Modern academic history was invented in Germany somewhat over a century ago with Ranke's slogan that we should tell the tale "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist," as it actually happened. But the birth of modern historical method coincided with the rise, in England, of imperial sentiment, with the rediscovery, in France, of the distinctiveness of the Republic, in Germany and Italy, of modern nationalism, and with an intense literary preoccupation, in the United States, with the meaning of America. The result is that the first modern histories are nationalist: they are stories of the coming into being of nations, from the point of view of the new national identities created in the very process they sought to describe.

It is an important fact that even scientific history is written by the victors. It is not just that nationalist history hides from view the local particularities that threaten the project of creating a unitary modern identity--so that Wales and Scotland and Ireland, or the Basque country, or Catholic Bavaria, or the American South, can find their distinctiveness deliberately written out of the story. Something much more subtle than this occurs, as we think back over the past from the perspective of the present: namely that we are bound to see ourselves, and thus our values, as the end of the process, and the triumph of those values as inevitable.

This is more than a merely intellectual mistake. In seeing the values of the present as the inevitable result of the historical process, we neglect the contingency of history: the fact that what happens is not always what must happen, that sometimes it is luck (or courage, or cowardice ...) and not fate that brought us to where we are. And that can leave us ill-prepared to make the future.

These reflections are relevant to my topic today--fallacies of Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism--because at the present, from the point of view of the West, it is tempting to see the triumph of values, institutions, and ideas derived from the West as inevitable, as a necessary victory, as what some have called "the end of history."

From our perspective here, it is natural to look out on a world dominated by the West, where even the major remaining resistance to it--notably, of course, among the quarter of the human population that is Chinese--is based in Marxism, the product of a Western thinker whose low credit in the contemporary West does not obscure his central place in Western intellectual history. When persecuted writers in Kenya or in East Timor or in Beijing speak to the world for aid, they talk in the language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen;  they appeal to the language of the American founding;  they speak in the terms invented by the great liberal theorists of the English seventeenth century: the language of Locke.

There are at least two ways in which the representation of these facts as a triumph of the West are misleading. First, because such a way of thinking ignores the very longstanding role of people and products from outside the West in the shaping of this intellectual heritage. The mistake here is the mistake of thinking that what is Western is only Western. We do not need to agree with the more extreme Afrocentrists to notice that the Greece to which this West looks back was at the crossroads of culture of North Africa and the Near East;  the Spain that began the conquest of the New World had been deeply shaped by Islam;  the Renaissance rediscovery of ancient learning owed a great deal to the Arabs who had preserved that tradition through the European Dark Ages;  and the economic basis of modern capitalism depended on the labor of Africans, the gold and silver of the New World Indians, and the markets of Asia. The West that has triumphed acquired its gunpowder from China, the astronomical data on which was based the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution from the ancient Near East.

These examples are familiar enough, but rehearsing them should remind us how true it is that the modern West was invented at the same time as culture and economy so to speak "went global." To use an example I learned of only recently: musicologists now argue, as I learned in passing from reading a recent conference paper by Susan McClary, that the rhythmic structure of Monteverdi's ciaconna may derive either from Peruvian Indian music or from Africa. If the latter is correct, the first European dance craze with an Afro-beat may have been a few centuries earlier than most of us had realized.

So the first way it is misleading to think of the triumph of capitalism and of liberal ideology as Western is that to do so is to forget that what made those successes possible was surely, in large part, the openness of the West to ideas and products and people from the rest of the world.

But its also misleading because the triumph of capitalism and of liberalism that we are seeking to explain is a far more complex set of facts than the simple notion of the transfer of our ideas and practices "over there" would imply. There are people here more qualified than I am to talk about what the triumph of capitalism might mean: but let me note only that monetization and markets are much older than European domination of the globe and that many cultures have taken to the market not as a Western institution but as something that continues traditions of their own. So far as liberalism is concerned, I am not sure that we should read too much into talk of human rights. I doubt that most people in the modern West have much sense of what that might be thought by a philosopher to mean. And I am sure that that is even more true for many who appeal to the notion elsewhere. What appeals about it is the notion of having some standard on which to call when you are being tortured, displaced, abused, or threatened with rape or death. This is not a Western idea but a human one. Still, because the West is overwhelmingly the center of power on the planet, it is inevitable that these appeals will be made in its--in our--language.

Because this is how I see the shaping of our increasingly global cultural situation--which has not, of course, yet produced a single global culture, but rather a world of many cultures in--often rather asymmetrical--interaction, I think there is much to be said for the critique of the ethnocentrism of much older scholarship in Europe and North America, that sought to understand the West, "our" civilization, without a vivid appreciation of the range and the depth of its interdependence with peoples and cultures "outside." I think it is true enough, if one looks at the histories that scholars have written over the last century or so, they have often been what we now call Eurocentric.

The term deserves a definition. By "Eurocentrism" is meant, to begin with, a scholarship that understands European history, intellectual life, and social institutions as a sort of ideal type, both normatively and descriptively. But Eurocentric work also displays an inability, rooted in prejudice, to enter sympathetically into the forms of life of non-Europeans, and, especially, of black people of African descent.

Eurocentrism in the first sense--taking European culture as the explanatory norm--is not the prevailing assumption of all scholarship. It is notable, for example, in the work of the founders of modern social analysis--Weber, Marx, Durkheim--that they were deeply interested in understanding modes of production and forms of life and thought different from those of the modern West, and that they held that we needed to understand all forms of human life if we were to understand our own. And while, like all people, Western scholars have been Eurocentric in the second sense--prejudiced, even racist--it is also true that intellectual life in Europe at least since Romanticism has often proceeded on the assumption that there was much of great value--and some things superior to our arts--in traditions from "outside." One is no longer entitled to treat modern history as an uninterrupted arc of progress--in a century that contains the Holocaust, this is not just a matter of political correctness--but there has been an increasing preoccupation in Western social and cultural analysis with attempts at objectivity--and critiques of ethnocentric bias--within the fields of anthropology and sociology and within the humanities. This means that, by and large, there would be few scholars, even among my most reactionary colleagues, who would defend either the taking of European culture as the explanatory norm or the ill-informed anti-African and anti-Asian prejudices of the past.

* * *

It is, I think, against that background that we should reflect on the stream of publications over the past few years, especially in the United States, aimed at establishing a new basis for the study and teaching of African and African-American culture. Whether or not they actually use the word "Afrocentric" on their packaging, these books--which differ enormously in the quality of their thought and writing, as well as in their factual reliability--have a certain common set of preoccupations, whose persistence entitles one now to speak of a broadly Afrocentric paradigm.

The consensus about which these works are organized has two basic elements, one critical, the other positive, which are either argued or taken for granted in them all. The negative thesis is that modern Western scholarship on cultural matters, high and low, is hopelessly Eurocentric. As a consequence of this Eurocentrism, Western scholarship presupposes, so the story goes, that Africans have produced little of cultural worth and that cultural works of sophistication or value (like the architecture of Great Zimbabwe or the Pyramids), even when they are in Africa, are unlikely to have been produced by black people.

In support of this Eurocentricity thesis some (and occasionally a great deal of) work goes into showing that European scholars at least since the Enlightenment have set about to conceal facts about the African origins of certain central elements of Western civilization: notably, both the Egyptian origins of the Greek "miracle" and the black African origins of the Egyptian "miracle."

This negative thesis is argued as the prolegomenon to an alternative, positive, "Afrocentric" view, in which African cultural creativity is discovered to have been at the origin of Western civilization, and Western civilization, especially in modernity, is either asserted or implied to be intrinsically morally depraved;  incapable, in particular, of living peacefully with others. We (sometimes all of us, sometimes just those of us who are black) are urged, then, to center on African history (and particularly the history of the Egypt of the pharaohs) and return to African values.

The Afrocentric paradigm is not just the source of a lively body of writing;  it is the basis, too, of a movement in the United States to revise the teaching of African-American children, to provide them with an Afrocentric education. Here the argument is that the Eurocentricity of what is taught in American schools, at best, fails to nurture, and, at worst, actively damages, the self-esteem of black children, and that what these children need instead is a diet of celebratory African history (also beginning in Egypt and insisting that its civilization was black) and the transmission of African values.

These values are often taught now in the version developed by Dr. Maulana Karenga and associated with the invention of a feast called "Kwanzaa," designed to provide an African celebration to go with Christmas and Hanukkah. (American children are taught Swahili words, naming various allegedly African virtues, as their proper inheritance. There is something of an irony in the use of Swahili as an Afrocentric language, since hardly any of the slaves brought to the New World can have known the language, while it was in fact being used in a culture in which slave trading to the Arabian peninsula was a major element of the economy.)  This particular brand of Afrocentrism goes under the label of "Kemetism" ("Kemet" being a name for ancient Egypt);  and the whole package can be found in a recent work by Molefi Kete Asante, one of the intellectual leaders of the movement, entitled Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge.

At least as important as published work is a body of Afrocentric lore transmitted in public lectures and in discussion groups by figures who have tended in recent years to combine the Afrocentric paradigm with a peculiar anti-semitism, which seems preoccupied with placing especial responsibility for the ills of the black world on a Jewish conspiracy. Many of the leading rap stars seem to subscribe to this package of views, combining it with their well-known misogyny and homophobia, to produce a cultural brew as noxious as any currently available in popular culture. The diagnosis of this particular cultural pathology is the subject of much current speculation among observers of the African-American cultural scene.

The Afrocentric paradigm--the scholarly end of the movement--has one major hero: Cheikh Anta Diop, the Senegalese man-of-letters, after whom the university in Dakar, Senegal is now named. Diop argued over many years (beginning in the 1950s) for the thesis of the African origins of Greek civilization. In such works as L'unite culturelle de l'Afrique noire, Anteriorite des civilisations negres, Nations negres et culture, Fondements economiques et culturels d'un etat federal d'Afrique noir, and Parente genetique de l'egyptien pharaonique et des langues negro--Africaines, he pursued a complex agenda, in which the splendors of Egypt were a basis for contemporary African pride and the cultural unity derived from a common African source could be the basis for modern African political unity.

Like most cultural movements at full flood, this Afrocentric turn is a composite of truth and error, insight and illusion, moral generosity and meanness. But if there is one thing that strikes me more about it than any other, it is how thoroughly at home it is in the frameworks of nineteenth century European thought. (One of the symptomatic features of much Afrocentric writing is that the antagonists it identifies are largely dead.) Afrocentrism, in short, seems very much to share the presuppositions of the Victorian ideologies against which it is reacting.

Take, for example, the preoccupation with the ancient world. The academic curriculum of the nineteenth century traced Western civilization to roots in ancient Greece, following a history of progress from the excellent beginnings mapped out by the heirs of Homer. Our Afrocentrists have bought into this way of doing cultural history, and have only challenged the priority of the (white) Greeks replacing it with the priority of the (black) Egyptians. There are, of course, genuine issues for discussion here about the relations between different parts of the ancient Mediterranean and the Greek "miracle." Martin Bernal (not, by my accounts an Afrocentrist, because he doesn't support the positive agenda of the movement) is a hero for Afrocentrists because he has taken on, in Black Athena, the challenge of refuting the modern view that the Greeks owed nothing of importance to Egypt. So far as I can see, there seems to be a consensus, now, that Bernal convincingly demonstrates the role of prejudice against blacks and Jews in classical scholarship in the Enlightenment and since, while not establishing decisively his own positive account of ancient history.

But it is not this perfectly interesting and potentially genteel academic debate that has drawn Bernal to the Afrocentrists' attention. For their purposes it is essential not only to agree with Bernal's account of ancient intellectual history but also to insist, in Diop's words, that "Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization [and]...the moral fruit of their civilization is to be counted among the assets of the Black world ..." And on this matter Bernal has little to say. Fortunately he did not have to argue for this secondary thesis, since it is taken to be implicit in his title. African Athena or Egyptian Athena (titles he himself favored) would have left the racial issue open: Black Athena (the publisher's idea) does not.

It is this preoccupation with racial matters that is so much a response to the nineteenth-century framing of the issues. What was added in the nineteenth century to the classicism of the Enlightenment was the thought that the Western heritage was a racial possession. This story neglects not only Egyptian influences on the Greeks but such minor embarrassments as the centrality of Jewish contributions to Western high culture, and the key role of the Arabs in maintaining the intellectual tradition that linked Plato to the Renaissance. And it depends on a way of thinking of culture and biology which is bound to be discomfited by those scholars, black, brown, and yellow, who have taken possession of Western culture in the twentieth century and mastered it, at the very same time as many of the supposed racial heirs of the West have been immersed in a popular culture "contaminated" with African rhythms.

But in our day racialism surely does not need arguing against in serious company. Do we not all know that there is biology and there is culture;  that their interconnections and interdependencies are complex;  that the old simplicities of racialism have not stood the test of exposure to the evidence? Perhaps. But, then again, perhaps not. After all, the Afrocentrist interest in the color of the ancient Egyptians presumably derives from the thought that if they were black then they were of the same race as contemporary black Africans and their New World cousins. (It is, indeed, a standard feature of Afrocentric argument to go through a series of claims about the physical anthropological evidence for the priority in various domains of the African.)  And why, if you do not conflate biology and culture, should that matter?

It is hard to find in the Afrocentrist literature a clearer answer to this question than the passage from Diop I quoted earlier. Racial identity with the Egyptians makes their achievements one of the moral assets of contemporary blacks. (Of course, if Greece grew out of Egypt and "the West" grew out of Greece, then the West is one of the moral assets of contemporary blacks: and its legacy of ethnocentrism is presumably one of our moral liabilities. But I digress.)  Perhaps this is why Black Athena and African Origins of Civilization--which contain translated selections from Diop's Anteriorite des civilisations negres--sell so well on the streets of Harlem. And if it is, this is a reason that would have been entirely congenial to the nineteenth century Eurocentrists whom Afrocentricity aims to refute.

Once we see the essentially reactive structure of Afrocentrism--it is, to borrow Marx's account of his relation to Hegel, simply Eurocentrism turned upside down--we can understand where its intellectual weaknesses will lie. It is not surprising, for example, that in choosing to talk about Egypt and to ignore the rest of Africa and African history, Afrocentrism shares the European prejudice against cultures without writing. Eurocentrism, finding a literate culture and significant architecture, set about claiming that Egypt could not be black. Afrocentrism chooses Egypt because Eurocentrism had already made a claim on it.

Similarly, we shall not be surprised at what is one of the most tiresome features of Afrocentrism, namely its persistence in what the Beninois philosopher (and current Minister of Culture) Paulin Hountondji has called "unanimism:"  the view that there is an African culture to which to appeal. It is surely prima facie preposterous to suppose that there is an African culture, shared by everyone from the civilizations of the upper Nile thousands of years ago to the thousand or so language-zones of contemporary Africa.

Here too, in aiming to identify some common core of African civilization, the Afrocentrists seem to be responding to earlier attempts to identify a common core of Western culture. Wandering, as I have, from Venice to Venice Beach, California, or from York to New York, one can be forgiven for wondering how unitary the West really is today. But it was always a strange idea that Alexander and Alfred and Frederick the Greats had something deeply in common with each other and with the least of their subjects which could be called Western culture. And in Africa, where whatever continuity there has been through all this time, has not been mediated by even the sort of broken textual tradition that in some sense unites something called Western culture, it is not only a strange idea but a silly one.

A final irony is worth pointing out: Afrocentrism, which is offered in the name of black solidarity, has, by and large, entirely ignored the work of African scholars other than Diop. (This fact tends to be concealed because African-American scholars like Asante and Karenga have adopted African names.)  Thus, much play has been given to another major source book for the Afrocentric, Jahnheinz Jahn's Muntu: African Cultures and the Western World, a work that first appeared in the United States with great eclat in the early 1960s. The book revolves around the concept of NTU. (This is the stem of the Kinyaruanda-Bantu words "Muntu" (Person), "Kintu" (thing), "Hantu" (place and time) and "Kuntu"(modality) and it is a morpheme that does not occur unprefixed in Kinyaruanda.)  "NTU," Jahn wrote with the gravitas of revelation, "is the universal force as such."

Reading this I found myself irresistibly drawn into a fantasy in which an African scholar returns to her home in Lagos or Nairobi, with the important news that she has uncovered the key to Western culture. Soon to be published, THING: Western Culture and the African World, a work that exposes the philosophy of ING, written so clearly on the face of the English language. For ING, in the Euro-American view, is the inner dynamic essence of the world. In the very structure of the terms doing and making and meaning, the English (and thus, by extension all Westerners) express their deep commitment to this conception: but the secret heart of the matter is captured in their primary ontological category of th-ing; every th-ing--or be-ing as their sages express the matter in the more specialized vocabulary of one of their secret societies--is not stable but ceaselessly changing. Here we see the fundamental explanation for the extraordinary neophilia of Western culture, its sense that reality is change.

The notion that there is something unitary called African culture that could be summarized in this sort of way has been subjected to devastating critique by a generation of African intellectuals. But little sign of African accounts of African culture appears in the writings of Afrocentricity. Molefi Asante has written whole books with Akan culture at the heart of them without referring to the major works of Akan philosophers such as J. B. Danquah, William Abrahams, Kwasi Wiredu, and Kwame Gyekye. And I am reliably informed that on one occasion not so long ago a distinguished Zairian intellectual was told by an African-American interlocutor that "we do not need you educated Africans coming here to tell us about African culture."

* * *

In the last half of this talk, I want to take up the question of how we might negotiate between the Scylla of the older Eurocentrism and the Charybdis of the new Afrocentrism. And despite the fact that I am speaking here at the American Enterprise Institute--or perhaps, since I am a philosopher, and so intellectually perverse, because of it--I am going to do so under the banner of multiculturalism.

I do so with some reluctance, however. Normally, I am not much one for "isms";  and talk of multiculturalism makes me as nervous as talk of the many other "isms" that surround us. Multiculturalism sounds like the name of an ideology, a single agenda, a unified political vision. If there is such a unified ideology out there, I certainly don't know what it is. What I do know is that--in at least one sense of the much-abused word "culture"--we live in a society of many cultures, a multicultural society.

The idea of "culture" is much abused because it is so elastic. But we can reduce it to some kind of order by identifying a spectrum that begins with the most basic sense of the term--the anthropologist's sense--in which culture means all the ideas and practices that are shared by a social group, and ends with what we call "high" culture--the critical notion of culture--which picks from among those ideas and practices a subset that requires the greatest training or the most individual skill. The habit of shaking hands at meetings belongs to culture in the anthropologist's sense; Sandro Botticelli and Martin Buber and Count Basie belong to culture in the anthropologist's sense also, but they also belong to culture in the critical sense.

No one is likely to make much fuss about the fact that a society is multicultural in the critic's sense. For, in this sense, most large scale societies have been multicultural. Once you have division of labor and social stratification, there will be people who do and people who don't know about music and literature and pottery and painting;  if we call all these specialized spheres together "high" culture, then everyone will participate in the high culture to varying degrees, and there are likely to be subgroups (opera-lovers, say, or dedicated moviegoers, or lovers of poetry) who share significant practices and ideas with each other that are not shared with everyone else.

If being multicultural is a problem, it is because societies are multicultural in the anthropological sense: pace those who seem preoccupied with stopping multiculturalism at the NEH or the NEA, the problems created by our many cultures largely lie elsewhere.

Culture in the anthropologist's sense is what a social group has socially in common: it is what we teach our children in order to make them members of our social group. By definition, therefore, culture in this sense is shared;  it is the social bottom line. It includes language and table manners, religious ideas, moral values. With this idea of culture goes the idea of a subculture. People who share not just the common ideas and practices of the whole social group, but also more specific other practices and values as well.

I say "social group" because a single society, a group of persons living together in a common state, under common authorities, need not have a common culture. There is no single shared body of ideas and practices in most contemporary African states: there is, as we have learned so sadly in recent months, no such shared culture in Bosnia and Hercegovina. And I think it is fair to say that there is not now and there has never been such a shared culture in the United States.

The reason is simple: the United States has always been multilingual, and has always had minorities who did not speak or understand English. It has always had a plurality of religious traditions;  beginning with Native American religions and Puritans and Catholics and including now many varieties of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Bahai...and so on. And Americans have always differed significantly even among those who do speak English, from North to South and East to West, and from country to city, in customs of greeting, notions of civility, and a whole host of other ways.

At the same time, it has also always been true that there was a dominant culture in these United States. It was Christian, it spoke English, and it identified with the high cultural traditions of Europe and, more particularly, of England. And, until recently, when people spoke of American culture, this is what they meant.

As public education has expanded in the United States, America's citizens, and especially those citizens educated in public elementary schools in this country, have come to share a body of historical knowledge, and an understanding of the American political system. And it is increasingly true that whatever other languages children in this country speak, they speak and understand English, and they watch many of the same television programs and listen to much of the same music. In that sense, most young Americans have a shared culture based in a whole variety of kinds of English: but it is no longer that older Christian, Anglo-Saxon, tradition that used to be called American culture.

The outlines of this common culture, to which only very few Americans are external, are somewhat blurry. But it includes, for example, in its practices, baseball;  in its ideas, democracy;  in its arts, rap music and music videos, and many movies. This culture is to a large extent, as I have implied, the product of schools and of the media. But even those who share this common culture--the shared cultural literacy of E. D. Hirsch, let us say--live in subcultures of language, religion, family organization, and political assumptions. And, more than this, most who are black and Hispanic have, irrespective of their incomes, radically different experiences and expectations of the state.

Now I take it that multiculturalism is meant to be the name of a response to these familiar facts: that it is meant to be an approach to education and to public culture that acknowledges the diversity of cultures and subcultures in the United States and that proposes to deal with that diversity in some other way than by imposing the values and ideas of the hitherto dominant Anglo-Saxon cultural tradition. That, I think, is the common core of all the things that have been called multiculturalism.

I think this common idea is a good one. It is a good idea for a number of reasons. It is a good idea, first, because the old practice of imposing Christian, Anglo-Saxon tradition was rooted in racism and anti-Semitism (and sexism and heterosexism ... but that is another story). But it is a good idea, second, because making the culture of one ethnic group the official culture of a state privileges the members of that subculture--gives them advantages in public life--in ways that are profoundly anti-egalitarian and, thus, anti-democratic.

Yet agreeing to this idea does not tell you much about what you should do in schools and in public culture. It tells you that you mustn't impose certain practices and ideas, but it doesn't tell you what you should do affirmatively. I want to suggest today that one affirmative strategy in this area is a bad idea for public education and that there are other strategies that are better. And then, in closing, I want to say something about why living together in a multicultural society is bound to turn out to be difficult.

Many multiculturalists seem to think that the way to deal with the fact of our many cultures in the public education system is to teach each child the culture of its group. This is the strategy of many Afrocentrists and of some (but by no means all) of those who have favored bilingual education for Hispanics.

This is the strategy I oppose.

To explain my first basis for objection, I need to elicit a paradox in this approach, which we can do by considering one Afrocentric answer to the question: Why should we teach African-American children something different from what we teach other children? This Afrocentric answer comes in two parts: the first part says that we should do so because they already come from a different culture;  the second part says we should do so because we should teach all people about their own traditions.

It's the first answer that is paradoxical. It is paradoxical because it proposes to solve the problems created by the fact that children have different cultures by emphasizing and entrenching those differences, not by trying to reduce them. (I think of this as the "WASPS have Christmas, Jews have Hanukkah, so Blacks should have Kwanzaa" approach.)  I should make it plain that I have no problem with the argument that children's home cultures need to be taken into account in deciding how to teach them: there's no point in talking to kids in languages or dialects they don't understand, or simply punishing them--rather than dealing with their parents or guardians--for behavior that they are being taught at home. But to admit that is to admit only that culture may sometimes make a difference to how you should teach, not that it should make a difference to what you should teach. And defending teaching children different histories (Afrocentric history) or different forms of speech or writing (Black English) on the grounds that this is already their culture simply begs the question: if we teach African-American children different histories from other children, then, indeed, it will become true that knowing that history and not knowing any other history will be part of the culture of African-Americans. But the fact is that if we don't enforce cultural differences of this kind in the schools, surely they will largely disappear.

And what that means is that the only serious argument for Afrocentricity that survives is the second answer I considered earlier: the claim that we must teach each child the culture of "its" group, because that is the right thing to do, because we should.

That idea is much more powerful. It is presumably at the basis of the thought that many non-observant Jews share with observant Jews (who have other reasons for believing this), namely, that it is good to teach their children Jewish history and customs, because they are Jewish children. It is the argument--"we have Plato to our father"--that led to the sense of exclusion that many African-Americans felt when the history and culture of the United States was taught to them as the continuation of a white Western tradition;  the argument against which so much Afrocentrism is a reaction. I myself am skeptical of all arguments of this form: I think that traditions are worth teaching because they are beautiful and good and true, never because they are ours or yours, mine or thine. I was brought up a Protestant;  but after my first seder, it struck me that this was a tradition worth teaching to everybody, Jew or Gentile; and I have always valued the experience of family community among my Moslem cousins at Ramadan. But this is not the place to pursue this argument. Because all I need to point out here is that even if teaching children "their" history were a good, it is not something that it would be practical for American public schools to do. For if carried to its ultimate, this policy would require segregation into cultural groups either within or between public schools, in ways that would be plainly unconstitutional in the United States. And if we did have unsegregated classes teaching Jewish history, and African-American history, and Anglo history and Hispanic history and Chinese history in our schools, by what right would we forbid children from going to the "wrong" classes?

Of course there are things that we surely all believe that we should teach all American children: in particular, we should teach them something of the history of the American political system. And here too is another reason why we cannot hope to teach each child only "its" cultural tradition: for understanding the American constitutional system and its history requires us to know about slavery and immigration, about the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Underground Railroad and Ellis Island: if there is a sense in which each of these belongs more to the history of some social groups than others, there is also a clear sense in which they belong to us all.

And it is that idea that motivates the approach to dealing with our multicultural society that I favor, that undergirds my multiculturalism. For it seems to me that what is ideal in a multicultural society, whose multicultural character is created outside the state in the sphere of civil society, is that the state should seek in its educational systems to make these multiple subcultures known to each other. A multicultural education, in my view, should be one that leaves you not only knowing and loving what is good in the traditions of your subculture but also understanding and appreciating the traditions of others;  (and, yes, critically rejecting the worst of all traditions.)  This approach has its practical problems, also: a curriculum filled with the history of Korean-Americans and African-Americans and Anglo-Americans and Jewish Americans and so on risks being a curriculum with a shallow appreciation of all of them. But the principle of selection is clear: we should try to teach about those many world traditions that have come to be important at different stages of American history. This means that we begin with Native American and Protestant Dutch and English and African and Iberian cultures, adding voices to the story as they were added to the nation. Because different elements are important to different degrees in different places today, we can assume that the balance will be and should be differently struck in different places. (All of which presupposes a general improvement, I should add, in the quality of American elementary and secondary education.)

I have a final argument against Afrocentricity and suchlike movements. It is that they are dangerous, for reasons that have to do with the final point I want to make, which is about the difficulty of managing multicultural--plural--societies.

I said earlier that no one is likely to be troubled by the variety of subcultures in high culture. Why is this? Because however important our participation in high culture is, it is unlikely to be at the heart of our ethnicity. High culture crosses ethnic boundaries to an extraordinary degree. (The boundaries that it crosses with less ease are those of class.) The result is that subdivisions of high culture are not so likely to become central to the organization of political life. The United States is not threatened by the cultural autonomy of the American Philosophical Association or (even) the American Medical Association. In this respect the associations of high culture are like many elements of popular culture: the next New York mayoral election is not going to be between followers of the Mets and the Yankees.

But differences in subcultures--in the anthropologist's sense of culture--are rather different. We pass on our language to the next generation because we care to communicate with them;  we pass on religion because we care for its vision and endorse its values;  we pass on our folkways because we value people with those folkways. Culture in this sense is the home of what we care about most. If other people organize their solidarity around cultures different from ours, this makes them, to that extent, different from us in ways that matter to us deeply. The result, of course, is not just that we have difficulty understanding across cultures--this is an inevitable result of cultural difference, for much of culture consists of language and other shared modes of understanding--but that we end up preferring our own kind: and if we prefer our own kind, it is easy enough to slip into preferring to vote for our own kind, to employ our own kind, and so on. In sum: Culture undergirds loyalties. To the extent that these loyalties matter they will be mobilized in politics, except to the extent that a civic culture can be created that explicitly seeks to exclude them. And that is why my multiculturalism is so necessary: it is the only way to reduce the misunderstandings across cultures, the only way to build bridges of loyalty across the ethnicities that have so often divided us. Multiculturalism of this sort--pluralism, to use an older word--is the only way of making sure we care enough about people across ethnic divides to keep those ethnic divides from destroying us.

The task for us teachers and scholars is not to replace one ethnocentrism with many;  not to reject old ideals of truth and impartiality as intrinsically biased. Rather it is to recognize that those ideals have yet to be fully lived up to in our scholarship;  that the bias has derived not from scholars who took Western standards (which often turn out to be everybody's standards) of truth for granted, but that they didn't take them seriously enough.

The old way of dealing with the problem of many cultures was to make us e pluribus unum. Out of many cultures, to mold one. Anyone who appreciates, as I do, the vibrancy of American popular culture and high culture, the splendid variety of our literatures and musics and cuisines, is likely to balk at such a project. And anyone who has looked at our history and seen how often the one into which we were to be made was white and Anglo-Saxon and protestant will be skeptical that the one into which we are to be made could be anything other than the cover for the domination of one of our sectional cultures. These are, in my view, legitimate skepticisms. And the only alternative, so far as I can see, that doesn't threaten perpetual schism, is the hard work of a multiculturalism that accepts America's diversity while teaching each of us the ways and the worth of others.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a professor of African-American studies at Harvard University.