understandable, but there is no need to
amend the Constitution to achieve an English-speaking nation. All
that need be done is the abolition of bilingual education and the
repeal of the Voting Rights Act's requirement of different language
ballots. Children from other countries will learn English in public
schools as they used to do. Their parents will accept the change
once they begin to see its results. Immigrant parents want their
children to learn English and become Americans. The opposition
to that, manifested in bilingual education, comes from American
elites who form an adversarial culture, alienated from the culture
of the West and wishing to weaken it.

In 1989, the Commissioners Task Force on Minorities in New
York concluded: "African Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto
kicans/Latinos, and Native Americans have all been the victims of
an intellectual and educational oppression that has characterized
the culture and institutions of the United States and the European
American world for centuries." All young people were being
"miseducated" because of a "systematic bias toward European cul-
ture and its derivatives." Bernstein asks, rhetorically, "Could the
multicultural animus against 'European culture and its derivatives'
emerge more clearly than that? Here we have a direct statement
that the Western culture is harmful to nonwhite children ."

Despite the evidence and the frankness of its advocates, most
people, including very astute people, tend to accept the beneficent
view of multiculturalism put forth by its less candid partisans.
Thus, one can find diametrically opposed views of the phe-
nomenon, one put forward, for example, by Richard Bernstein
and another articulated by Conor Cruise O'Brien. Bernstein
writes, "Multiculturalism is a movement of the left, emerging from
the counterculture of the 1960's... It is a code word for a politi
cal ambition, a yearning for more power, combined with a gen-
uine, earnest, zealous, self-righteous craving for social improve-
ment. . . ." He says we are "likely to end up in a simmering sort of
mutual dislike on the level of everyday unpleasantness..."

O'Brien, on the other hand, thinks that multiculturalism and
diversity are "actually both a mask for, and perhaps an unconscious
mode for achieving, a unity which would be broader-based and to
that extent stronger. . . . The real agenda is the enlargement of the
American national elite to include groups of persons who have
traditionally been excluded from the same, mainly for reasons
associated with race and gender. What is in view is the enlarge-
ment and diversification of the composition of the future govern-
ing class of the United States of America."

I am afraid it is clear that Bernstein has it right and O'Brien
has it wrong. Multiculturalism is advertised by its less candid prac-
titioners as opening students to the perspectives and accomplish-
ments of groups that have been largely ignored and undervalued
in conventional curriculums. The goal, it is said, is to enrich the
student's understanding of the world and to teach him respect for
and tolerance of others who are different. It substitutes an ethic of
inclusion for the older ethic of exclusion. This is the movement's
self-portrait, and O'Brien seems to have accepted it at face value.
If there were truth in that advertising, if that were what the goal
really is, no one could legitimately object to what is taking place
in the American educational system. Unfortunately, there appears
to be very little truth in the pretensions of the multiculturalists.

Bernstein took a two-year leave of absence from the New York
Times to gather the facts of the multicultural ideology and its
opponents. His is not an impressionistic book or one based on an
ideological predisposition; it is a report of empirical findings. He
points, for example, to the remarkable change in attitude towards
Christopher Columbus between 1892 and 1992. Though not a
single new fact about Columbus's life and exploits had been
uncovered, the country's mood swung from one of uncritical adu-
lation to one of loathing and condemnation, at least among the
members of the "intellectual" class. The change was accomplished
by the aggressive ideology of multiculturalism. The Columbus
turnaround is merely a specific instance of more general alter-
ations in our moral landscape.

What it signifies, and what becomes increasingly obvious, is
that multiculturalism is a philosophy of antagonism to America
and the West. The hostility of the multiculturalists to this nation
and its achievements can hardly be overstated. Lynne Cheney, the
former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities,
quotes a professor who is pleased that multiculturalism has the
"potential for ideologically disuniting the nation" by stressing
America's faults so that students will not think this country
deserves their special support.

That multiculturalism is essentially an attack on America, the
European-American culture, and the white race, with special
emphasis on white males, may be seen from the curriculum it
favors. A curriculum designed to foster understanding of other
cultures would study those cultures. Multiculturalism does not.
Courses are not offered on the cultures of China or India or Brazil
or Nigeria, nor does the curriculum require the study of languages
without which foreign cultures cannot be fully understood.
Instead the focus is on groups that, allegedly, have been subjected
to oppression by American and Western civilization--homosexu-
als, American Indians, blacks, Hispanics, women, and so on. The
message is not that all cultures are to be respected but that Euro-
pean culture, which created the dominance of white males, is
uniquely evil. Multiculturalism follows the agenda of modern lib-
eralism, and it comes straight from the Sixties counterculture. But
now, in American education, it is the dominant culture.

Bernstein catalogues the basic changes multiculturalism has
made in the nature of public discourse.

"First is the elimination from acceptable discourse of any claim
of superiority or even special status for Europe, or any definition of
the United States as derived primarily from European civilization.

"Second is the attack on the very notion of the individual
and the concomitant paramount status accorded group identifi-
cation.

"Third is the triumph of the politics of difference over the
politics of equality, that great and still-visionary goal of the civil
rights movement. Multiculturalism here is the indictment of one
group and the exculpation of all the others. . .

"This obsession with the themes of cultural domination and
oppression [by whites] justifies one of the most important
departures from the principal and essential goal of the civil
rights movement, equality of opportunity. Multiculturalism
insists on equality of results."

Hence it is that multiculturalists have turned Martin Luther
King, Jr.'s dream into a nightmare. He asked that his children "not
be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their
character," which, as Bernstein says, is the "essential ideal of liberal-
ism:' But multiculturalists say, "Judge me by the color of my skin
for therein lies my identity and my place in the world."

Multiculturalism requires the quotas or affirmative action that
create group dislike of other groups and self-segregation. There is
no other way to ensure that each valued ethnic group is repre-
sented in the student body and on the faculty. Of late, educators
have begun to speak of diversity instead of multiculturalism, but it
is the same thing. University presidents and faculties, secondary
and primary school principals and teachers, all chant the diversity
mantra. So powerful has this harmful notion become that it not
only dictates who is admitted to a school but sometimes deter-
mines who may leave.

Students of Asian ancestry, for example, have tried to transfer
to public schools whose curriculum was better suited to their
ambitions but been denied the transfer on the grounds that their
departure would lessen diversity. One father complained that his
adopted Korean daughter could contribute no non-western per-
spective to the school she sought to leave because she had been
brought to this country at the age of five months. No matter; she
was of the requisite racial group. When the controversy was
reported in the newspapers, she was allowed to transfer. But the
episode demonstrates that the multiculturalists are sometimes will-
ing to force a person into a cultural identity that person does not
have on the grounds of ancestry alone.

The quality of education must necessarily decline as students
turn from substantive subjects to ideologically driven resentments,
in the case of non-whites, or guilt, in the case of whites. Although
white students are often required to study America's "oppressed"
subcultures and their allegedly superior qualities, it is regarded as
racist to require that non-whites study Western culture. That was
the meaning of the radicals' attack on Stanford's Western Culture
program in which students were required to sample the writings
of men who had helped shape Western culture-Shakespeare,
Dante, Locke, etc. A black student who objected to the program
said its message was "Nigger, go home." That exclusionary inter-
pretation is precisely the opposite of the real message of the pro-
gram, which was "Let us study what we have in common as
inheritors of a tradition." The black student's objection follows
from the perverse teaching of multiculturalism that those who
have been "traditionally excluded" must now reject inclusion.

This has the odd effect of damaging all groups. The insistence
on separate ethnic identities means that persons in each group can
study their own culture, often in highly flattering and historically
inaccurate form. Multiculturalism then means not the study of
others but of oneself. The student who immerses himself in multi-
cultural studies, who lives in a dormitory where admission is
defined by ethnicity, who socializes only with members of his eth-
nic group, does not acquire the knowledge and discipline that he
might have and does not learn how to deal comfortably with
those of other ethnicities. One of the ways in which cultures
improve is by borrowing from other cultures. Europe borrowed
important aspects of mathematics, for example, from the Arab
world. But the essence of multiculturalism is the isolation of
groups so that they do not borrow from one another. The result is
the relative cultural impoverishment of all groups.

In education at all levels, the substance of the curriculum
changes to accommodate multiculturalist pressures. We have
already seen this in feminist and Afrocentric studies, but it is
everywhere. In New York state it is official educational doctrine
that the United States Constitution was heavily influenced by the
political arrangements of the Iroquois Confederacy. The official
promulgation of this idea was not due to any research that dis-
closed its truth. Nor has any other state adopted this nonsensical
idea. New York adopted it because the Iroquois mounted an
intensive lobbying campaign directed at the State Department of
Education. Far from this being a beneficial borrowing from
another culture, it was a detrimental forcing of a false notion by
one culture on another. John Leo notes that the decision "shows
that some school authorities, eager to avoid minority group pres
sure and rage, are now willing to treat the curriculum as a prize in
an ethnic spoils system." That it is ideologcally driven by guilt
and not an attempt to pacify a large bloc of voters is clear from the
fact that there are only a little more than 38,000 Indians in New
York state, most of whom probably have no interest in the myth of
the Iroquois and the Constitution.

This sort of thing is happening across the country as various
ethnic groups and feminists demand that history be rewritten
according to their party lines. This not only debases history but
pits the various groups against one another as they struggle for
space in the textbooks. New York's "interest in history is not as an
intellectual discipline," Schlesinger writes, "but rather as social and
psychological therapy whose primary purpose is to raise the self-
esteem of children from minority groups."

Those who have traditionally been excluded because of race
or gender are not helped by multiculturalists who teach them that
European culture and standards are the cause of their difficulties
and may be jettisoned, that history has no content aside from its
ideological usefulness, that there are different ways of knowing,
that linear thinking is a white male stratagem to oppress those
who are not white or male, that standard English is no better than
a variety of dialects such as "black English." To the extent the tra-
ditionally excluded believe any of this, they are additionally handi-
capped in life, and further excluded. To the extent they are taught
that self-esteem comes before achievement and leads to achieve-
ment, they are lied to and held back.

--end