Multiculturalism

Using two of the essays we have covered this unit—Volokh’s “The American Tradition of Multiculturalism,”
Mukherjee’s “American Dreamer,” Saulny’s “Black? White? Asian? More Americans Choose All of the
Above,” Michaels’ “The Trouble with Diversity,” Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” and Staples’ “Just
Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space”—and two outside (secondary)
sources, write an essay to the Houston Chronicle arguing for or against a deeper public engagement with multiculturalism. Please do not feel compelled to take a rigid (dogmatic) approach to the issue. You may examine the issue in terms of degrees and gradations if you wish and suggest that some forms of multicultural paradigms and institutions (educational, religious, political, and so on) are positive while other forms are negative. In the end, however, make your case for a specific approach to the place of multiculturalism in the institutions, symbols, and social practices that make up the United States. Create your own approach, but make sure that it is related to the central mandate of the assignment—arguing for or against a deeper public engagement with multiculturalism. To help you make your argument (to set up,
promote, defend, etc. your points), you are required to cite material from four sources—two from the above list of in-class essays and two from outside sources that you will locate in the HCC databases. You need not simply adhere to the positions conveyed in the sources; feel free to refute the ideas/themes/passages of the sources as well (remember that refutation, in the Socratic form—dialectic—and in terms of Kastely’s notion of “meaningful disagreement,” is a democratic necessity). You should not expect your four sources to speak directly to one another or offer the same insights into the topic. Therefore, you will need to work diligently to identify some connections among the sources before you sit down and begin writing your essay. In other words, you need to determine how you plan to connect your source material to your overarching argumentative focus before you start to compose your essay.