People often see history as a set of immutable facts and events that took place in the past. But it's really a story we tell ourselves about these facts and events, and we rewrite the story as we get new insights and develop new understanding of the past. This country has always been multicultural: Black, white, and red people have been part of it from the beginning. But as long as history focused mainly on the deeds of rulers, it did not tell the story of contributions made by people who never sat in the White House or led an army.
Now, historians also see history in terms of social, cultural, political and economic movements. This gives us a richer and more accurate picture of how our country cam to be what it is-not because it excludes what we already knew but because it includes much more. And it will help us to understand and do justice to the multicultural nature of our history.
But as some people rewrite our history to present the role minorities have played in developing our democratic institutions, other people are saying, "Forget it." These critics insist that the very idea of a history common to all Americans is meaningless and a sham. They say that the only history valid for their children is the history of their own ethnic and cultural group. Supporters often call this approach "multicultural," but "ethnocentric" would describe it more accurately. It excludes instead of including-and it simplifies and distorts the history of our multicultural democracy.
What would a history that does justice to our development as a multicultural society look like? Legal historian Robert Cottrol, writing in the Winter 1990 American Educator, offers some straight forward ideas.
As Cottrol sees it, the history of our democracy is the story of democracy's transformation from a great idea into what he calls "the most successful multi-ethnic and multiracial society of our time, perhaps of all time." But, as he points out, this continuing transformation did not take place without a long, painful and sometimes ugly struggle in which minorities played a central role.
The civil rights movement of the 1960s, the most obvious example of this struggle, is often taught as though it came out of nowhere. In fact, it was the climax of many battles by many people who tried to turn the promises of democracy into realities. The movement began when our history began, with native Americans' resistance to being conquered, and went on to slave uprisings and slave petitions for freedom, which cited the same natural rights our founding fathers invoked. Paul Cuffee's success, in 1783, at winning voting rights for the black citizens of Massachusetts was another chapter in the struggle. So were the concerted efforts of Chinese-Americans in the 1800s to use the courts to gain civil rights and the battles for women's suffrage. Jews, who challenged the quotas that denied them access to universities, were part of that struggle, as were Hispanics who challenged school segregation in the 1940s and won.
This struggle to define our democracy still continues, and it will as long as our country does. It also has had a profound influence on the rest of the world because it has helped turn abstract principles like equity, justice, individual rights and equality of opportunity into political movements, laws, programs and institutions-concrete things. And if our children walk away from an American history course without understanding this, the history they have studied is a travesty.
The point of all this is not to get more minorities and more women mentioned in history textbooks. They are already "mentioned" constantly in sidebars and "special features," and pictures are carefully portioned out so each group gets its share. If we take this mechanical and superficial approach to the multicultural and multiracial aspect of American history, we'll never get it right.
And magnifying some figures and events in our history while ignoring or damning others (whether in the name of history that is multicultural or Eurocentric or Afrocentric or some other "centric") will only impoverish our students. All of them need to learn about the lives and political ideals of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. This is not because they never made any mistakes but because all our students, no matter what group they belong to, are equal heirs to the ideals of these men and to the nation they helped to create. To say otherwise is to limit and isolate students and deny them their full heritage, as well as the means to participate in and further democracy in the future.
But we also limit and deny students when we don't give them a chance to learn about Paul Cuffee or Martin Luther King or about Lee Yick, who fought for his right to get a license for his business all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. These heroes are part of all of our students' legacy, too. As Cottrol says, their stories cannot be "put to one side, reserved for students of some races, but not others, or marginalized as sidebars to American history" because what these people achieved "is American history."