The usefulness of the first half of the book is...in its common-sensical questions about the practical significance of educational ideologies—and the doubts Glazer expresses about the efficacy of difference curricula. His tone here is chastened and tentative—perfectly appropriate...there can be little argument that Glazer's reconsideration advances the current debate. This is a wise book.
Contemporary Sociology - Todd Gitlin
In this short but important book, Nathan Glazer addresses one of the most controversial issues in American education—and outside of it, for that matter...[It is] a wise and temperate book.
The New Leader - William L. O'Neill
[Glazer] is aware of the complexity of the issues, of the many forms of and motives for multiculturalism, and of the multiple forces and dynamics affecting ethnic relations. Just as he doubts that multiculturalism is the solution to ethnic problems, so too he doubts that multiculturalism is the cause of America's ethnic tensions. Indeed, he is quite dismissive of those who have blown multiculturalism out of proportion, and turned it into the 'trojan horse' destroying American culture and society...This sober, even-handed approach is unlikely to satisfy either defenders or critics of multiculturalism, but many readers will find his balanced tome a welcome relief in what is an overheated and overpoliticised debate. It is certainly an easy book to read: well-written, full of interesting and revealing anecdotes, and mercifully devoid of political jargon or esoteric terminology.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development - Will Kymlicka
[Glazer's] analysis of the relative failure of the United States to assimilate its black population, despite his own early optimism, is sobering, and goes a long way toward explaining the drive for multicultural studies in American classrooms.
Nathan Glazer...understands the present situation...clearly, and with an admirable sensitivity to what certain multiculturalists are trying to achieve...As Mr. Glazer shows in a fascinating chapter, the educational theorists (including John Dewey) who spoke of the American ‘melting pot' were thinking almost exclusively of the European immigrants to this country; race, in their vocabulary, meant what we now call ethnicity. European-Americans could and would in time disconnect themselves from their country of origin and cease to be known as 'hyphenated' Americans. African-Americans were never included in this vision and were often treated by the theorists as if they simply were not there.
Wall Street Journal - Mary Lefkowitz
Glazer is positive, but cautionary, towards multiculturalism. His perspective smacks of sociological savvy...Glazer raises many pertinent and illuminating considerations that teacher educators would find useful in analyzing multiculturalism in their classrooms and publications. There are too many to catalog here, but Glazer's discussion of them is a real contribution to this curriculum issue.
Educational Studies - Richard La Brecque
[Glazer's] latest book is provocative, readable and occasionally disturbing, but should be read by anyone interested in this topic.
Washington Times - Martin Morse Wooster
A generation ago, Nathan Glazer made a reputation of being one of the strongest critics of affirmative action policies, arguing that the melting pot of the market would suffice to overcome ethnic inequality. Glazer's present qualified support for multicultural policies indicates how far assimilation has been supplanted as the goal and reality of US society. In this book Glazer charts the relatively recent rise of the word, discusses several debates evoked by multiculturalism, explains why it has been such a preoccupation of the last two decades, and mounts a moderate defence of it.
Though troubling and significant issues remain in the struggles of women, gays and lesbians, and Hispanics, they pale by contrast with the far greater separateness, weight of grievances, and suffering of American blacks. This remains 'the American dilemma,' and Glazer has performed a useful service by reminding us of this fact.
Southern Humanities Review - Dwight St. John
Glazer begins with a straightforward account of how, in a few short years, teachers in public elementary, middle, and secondary schools have come to take for granted something called 'multicultural education'...[He] suggests helpfully that what multiculturalism's enthusiasts share is an approach to education and to public culture that seeks to sustain hitherto derogated identities...We Are All Multiculturalists Now offers an insider's account of the debate over New York State's attempts at curriculum reform in the early Nineties, a process in which Mr. Glazer was intimately involved. It includes a reasonable discussion of what the guiding principles of curriculum reform should be, and it reflects temperately on the debate about national history standards.
New York Review of Books - K. Anthony Appiah
So many reams of paper, so many gallons of ink have been devoted to books dealing with our ongoing culture wars in general, and with multiculturalism in particular, that it is difficult to comprehend an end to it all… The esteemed social scientist Nathan Glazer’s book is so thorough and reasoned in its analysis and prognosis that one can only hope that it will be treated as definitive… Mr. Glazer’s account seeks to place our current round of multiculturalism in historical perspective… Given [his] impressive marshaling of historical, economic and sociological evidence, it is hard to argue with him… [This book] offers a clear, if imposing, path out of the present impasse.
[A] welcome addition to the growing canon [on multiculturalism]...a kind of battlefield primer for spectators and participants alike...[T]his is a sober, lucid and fair-minded book.
Glazer...is a distinguished social scientist and social critic...[This is a] densely packed book, the essential argument of which is that multiculturalism ‘is the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African Americans, in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many groups.'
Jonathan Yardley Book World
In this elegantly written book, Nathan Glazer provides a historically rich account of the rise of multiculturalism and explicates its political significance. He argues that the diffusion of multiculturalism has been driven by the singeing fault-line of 20th-century America, the position of African Americans. In the book's best chapter, on assimilation, Glazer explains how the discussion of this topic elided and ignored the position of black Americans—it was the assimilation of eastern and southern Europeans which exercised the assimilationists in the 1910s and 1920s; African Americans, if thought of at all, were considered unassimilable...This is a timely and thoughtful book. Glazer's historical sensitivity and, above all, his appreciation of the need to place African Americans at the centre of any engagement with multiculturalism, enables him to dissect and explain this phenomenon far more cogently than most commentators.
Times Higher Education Supplement - Desmond King
We Are All Multiculturalists Now is a reasoned and discerning analysis of an issue that has generated intense controversy… [Glazer’s] account of the history of America’s responses to immigration offers an invaluable context for assessing contemporary racial and ethnic issues.
Times Union [Albany, NY] - William Hogan
Glazer...is a distinguished social scientist and social critic...[This is a] densely packed book, the essential argument of which is that multiculturalism ‘is the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African Americans, in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many groups.'
Washington Post Book World - Jonathan Yardley
In this elegantly written book, Nathan Glazer provides a historically rich account of the rise of multiculturalism and explicates its political significance. He argues that the diffusion of multiculturalism has been driven by the singeing fault-line of 20th-century America, the position of African Americans. In the book's best chapter, on assimilation, Glazer explains how the discussion of this topic elided and ignored the position of black Americans—it was the assimilation of eastern and southern Europeans which exercised the assimilationists in the 1910s and 1920s; African Americans, if thought of at all, were considered unassimilable...This is a timely and thoughtful book. Glazer's historical sensitivity and, above all, his appreciation of the need to place African Americans at the centre of any engagement with multiculturalism, enables him to dissect and explain this phenomenon far more cogently than most commentators.
Times Higher Education Supplement
Glazer begins with a straightforward account of how, in a few short years, teachers in public elementary, middle, and secondary schools have come to take for granted something called 'multicultural education'...[He] suggests helpfully that what multiculturalism's enthusiasts share is an approach to education and to public culture that seeks to sustain hitherto derogated identities...We Are All Multiculturalists Now offers an insider's account of the debate over New York State's attempts at curriculum reform in the early Nineties, a process in which Mr. Glazer was intimately involved. It includes a reasonable discussion of what the guiding principles of curriculum reform should be, and it reflects temperately on the debate about national history standards.
In this short but important book, Nathan Glazer addresses one of the most controversial issues in American education—and outside of it, for that matter...[It is] a wise and temperate book.
[A] welcome addition to the growing canon [on multiculturalism]...a kind of battlefield primer for spectators and participants alike...[T]his is a sober, lucid and fair-minded book.
Glazer...is a distinguished social scientist and social critic...[This is a] densely packed book, the essential argument of which is that multiculturalism 'is the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African Americans, in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many groups.'
Washington Post Book World
The usefulness of the first half of the book is...in its common-sensical questions about the practical significance of educational ideologies—and the doubts Glazer expresses about the efficacy of difference curricula. His tone here is chastened and tentative—perfectly appropriate...there can be little argument that Glazer's reconsideration advances the current debate. This is a wise book.
Though troubling and significant issues remain in the struggles of women, gays and lesbians, and Hispanics, they pale by contrast with the far greater separateness, weight of grievances, and suffering of American blacks. This remains 'the American dilemma,' and Glazer has performed a useful service by reminding us of this fact.
Southern Humanities Review
Since it is already deeply entrenched in the schools, Glazer devoted much of his attention to multiculturalism in education. He provides a thoughtful analysis of four concerns raised by its influence there: to wit, whether it does or does not distort truth, imperil national unity, and undermine social harmony, and whether it affects students' learning positively or negatively. He also gives us something of an insider's view of the curricular and textbook wars in New York and California, and of the controversy over 'national standards' in history. Glazer is quite sensitive to the danger that the 'strongest' versions of multiculturalism could 'undermine what is still, on balance, a success in world history, a diverse society that continues to welcome further diversity, with a distinctive and common culture of some merit.' Be he does not think this will happen, because what the multiculturalists are really demanding is not separation, but inclusion under terms of equality.
Glazer is positive, but cautionary, towards multiculturalism. His perspective smacks of sociological savvy...Glazer raises many pertinent and illuminating considerations that teacher educators would find useful in analyzing multiculturalism in their classrooms and publications. There are too many to catalog here, but Glazer's discussion of them is a real contribution to this curriculum issue.
[Glazer] is aware of the complexity of the issues, of the many forms of and motives for multiculturalism, and of the multiple forces and dynamics affecting ethnic relations. Just as he doubts that multiculturalism is the solution to ethnic problems, so too he doubts that multiculturalism is the cause of America's ethnic tensions. Indeed, he is quite dismissive of those who have blown multiculturalism out of proportion, and turned it into the 'trojan horse' destroying American culture and society...This sober, even-handed approach is unlikely to satisfy either defenders or critics of multiculturalism, but many readers will find his balanced tome a welcome relief in what is an overheated and overpoliticised debate. It is certainly an easy book to read: well-written, full of interesting and revealing anecdotes, and mercifully devoid of political jargon or esoteric terminology.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
Nathan Glazer...understands the present situation...clearly, and with an admirable sensitivity to what certain multiculturalists are trying to achieve...As Mr. Glazer shows in a fascinating chapter, the educational theorists (including John Dewey) who spoke of the American 'melting pot' were thinking almost exclusively of the European immigrants to this country; race, in their vocabulary, meant what we now call ethnicity. European-Americans could and would in time disconnect themselves from their country of origin and cease to be known as 'hyphenated' Americans. African-Americans were never included in this vision and were often treated by the theorists as if they simply were not there.
We Are All Multiculturalists Now is a reasoned and discerning analysis of an issue that has generated intense controversy...[Glazer's ] account of the history of America's responses to immigration offers an invaluable context for assessing contemporary racial and ethnic issues.
Glazer...is a distinguished social scientist and social critic...[This is a] densely packed book, the essential argument of which is that multiculturalism 'is the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society Africal Americans, in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many groups. —Washington Post Book World
This book's title -- an echo of statements such as 'We are all Keynesians now' -- indicates an acceptance of the unavoidable, even by neoconservative types like eminent sociologist Glazer (The Limits of Social Policy ). Despite his earlier hopes that minorities would be included and assimilated into a greater American ideal, Glazer acknowledges that African Americans remain uniquely separated (by residence, intermarriage, dialects) from the larger society. Thus he reluctantly concedes that multiculturalism -- at least in public schools, his focus here -- has been institutionalized, as a way of compensating for that historical lack of assimilation. While Glazer acknowledges that multiculturalism responds to other societal forces -- immigration, feminism, the gay movement -- he argues that blacks' unaddressed grievances are the engine driving this proliferation. Glazer has written an accessible if limited narrative about multicultural conflicts that fit this theory. He describes debates about a new social-studies curriculum in New York State and new textbooks in California, and sketches a brief history of attempts by the educational system first to ignore and then to acknowledge the contributions of different ethnic groups. Then he examines the failures of assimilation for African Americans. His conclusion that the 'culture wars' stem from this lingering injustice is powerful if not exactly complete. For example, consideration of the vigorous multiculturalism in Canada and Australia and its different historical causes there would have been helpful.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
If all you know about Nathan Glazer is that, in 1965, with Irving Kristol, he founded the Public Interest -- the intellectual flagship for disillusioned liberal policy wonks everywhere, the prime incubator of neoconservative social thought -- then the title of his new book is apt to sound darkly ironic, verging on the sarcastic. That, after all, is the usual tone of polemic; and the neoconservative intellectuals were, and are, mostly polemicists.
But Glazer himself describes his own trajectory as that of a mild radical who turned into a mild conservative. A sublimated Limbaughism with footnotes is not his style. We Are All Multiculturalists Now proves far more pacific than polemical. It sues for peace in the culture wars.
Perhaps some multiculturalists are wild-eyed bisexual Maoists who once spray-painted "Death to Amerika" on the walls. Glazer does not argue that point (which so preoccupies some conservatives). "But," he writes, "if we look further into the objectives of most of those who promote a strong multicultural thrust, and who in doing so presented a somewhat lopsided view of our history, we will find that they promote it, for the most part, not because they aim at divisiveness and separatism as a good, not because they want to break up the union, but because they aim at a fuller inclusiveness of deprived groups."
He provides a brief, not terribly deep survey of multiculturalism, recognizing the existence of varying currents within it. He ponders the mechanics of implementing even very moderate sorts of multicultural reform in basic education. After looking into several recent textbooks, Glazer remarks: "One wondered what specialists, let alone fifth graders or high school students, could know about 'gender roles' in pre-Columbian Indian societies or in the earliest agricultural communities of the Middle East."
Yet he accepts multiculturalism as a necessary evil. He calls it "the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African-Americans, in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many groups."
Now, from one perspective, that is the understatement of the century. Coming from Glazer himself, it carries enormous weight. It suggests an almost total reversal of his work from Beyond the Melting Pot (1963) through Affirmative Discrimination (1975) and beyond. Previously, Glazer assumed that every ethnic group started out in some kind of enclave or ghetto, moved providentially through the phases of assimilation and eventually found its way, at last, to the suburbs and the board rooms in representative numbers. Remove such barriers as legally sanctioned discrimination in housing and employment and -- voila! -- the ghetto would disappear. If, as in the case of black ghettoes, that did not happen, the problem lay in the unintended consequences of existing government programs. The provisions of the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-'60s embodied the necessary and sufficient conditions to overcome the history of racism.
Glazer no longer quite believes this. At the very least, he believes, we must have multicultural education, too. And the less belligerent their conservative opponents (by implication), the less the well-meaning and hard-working multiculturalist teachers in the public schools will be driven to embrace the theory that ancient Africans invented the flying saucer, or whatever. That sounds like the height of pragmatic rationality. But to his readers on the right, it may seem that Nathan Glazer has shifted, mildly, back to radicalism. --Scott McLemee
A wry statement of reluctant resignation to America's prevailing cultural realities, by Glazer, a Harvard sociologist and education/social-policy expert. In such books as Ethnic Dilemmas and The Limits of Social Policy , Glazer has consistently argued that the anti-discrimination and voting-rights legislation of 1964 and '65 alone—without measures like affirmative action in employment or busing for school desegregation—would support black economic and social mobility and lead to a more equal society. However, in these eight short essays on public-school curriculum reform and American society, he explores why African-Americans live and go to school more separate than ever from other Americans. It's a situation Glazer so deplores that it prompts him to see his own previous attitudes as complacent. While he still avows his faith in democracy's capacity for justice, he cannot deny its failure so far to assimilate people of African descent to the same extent that it has absorbed European immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and even those increasingly arriving from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. This is certainly not what his previous studies of ethnicity (co-authored with Daniel P. Moynihan) had led him to expect. One of the results of the inability of the dominant society to absorb African-Americans, Glazer suggests, is the rise of multiculturalism, spurred by black anger at traditions that have rejected them. Multiculturalism, he asserts, is now an unavoidable element of American life, and one that we must come to grips with. This book is remarkable for the plainspoken grace of its concessions, and Glazer also maintains an eloquent honesty abouthis reservations regarding government-imposed remedies, and about his unaccustomed position of being stymied for answers. One of the culture wars' quietly dedicated establishmentarian soldiers has laid down his rhetorical arms to prepare for a more civil and salutary engagement.
