Volume 40, Number 16 · October 7, 1993
'Diversity' and Its Dangers
By Andrew Hacker
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
by Ronald Takaki
Little, Brown, 508 pp., $27.95
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
by Douglas S. Massey, by Nancy A. Denton
Harvard University Press, 292 pp., $29.95
Raising Black Children: Two Leading Black Psychiatrists Confront the Educational, Social and Emotional Problems Facing Black Children
by James P. Comer MD, by Alvin F. Poussaint MD
Plume Books, 436 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation
edited and with an introduction by Gerald Early
Penguin/Allen Lane, 351 pp., $23.50
Race Matters
by Cornel West
Beacon Press, 105 pp., $15.00
The Scar of Race
by Paul M. Sniderman, by Thomas Piazza
Harvard University Press, 212 pp., $18.95
What is intended by the demand that the United States should recognize—and recast—itself as a 'multicultural' society? In physical appearance, we are ethnically more diverse than at any other time in our history. Americans who describe themselves as 'white' now account for less than 75 percent of the population, and only 55 percent in California. But the issue has less to do with our varied origins than what we make of them. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., is not alone in worrying that the current stress on diversity is already causing 'the disuniting of America.' Others—most recently, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor—warn of 'balkanization.'
Review, 5287 words
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