Diversity In The Cult Of Ethnicity By Arthur M.

Countless Supreme Court cases, riots, and continuing occurrences of discrimination have caused many people to wonder if celebrating differences might actually be more harmful to the United States of America than it is beneficial. Nobody seems to advocate for the complete eradication of diversity in the nation, but there are some intellectuals like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the author of “The Cult of Ethnicity”, who believe an overemphasis on diversity decreases the solidarity of American nationalism. To some extent this might hold true, but the benefits of recognizing diversity, as defined by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and Richard Rodriguez, including an increase in the general population’s sense of self-worth and in the level of innovation,
Are some forms of or lack of diversity more detrimental to society? Are there some forms of diversity that will affect society by its presence or lack thereof? Really the answer to these questions depends on the stage of advancement a society or institution is at, and the needs of the people functioning in this society or institution. For example, The United States seems to be in the middle of a stage that demands a sort of visual diversity in popular culture, especially with the rise of the We Need Diverse Books campaign, body image movements launched by companies like Dove and Victoria’s Secret, and also the demand for minority representation in major film and T.V. productions. This demand for diversity is different from the demand for diversity during the nation’s first couple of decades, in which citizens early on demanded the right to be diverse in their choice of practiced
This is what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. feared when he wrote “The Cult of Ethnicity”, an essay which advocates for a greater emphasis of American values and calls for a decrease in the emphasis individual cultures. According to Schlesinger, a continuous emphasis on multiculturalism only sets the country up for “fragmentation, resegregation and tribalization of American life” (Schlesinger, 144). This is a valid statement, if it were not for the fact that attempting to unite the entire American population, one that was “inescapably English,” had already fragmented and segregated the nation before (Schlesinger, 143). To pick a single culture to be the nation’s culture, unless it is a culture that is reflective of all other cultures, makes that culture supreme and makes people who did initially have any ties to that culture outcasts within society, never feeling a genuine sense of belonging. This does not mean that a society cannot be unified under a single culture of sorts while still celebrating individual differences. This is what the United States of America is moving