In Lenin's Tomb, David Remnick describes how, as the power of the Communist regime waned, people hurried to uncover the truth about events they believed had been misrepresented by the government or suppressed altogether (New York: Random House, 1993). As a result, the real stories about the previous 40 years came to light -- the names and numbers of people murdered in Stalin's purges, the economic and human costs of collectivization and industrialization, the casualties of Chernobyl. ... Citizens were finally able to see the shape of their nation's history.
Only people ruled by totalitarian regimes have their history completely hidden by lies and propaganda so that, when a regime falls, they must rediscover their past. But all histories are flawed. Historians leave some things out and place too much importance on others; we are all creatures of our time. In democratic countries, scholars and ordinary citizens constantly revisit their history in order to correct these omissions and distortions and get a truer and more comprehensive picture of their past. The current efforts to write a "multicultural" American history to replace the great-(white)-man type of American history that we inherited are part of this democratic tradition.
The trouble is, some multicultural historians are not setting the record straight, as Lawrence Fuchs, a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, points out in The American Kaleidoscope (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990). In place of the one-sided picture of American history as an epic of democracy in which right inevitably triumphed, they present an equally one-sided story of a nation whose history always ran counter to its ideals. These multicultural historians, says Fuchs, view U.S. history as a saga of victims and victimization. They present U.S. history primarily in terms of how a white majority wronged minorities and thus encourage young Americans to view their country, and one another, with distrust and contempt.
No one would deny that American history is, in part, the story of victims and victimization. This is an important theme, and in the past it was neglected in our schools. But, as Fuchs says, it is not the principal theme. And victimizing individuals or groups is not unique to the history of the U.S. What is unique in our history is the legal structure that has given people who are wronged a way of seeking their rights: "The Declaration of Independence and a system of laws based on the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution ... [have] made it possible for individuals from all groups to battle prejudice and unjust laws with an amazing measure of success."
Insisting that minorities were merely victims -- the passive sufferers of injustice -- also distorts the role of minorities, and especially nonwhites, in our history. People like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King were central players in the effort to make the U.S. live up to its ideals. They protested the hypocrisy of a government that promised rights to all but denied them to people of color. Indeed, as Fuchs points out, they refused to be victims and in doing so secured for members of their group their rights as equal citizens.
Fuchs's alternative to the victim-victimizer version of U.S. history is what he calls "civic-centered history." Its focus is on the ideals, institutions and experiences that Americans share rather than the group differences that separate us -- on themes that reflect, as Fuchs says, the unum rather than the pluribus.
What are some of these themes? One is the development of religious freedom -- the "remarkable ... American invention of separation of church and state and the evolution of protection given to religious liberty." Another is the long and continuing fight of African-Americans to obtain their rights. A third theme -- and one that includes most of the other themes -- is the effort to establish individual, rather than group, rights.
In many other countries, minority groups are given special privileges. For example, they may be allocated special jobs in government agencies that only people from their group can fill. Our ideal has always been to base this kind of thing on individual merit rather than membership in a group. A civic-centered history would show how members of groups here have struggled -- sometimes successfully and sometimes not -- to get their rights as individuals and be judged on their merit rather than on the fact that they are Asian or Catholic or female -- or white.