It is important to note that multiculturalism does not share the postmodernist stance. Its passions are political; its assumptions... empirical; its conception of identities visceral. For it, there is no doubting that history is something that happened and that those happenings have left their mark within our collective consciousness. History for multiculturalists is not a succession of dissolving texts, but a tense tangle of past actions that have reshaped the landscape, distributed the nation's wealth, established boundaries, engendered prejudices, and unleashed energies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Success and failure in our own national economy will hang upon the degree to which we are able to work with races and nations whos...e social order and whose behavior and attitudes are strange to us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... with every Asiatic country where we operate in cooperation with the existing culture, the need for intelligent understanding o...f that country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irresistible. The danger--and it would be fatal to world peace--is that in our ignorance of their cultural values we shall meet in head-on collision and incontinently fall back on the old pattern of imposing our own values by force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hispanic gives us all one ultimate paternal cultural progenitor: Spain. The diverse cultures already on the American shores when t...he Europeans arrived, as well as those introduced because of the African slave trade, are completely obliterated by the term. Hispanic is nothing more than a concession made by the U. S. legislature when they saw they couldn't get rid of us. If we won't go away, why not at least Europeanize us, make us presentable guests at the dinner table, take away our feathers and rattles and civilize us once and for all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we have to do ... is to find a way to celebrate our diversity and debate our differences without fracturing our communities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all t...he undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »