Introduction: what this site is about.

I am a fairly liberal person who votes Democrat. I live in Berkeley, California. I believe in socialized medicine, socialized daycare, higher taxes for the rich, and free or very inexpensive high quality education. I believe in the things that I think are consistent with a Democrat of about Franklin Roosevelt's era.

However, there are some things of which the American Left approves with which I cannot agree. The biggest ones are the excesses surrounding multiculturalism, especially the fetishization for ethnic diversity that often runs head-on against other beliefs of mine. Don't get me wrong. There are few things I would rather see more of (aside from peace, prosperity, scientific advances, functional colonies offworld spreading human civilization elsewhere, a cure for cancer, human happiness, etc) than persons of a wide variety of ethnic groups in, for example, the higher reaches of academia.

However, the manner in which this goal is achieved, and whether it should be thought of as a "goal" that needs to be "achieved," are questions whose answers -- at least the ones the American Left, especially in Berkeley, California, have given -- are tricky. For example, should a massive social engineering effort really be necessary to achieve this goal? How much money should be spent on it? Should individuals be pulled into the most elite instititutions by those institutions' outreach staffs just because those individuals happen to be of a "desired" ethnic minority to complete a palette, sometimes almost regardless of the individuals' levels of skill or interest in a subject?

Aside from admissions, how about some of the classes one finds in the academic setting today? I have taken an "American Cultures" class at the University of California at Berkeley. In this class I was instructed quite straightforwardly that white people are bad, nonwhites are good; men are bad, women are good; Christianity's effects have been absolutely negative;straights are bad, and non-straights are delightfully deviant and fascinating. And this was meant to be an upper-division history course. Its teacher is a perfectly respectable professor whose father played an important role in the United Nations. He wasn't a wide-eyed fanatic. This is the mainstream attitude of a whole lot of people. The obsessive identification of, identification with, and sole concentration on, history's victims trumped every other consideration in that course and in the minds of many people. Further, the obligation of insulting all things related to European culture is an active sentiment in these circles as well. Is this a reaction from centuries of oppression? What the benefits of this overlordship were to the oppressed is a highly arguable point, but even if what happened in the past has largely been a straightforward case of oppression, the overreaction to it that I see daily is not rational or reasonable.

A friend of mine told me that the word "overreaction" in the last sentence made her uncomfortable. Let me linger on it a moment. I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable, nor do I want to be inflammatory at all on this site. However, I don't think that the free exchange of ideas will be possible if the word "overreaction" is prohibited. The status quo of any discussion on ethnicity amongst caucasians on the left very often (since the late 1960s) has taken the form of a futile ballet of one group of people delicately tiptoeing around the sensibilities of persons who consider themselves or their ancestors as oppressed, as Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn explains in her interesting book "Race Experts." The first group feels it cannot speak frankly lest it cause offense, and that it must constantly apologize to the point of being self-demeaning, an utterly unproductive action. This status can only harm honest discussion. But honesty need not equal obnxiousness. A balance needs to be struck. Compromises need to be made both by the party whose language might hurt others' feelings and by the party whose feelings might be hurt. However, at least from having lived in Berkeley, I can say that the first party has been making all the compromises and the second party, at least as I have seen it, not as many.

Obviously this site is not meant to be a cranky conservative site that castigates "political correctness" or PC. There are already plenty of sites like that. It's meant to be for fairly leftish people, or formerly leftish people. Anyone may post; I will remove counterproductive or insulting postings. I will be posting things I find bothersome in relation primarily to the sort of extremist multiculturalism in the San Francisco Bay area that, among other things, denies agency to minorites by encouraging them to identify themselves as human beings primarily in terms of their or their ancestors' oppression; as well as the extremes to which I occasionally see feminists go, often colored similarly.

My hope is to create a critical forum for these issues that, for once, does not issue from the far right.

Even aside from the universities, let's look at a situation in a Berkeley elementary school, below from a local paper produced in the city of Berkeley.

This is from the Berkeley Daily Planet, Weekend Edition, April 21-24, 2006:

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Academic Choice Students Excused from Core Course
By SUZANNE LA BARRE (04-21-06)

It has survived heated criticism, a curriculum overhaul and a new name, but Freshman Seminar can’t stand up to Academic Choice.

Following a 4-1 vote by the Berkeley Board of Education Wednesday, students enrolled in the Academic Choice enrichment program at Berkeley High School are no longer required to take the concentrated ethnic studies and social living course required of freshmen, known in recent years as Freshman Seminar.

Instead, they will enroll in a year’s worth of ancient civilization and geography that will make time for a month-long social living segment as mandated by state law. Ethnicity and identity studies will be dispersed throughout the program’s four-year arc. The new curriculum goes into effect this fall.

“We’ve been struggling for years to provide a meaningful social studies course,” said Berkeley High School Principal Jim Slemp. “Since I’ve been there, we’ve been working on it and not succeeding. … There may be better ways to meet those goals than what’s currently being offered.”

Freshman Seminar, or Identity and Ethnic Studies (IES), as it was known pre-2004, provides lessons in identity, diversity, health. The curriculum has been a rite of passage for freshmen at Berkeley High since the early 1990s, but one that has earned mixed reviews.

Some say the course lacks structure. Instructors are free to teach—or not teach—as they please. Bradley Johnson, who served as student school board director during the 2003-2004 school year, complained that the ethnic studies course victimized ethnic minorities, demonized white students and inculcated students to the teacher’s ideology.

In 2004, the board approved an IES curriculum revamp and conferred the new name Freshman Seminar. But most agree the program is still flawed.

“Some people like the program. Some love it. But a lot of people really hate the course,” said school board Vice President Joaquin Rivera. “It has been extremely controversial. We’ve tried to improve it in many ways and with a few exceptions, it has not been successful.”

Susan Helmrich, one of more than a dozen Academic Choice parents who attended Wednesday’s board meeting in support of the new courses, described her son’s Freshman Seminar as “an absolute disaster.”

Another parent quipped that her child watched movies and learned how to play poker in IES.

Others expressed concern that the existing curriculum does not offer UC credit to Academic Choice freshmen. Academic Choice is a program within Berkeley High School for high achievers.

The newly approved freshman course offers one semester of world geography and cultures, and one semester of ancient civilization, both of which are designed after UC-approved courses. There is no guarantee they will earn accreditation, however.

Support for the curriculum is not unanimous. The proposed course was submitted to the Berkeley High School Shared Governance Committee, comprised of school site council representatives, faculty, staff and students, three times, and never received a two-thirds majority approval.

On Wednesday, School Board candidate and Berkeley High School parent Karen Hemphill spoke out against the course.

“I think the proposal is a short-sighted answer to a long-term problem,” she said, detailing the benefits of coursework that emphasizes identity development, ethnicity and diversity. “Lack of academic rigor is not due to course content, but due to lack of accountability for teachers.”

Student Board Director Teal Miller agreed teachers make the course, but that doesn’t mean other possibilities should be dismissed.

“I had an amazing IES teacher, however the more I talk to students at Berkeley High over the past three years, the more I realize I was in the minority in having a phenomenal teacher,” she said. “Taking it from a different perspective is important because of the other students I talked to who sat for a year and did nothing and I think that’s really unfortunate.”

School board directors Rivera, Shirley Issel, John Selawsky and Nancy Riddle approved the new Academic Choice curriculum. Terry Doran opposed it, saying he did not feel world history was necessarily appropriate at the freshman level, and preferred a contemporary course.

Only one other program at Berkeley High, the International High School—a small school slated to open this fall—provides an alternative to Freshman Seminar. Students at the other small schools and the comprehensive high school are still required to take Freshman Seminar.

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?archiveDate=04-21-06&storyID=23942

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Again, having experienced the Berkely zeitgeist on matters of ethnic diversity, I have a very easy time believing that Bradley Johnson's comments are unfortunately correct. The majority of people I have seen who disagree with sentiments like his are either people in their fifties who argue along the lines of "well, there was no recognition whatsoever of ethnic minorities in my day, so this is a step in the right direction." While I am sympathetic to their point of view, I would assert that it is not they who are being educated in Berkeley high schools but their children and grandchildren who have grown up in a much different world. Almost all agree that a recognistion of and appreciation for ethnic diversity is a fine thing -- even those who only from the perspective of self-interest because it is better to be able to select from a wider variety of national cuisines. The problem is when one has, as a mandatory course, something that is likely to become infected with the very denigration of European culture that I found in a university course at UC Berkeley. I fail to see how most high school courses will refrain from the simplistic game of "let's reverse the color of hats on the bad guys and good guys" if a UC Berkeley course couldn't refrain from that.

Terry Doran's comment that ancient civilization is not appropriate for a freshman level and that a contemporary course is preferable is confusing and even distressing. First, students are surrounded by contemporary culture. What they need is to break out of that and study something alien. Secondly, at what level would he prefer students to learn of the civilizations of the past? This is extremely important information. A proper understanding of Roman maritime culture, for example, puts diversity in perspective for us today -- and is interesting in its own right. The realization that slavery has existed in every single culture in the past puts American slavery in a decidedly less demonic perspective and makes it an understandable institution if highly regrettable. A perhaps paranoid thought in my head even makes me wonder whether there are people who profit by maintaining anger between blacks and whites; they would surely not want blacks to learn about the widespread nature of slavery.