What's So Great About America Read Online Free PDF Page B

theme of Howard Zinn’s widely used textbook A People’s History of the United States. Other leading scholars affirm Zinn’s basic themes. Cornel West, who teaches African-American studies at Harvard, says that American society is “chronically racist, sexist and homophobic.” 23 Political scientist Ali Mazrui goes further, charging that the United States has been, and continues to be, “a breeding ground for racism, exploitation and genocide.” 24
    The reason America exercises such a baleful influence, multiculturalists argue, is that the American founders were slave owners and racists who established what one scholar terms “a model totalitarian society.” 25 No wonder that multiculturalists are not hopeful about the future of the American experiment. In the words of historian John Hope Franklin, “We’re a bigoted people and always have been. We think every other country is trying to copy us now, and if they are, God help the world.” 26
    Multiculturalists insist that immigrants and minorities should not assimilate to the American mainstream, because to do so is to give up one’s identity and to succumb to racism. As the influential scholar Stanley Fish puts it, “ Common values. National unity. Assimilation. These are now the code words and phrases for an agenda that need no longer speak in the accents of the Know-Nothing party of the nineteenth century or the Ku Klux
Klan of the twentieth.” 27 The multicultural objective is to encourage nonwhites in America to cultivate their separate identities and to teach white Americans to accept and even cherish these differences. For multiculturalists, diversity is the basis for American identity. As a popular slogan has it, “All we have in common is our diversity.”
    Multiculturalists also seek to fill white Americans with an overpowering sense of guilt and blame so that they accept responsibility for the sufferings of minorities in America and poor people in the rest of the world. One favored multicultural solution, taken up by the Reverend Jesse Jackson upon his return from the recent United Nations–sponsored World Conference on Racism in Durban, is for the American government to pay reparations for slavery to African nations and to African-Americans. “The amount we are owed,” says black activist Haki Madhubuti, “is in the trillions of dollars.” 28
    What we have, then, is a vivid portrait of how terrible America is and of the grave harms that it has inflicted on its people and on the world since the nation’s founding. These charges of the low origins of America, and its oppressive practices, and its depraved culture, and its pernicious global influence—are they true? If so, is it possible to love our country, or are we compelled to watch her buildings knocked down and her people killed and say, in unison with her enemies, “Praise be to Allah”?

    â€œT o make us love our country,” Edmund Burke wrote, “our country ought to be lovely.” 29 Burke’s point is that we typically
love our country for the same reason that we love our children—because they are ours. Some people have kids who are intrinsically unlovable, but they love them anyway. This partiality that we all show for our own seems to be part of our tribal nature. But Burke implies that this is not the highest kind of patriotism. In the movie The Patriot, the hero, played by Mel Gibson, refuses to fight for America until his son is killed and his home is burned to the ground. Despite its great battle scenes, the film conveys the message that patriotism is a kind of selfishness. This would not seem to be the noblest form of patriotism, which calls us to look beyond private interests to the public benefit. As Burke suggests, the genuine patriot loves his country not only because it is his, but also because it is good.
    Now, more than ever, we need this higher kind of patriotism, and it is