Will Morrisey Reviews

Jeffrey Ostler: The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

 

At the end of this history, Jeffrey Ostler lays his political cards on the table: “The beginning of the twenty-first [century] holds the possibility of an end to economic and political colonialism and the reemergence of fully sovereign Indian communities in Sioux country and throughout North America,” a possibility that will require “non-Indians to recognize the legitimacy of Native aspirations and to alter powerful structures that continue to constrain their realization.” Specifically, respecting the Lakota Sioux, this would mean return of the Black Hills territory in South Dakota. Although a 1980 Supreme Court decision offered monetary compensation for “the United States’ theft of the Black Hills,” the Sioux rejected this offer and demanded the land itself.

This, then, is a political history not only in the ordinary sense—an account of struggles over who rules a land and a people—but a work of political advocacy. Should the Black Hills and other lands formerly ruled by American Indians be returned to their full control? Are such “Native aspirations” in fact legitimate? Ostler provides substantial information to his readers, enabling them to make their own independent judgments, irrespective of the rhetorical nudges he delivers along the way.

He begins with the Louisiana Purchase, the centerpiece of President Jefferson’s policy of extending the “extended republic” of the United States. Jefferson called this an “empire of liberty,” meaning the self-government of American citizens in territories that would ascend to the status of states in the Union, not mere colonies subordinate to a metropole—as the British regime had regarded its American holdings. According to Ostler, this was scarcely an empire of liberty, at least not for all, inasmuch as it defined citizenship as white and male. He is mistaken. There was nothing in the United States Constitution that so defines American citizenship, and as Thomas G. West has shown, free blacks and some women were entitled to vote in some states. [1] According to Ostler, the “theorists of the American nation” thought “that the United States embodied principles that demanded universal adherence,” such as property rights held by individuals. This, too, isn’t exactly true. The Founders held it to be self-evident that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, including the right to hold property, inhere in individuals by nature; their regime aimed at securing those rights. But they recognized that many peoples throughout the world faced serious impediments to doing so. Unlike the Americans, they had no experience in self-government at all; more profoundly, the truth of natural human equality of rights were not self-evident to them. On the contrary, persons living in many regimes had not conceived of the idea of ‘rights’ or even of ‘nature’ at all. Their ignorance of nature and of rights did not mean that nature and the rights endowed by its Creator did not exist; their ignorance did mean that they did not know that government should secure such rights or, in some cases, they did not know how to frame such governments. 

Ostler claims that the Founders believed that “Indians had no right to continue wasteful and inefficient uses of land or to perpetuate barbaric social and religious practices once civilization made its demands.” This is a somewhat garbled statement of John Locke’s argument, with which the Founders did indeed concur. Locke contends that no people has the right to continue wasteful and inefficient uses of land; this contentious, it should be remarked, is shared by ‘environmentalists’ today, although they define waste and inefficiency rather differently than Locke does. To defend the Indians’ claims, Ostler eventually cites the predictions of contemporary Indians that modern attempt to conquer nature, initiated by Europeans, must fail, and that Indians’ ways of using the land, supporting small human populations, will soon be vindicated. The prediction, brandished by many ‘Whites’ today as well, remains to be realized. As for barbaric social and religious practices, the Founders would never say that they became morally wrong “once civilization made its demands”; they were always wrong, but for millennia human beings hadn’t known that. “Thus,” Ostler writes, “although U.S. policy recognized Indian tribes as nations with limited sovereignty and made treaties with them, American leaders envisioned nothing less than the eventual extinguishing of all tribal claims to land,” as distinguished from property rights, which can be individual, corporate, or political. That is, the Americans intended to extend a modern state in addition to a commercial republican regime.

To do so, the Indians would need to be “assimilated.” As Ostler sees, “assimilation was antithetical to racial thinking, since it presumed that Native Americans possessed the same innate mental and moral capacities as Europeans.” Their “ways of life were inferior”—their regimes and their tribal organizations—but not their natural rights and abilities. Unfortunately, this judgment of political inferiority became “lined to increasingly systematized theories of racial classification and hierarchy.” Exactly so: the same abandonment of natural right theory for ‘race science’ or ‘race theory’ also bedeviled the cause of slave emancipation, which the Founders had championed. This may be seen in the writings of John C. Calhoun and the many other advocates of perpetuating the enslavement of African Americans. According to the new generation of “American elites,” Indians “were an inferior race that was inevitably destined to perish,” even as the European Americans were ‘manifestly destined’ to triumph. ‘Manifest Destiny,’ a historical claim, began to replace self-evident rights discovered in nature. But that is tantamount to saying that many among the second and third generations of Americans abandoned the philosophic, theological, and legal principles of the Founders.

“Early American imperial thought, then, denied the necessity for colonialism in the sense of rule over others. Settlers would move west, but, in sharp contrast to the colonies under the British empire, they would enjoy the same freedoms as eastern citizens,” forming states legally equal to the original thirteen. “Nor, according to American theorists, would expansion require permanent rule over subjugated people.” Rather, Americans expected “to exercise very moderate forms of authority over temporarily enclaved Indian communities,” preparatory to “the larger process of dispossession and absorption.” Things didn’t work out that way in practice because United States citizens “consistently overstated their capacity to subdue armed resistance and severely underestimated the pervasiveness of non-violent Native resistance to dispossession and assimilation. Consequently, building an empire of liberty required the conquest of Indian people as well as the systematic and enduring exercise of power over subjected Indian communities.” Our own contemporaries will recognize this as the problem of regime change or revolution. The Founders solved it by making war against—killing or exiling—American colonists loyal to the British Empire and its regime. The United States Congress to an important degree failed to solve it when it attempted to ‘reconstruct’ or revolutionize the oligarchic regime of slaveholding plantation owners in the South. President Washington had met with some success in this strategy respecting the Five Civilized Tribes of Amerindians in the deep South, but the local populations, especially in Georgia, undermined his policy a generation later, leading to the infamous ‘Trail of Tears.’ It is noteworthy that the major struggles pitted whites against whites. That is because these were regime struggles first and foremost, not simply struggles over ‘race.’

Often, even usually, American Indians “clung tenaciously to community and tribal affiliations,” even as they reconfigured them, adapting to changing circumstances. “They refused to accept assimilation, refused to go away.” This was nowhere more evident than in the plains of South Dakota, among the Sioux. 

President Jefferson sent Merriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the northwest tributaries of the Mississippi River, especially the Missouri River. There they encountered the Sioux, with whom they quarreled; the Sioux demanded more gifts of tribute than the explorers were willing to part with. The Sioux generally had found Europeans unimpressive, having dealt with French, British, and Spanish traders for years. They themselves were relatively recent arrivals to the area, having lived there “probably no more than two generations,” since the early 1700s. From Minnesota they had moved west, “using guns acquired through trade” to displace the Omaha, Otoe, Iowa, Missouri, and Ponca tribes. By Lewis and Clark’s time, the westernmost groups of Sioux “had acquired horses and were becoming a buffalo-hunting people.” In subsequent decades, “the Plains Sioux waged intermittent war against Kiowas, Crows, Shoshones, Assiniboines, and Skidi Pawnees to gain access to new hunting areas, and by 1850 their population numbered about 15,000, ruling “much of the vast region between the Platte and the Yellowstone.” That is, the Sioux had their own strategies of empire and regime change.

It is worth pausing to consider this information, as it rather spoils the moral foundation of any Sioux claims to the Great Plains. The tribes they displaced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries all had prior claims to the land. Most had arrived there because they had been driven from their previous lands by more powerful Indian nations. It should come as no surprise that human beings in North America acted more or less as human beings did in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America: fighting over territory with no particular respect for natural right, an idea discovered by philosophers, not warriors. Like the Americans later on, they practiced a policy of assimilation, capturing women and children in attacks on other tribes and ‘adopting’ them.

Knowing that such facts damage his case for the Sioux, Ostler is at pains to tell us that “unlike European Americans,” the Sioux “did not divide the world’s people into the civilized and the primitive and imagine an inevitable and total triumph of the former over the latter,” and had no “ideologically articulated commitment to an empire that would encompass the entire continent.” Nor were their incursions “planned very far in advance,” centrally coordinated from a distant capital. Of course, all this means is that the Sioux, unlike the people of the United States, lacked ‘modernity.’ They had no modern state and little in the way of modern technology, except for the guns they obtained from Europeans. Their imperialism was less impressive than that of the Americans because they lacked the population size, political organization, and technological power of the Americans. They were surely no less intent on grasping for power over the land, and no less successful until the bigger fish swam along. This doesn’t mean that the Sioux have no legal claims to territory on the Great Plains; in the course of the nineteenth century they signed treaties with the Americans, and the Americans violated them more than once. But to say that they enjoy some sort of moral advantage over the ‘Whites’ is rather silly. Ostler wisely attempts no formal argument on that point. 

Ostler deftly sketches the political organization of the Sioux nation. They consisted of seven groups they called the Seven Council Fires. The Council wasn’t “a political entity” but rather “an identity based on a shared language, culture, and history,” its internal relations characterized by fluctuating alliances, rulers, and locations. Each of the Council Fires was in turn divided into oyate, “a term that can be translated as tribe, people, or nation,” and each oyate “consisted of several tiyospayes or bands of a few hundred people linked by kinship. “There is little evidence of large multiband councils before the 1850s.” Each band had a chief who could be removed by the people. The total population of Sioux increased dramatically in the nineteenth century, doubling between 1850 and 1880. 

That is, the organization of the Sioux resembled the ancient European societies described by Aristotle and Fustel de Coulanges, societies predating the establishment of poleis or ‘city-states,’ much less the modern state. Their religion also resembled that of many other peoples of antiquity and indeed of today. According to the Sioux, the Wakan Tanka rules the world. Although this term has often been translated as ‘God’ or ‘Great Spirit,’ it is no creator-God, nor is it a person. Wakan Tanka refers to “the spiritual powers of the universe,” immanent in all things, not holy or separate from them. In moving to the Great Plains and “becoming a Buffalo Nation,” the Sioux believed themselves to be a people favored by the Wakan Tanka. “They continually reminded people of their dependence on the life-giving powers that suffused the world.” This amounts to a sort of Hegelianism without rationalism, and Ostler duly notes the tendency among some nineteenth-century Americans to abandon the Founders’ natural-rights Christian rationalism for newly fashionable historicist Christian rationalism, a democratized and Christianized Hegelianism. This is indeed an ideational difference, drawn from radically different sources, but not so much of a moral difference, when you come right down to it. By 1846, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton could win applause by intoning that the “White race” was obeying God’s command to “subdue and replenish the earth.” In the eastern United States, Indian “tribes that resisted civilization met extinction,” and the same fate would hold for the Indians of the West. It seems that the Sioux had held similar opinions of the peoples they had defeated, lacking only the political and technological means to enforce them so successfully.

Avid for modern “weapons, ammunition, metal tools, clothing, decorative ornaments, sugar, coffee, clay pipes, blankets, and tobacco,” the Sioux began “willingly hunt[ing] more bison than necessary for subsistence” in order to provide the Americans with robes and hides. “Hunting bison for the market was one of many causes that contributed to the decline of bison populations in the 1840 and 1850s.” The Sioux also traded furs for alcohol, which led to some violence, but this was not widespread among them. The Americans brought with them not only tradeable goods but smallpox; it must be said, and Ostler does say, that before the disease had spread they inoculated many of the Sioux. In all, “Plains Sioux in the 1820s and 1830s had little reason to think Americans would pose a serious threat.” Even in the 1840s, the increasing numbers of Americans they saw were only passing through to points west, and they could be charged fees for their consumption of game, grass, and timber. 

However, in that same decade such diseases as cholera and measles, along with smallpox, increased. The Sioux may have regarded these epidemics as forms of magic inflicted upon them by the American travelers or as punishments inflicted by the Wakan Tanka for transgressions of taboos and improper performance of rituals. However, the main pressure was political. By midcentury, the Americans (who had substantially increased their southwestern territories by defeating Mexico in the 1848-49 war) began to attempt to settle Plains tribes into reservations, a move preliminary to assimilation into American civil life. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 “specified the territory of each tribe and called for intertribal peace,” the latter having been scarce enough for many centuries. The Plains Indians “recognized the right of the United Sates to establish roads and military posts within these reservations and pledged to respect the passage of emigrants” in exchange for U.S. annuities to the tribes for the next fifty years. To distribute these monies, the United States government placed officers at “agencies on or near each tribe’s reservation.” As Ostler admits, “It is difficult to know for sure what the Sioux understood they were doing when they signed this treaty,” but in any event it “failed to take into account…the decentralized and voluntary character of Plains Sioux political organization.” The signers “did not necessarily represent all the bands within these oyate, and they certainly did not represent other oyate.” 

Understandably, a series of wars followed, beginning in 1854 and lasting into the 1890s. At the same time, Americans attempted to change the regime of the Sioux much as Washington had done with the Five Civilized Tribes, decades earlier—exhorting them “to take up the plow” instead of their (relatively recent) way of life based on hunting bison. This policy was enforced primarily by government annuities, the manipulation of which gave government agents considerable sway. But the military side of the policy intensified in the 1860s, when the eastern Sioux, still in Minnesota, thought to rebel against Minnesota settlers when the vast majority of U.S. forces were engaged in the Civil War. It didn’t work; the Americans pushed the eastern Sioux onto the Plains and in 1863 the U.S. military pursued, intending “to subjugate the Sioux once and for all.” After the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman led a larger force into the region, but without much success. The Sioux had honed their own military skills for decades while fighting rival tribes on the Plains; the U.S. Congress wanted to cut funds for the Army in the wake of the Civil War; Reconstruction in the South required about 20,000 soldiers there; and many of the former Abolitionists now turned their attention to the suffering of the Indians at the hands of corrupt agents in the Office of Indian Affairs. Army officers, led by the decidedly unsentimental General Sherman, faced off against these “Indian lovers,” as they styled these Christian reformers. They would frustrate one another for the next three decades, but not to the advantage of the Sioux.

President Grant attempted to resolve the matter by establishing the Indian Peace Commission, which consisted of four civilians and three army officers. Some Sioux signed treaties proposed by the Commission, others did not. And once again, even the Sioux tribes that signed the treaties may not have fully understood them. True to their longtime intention of changing the regime of Indian tribes and nations, “the words of [the principal] treaty were designed to erase Sioux ways of life” by encouraging agriculture and by privatizing communal lands. Such militants as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull refused to sign any treaty at all. The geographic center of military resistance to the United States formed between the Yellowstone and the Black Hills; “if the U.S. army tried to invade the region it would face a formidable alliance of all northern Plains Indians still willing to fight.”

In so organizing, the militant Sioux did exactly what European monarchs had done in the sixteenth century. They “attempted to create new forms of centralized authority to resist a sustained invasion”—something along the lines of a modern state—with Sitting Bull as “War Chief—Leader of the entire Sioux nation.” Sitting Bull soon faced the same troubles as the kings of England and France had experienced. “Sioux decision-making processes remain would remain decentralized” and political union “was difficult to sustain.” The North American equivalent of feudal lords would have their say, as indeed the American equivalents of such lords, based on the plantations of the South, had had their say in Congress in the decades before the Civil War. This notwithstanding, the militants “had ample cause to think they could prevail.” Large herds of bison remained in the region they ruled; up to now, they “had an impressive record of avoiding destructive engagements and checking the American advance”; and “they had reason to think that the spiritual powers of the universe, accessible through ceremony and proper moral behavior, would continue to assist them.” Materially, militarily, and spiritually, they seemed to themselves well-armed. The four main U.S. government agencies for the western Sioux “could do little except try to persuade and cajole Indians to take up farming or wear ‘civilized’ clothing.” Assimilation had not advanced much.

One agent, J. C. O’Connor, realized that agriculture wasn’t the best use of the Great Plains, anyway. The Plains were home to the bison. Bison are herd animals, not vegetation. “Furthermore, since Indian men were used to ‘the chase,'” O’Connor reasoned, “and were ‘little inclined to farming operations,’ stockraising was a good match to ‘their habits.'” Quite likely so, but it was too little, too late, and too many other government agencies preferred to keep the non-militants among the Sioux dependent upon the annuities the agents dispersed or withheld. What is more, American cattlemen saw the same thing O’Connor did, moving to occupy prime grazing lands. And the Black Hills also held its real or imagined attraction to Americans, when small amounts of gold were found there. But “the Plains Sioux looked upon the Black Hills as the center of their land, indeed, as the very heart of the earth.” Yet claims of sanctity for land have never held any weight in American courts, whether animated by theories of natural right or of historical progress. The regime clash therefore continued and intensified. 

Thus “the Grant Administration’s peace policy began to wane.” It hadn’t produced peace, for one thing. With the defiance of Sioux militants, “Americans who had once favored a policy of kindness were losing patience,” even as the Reconstruction of the South was losing favor. The Panic of 1873 produced tension among workers and capitalists in the cities, farmers and capitalists in the countryside. It seemed to many Americans that they had reunified the country in 1865 only to see it threatened again in the late 1870s. To relieve these civil-social pressures in the heavily populated East, Grant hoped to induce young men to make their fortunes in the West. He sent a commission to the Sioux, offering to buy or lease the Black Hills for the substantial sum of $100,000 per year, but the Sioux would have none of that. The strategy worked up by his administration was clever: allow Americans to continue their movement into the Black Hills while withdrawing U.S. troops; wait for Indian attacks upon the miners, which “would provide a pretext for a final conquest of the northern militants.” “The government would demand that the agency Sioux sell the Black Hills at whatever price it decreed and threaten to starve them if they refused.” After that, the overconfident Sitting Bull and his militants could be crushed.

A famous setback occurred in June 1876, when General George Armstrong Custer led his men to disaster at Little Bighorn. The Great Sioux War had begun. Just as the Sioux underestimated the Americans, the Americans had underestimated the Sioux—as peoples ruled by opposing regimes so often do, and indeed had done in the previous decade, during the Civil War. In September, a U.S. delegation told the Oglala Sioux that if the refused to cede certain lands to the Americans, “Congress would cut off their ratios, the army would punish them, and the government would take the Black Hills anyway.” Only about ten percent of the adult male Oglalas signed (the treaty supposedly framing U.S.-Sioux relations had stipulated seventy-five percent), but the commissioners were satisfied. Obviously, most of the Sioux were not, and the war was on. It didn’t last long, and although the Sioux and their Cheyenne allies killed far more Americans than Americans killed Indians, the Americans’ superior manpower numbers told in the end. However, the Indians did win peace with the United States, along with the “freedom from fear and hunger” peace entailed. The settlement also ended “the ravages of intertribal warfare,” as the United States would serve as an arbiter of any disputes that arose among the Plains Indians. 

As happened many times, the United States soon reneged on one of its promises under the peace agreement, whereby it pledged to establish an agency in the northern section of Sioux territory. The American leverage over the Sioux now derived from the threat of moving many of them out of the Great Plains. Some Sioux chiefs were sufficiently intimidated by this prospect to break with Crazy Horse, the tribal chief of the northern Sioux, who demanded that the Americans fulfill their promise. Initially, the Americans temporized, but eventually Crazy Horse was arrested and imprisoned; he died in American custody. “By the late 1870s, the Sioux had become a captive people.”

Within the new terms of their political life, the Sioux continued to negotiate with the Americans, and at the highest levels. In September 1877, worried about the Americans’ intention to move them ‘temporarily’ off their now-reduced land to a location along the Missouri River, a delegation of chieftains met with President Rutherford B. Hayes. They cited the effects of alcohol in those riverboat towns, Chief Red Cloud saying there was “too much whiskey there”—a line that appealed to Hayes’s wife, an ardent temperance warrior. They appealed to the universal sentiment of patriotism, Chief Spotted Tail saying that “the country I live in is mine,” and I love what is my own. Hayes assured them that the move was only for the winter, necessitated by the threat of starvation caused by the decline of game in the territories set aside for the reservation. You must learn to become farmers, he said. With a sense of the importance of public opinion in a republican regime, the Sioux leaders next turned to the media—specifically, a reporter for the New York Herald—telling him that supplies could indeed be shipped from the Missouri to the agencies supplying Sioux populations. Returning to the White House the following day, they engaged in a bit of political theater, costuming themselves in American clothes, thereby “dramatizing their willingness to change.” Hayes remained obdurate. By now, after the stinging defeat at Little Big Horn, the American public “favored a policy of dealing firmly with the Sioux.” Under those circumstances, Hayes intended to show no weakness.

Where, then, did the regime change strategy stand at this point? “Many Sioux leaders were genuinely willing to ‘become like the white man,’ though only in the limited sense that they wanted to prosper and were willing to incorporate certain elements of American ways of life to do so.” ‘Yes’ to schooling in the English language, given the “practical advantages” of knowing it; ‘no’ to full assimilation. The dwindling bison population weakened Sioux attempts at preserving their way of life, however, as did their consequently ever-increasing dependency upon the U.S. government for their supplies. Even here, the regime difference surfaced, as the government wanted to give them only processed meat, which prevented the Sioux from using hides and other parts of the slaughtered animals for making their traditional clothing, shelter (specifically, bison hides for tipis), and ornaments. U.S. agents aimed at getting the Sioux to disperse over the prairie on farms—forming the Prairie equivalent of a Jeffersonian yeomanry—and thus diluting the tribal institutions and habits of the Sioux regimes. The Sioux prudently resisted. For example, at one settlement they took the new building materials and constructed houses along streams, “thus creating elongated villages.” And “indeed, the relative permanence of houses would make it more difficult for the government to atomize Oglalas in the future.” A regime is more than an arrangement of physical elements, and U.S.-imposed rearrangements of those elements could be reworked to preserve the old ways of life. They adapted to the disappearance of the bison by hunting other game, including elk, deer, and pronghorn antelopes not only for food but for the hides, antlers, and bones the Americans had tried to block them from obtaining. [2] Increasingly, the American agents saw J.C. O’Connor’s point, that herding cattle made more sense on the Great Plains than farming did, although Sioux kinship-based communalism continued to resist thoroughgoing adoption of American-style individual property rights.

The character of the American regime itself was changing, complicating matters further. Notions of ‘Manifest Destiny’ and ‘race science,’ which galvanized some Americans prior to the Civil War, were now coalescing into the frankly historicist constellation of doctrines whose advocates (often temperance and civil service reform advocates) were beginning to call themselves “Progressives.’ These “theories of social evolution” fed into thinking about Indian policy, further exaggerating hopes “that assimilation could be accomplished with relative ease.” “The key” to this enterprise “was to establish the proper environment and, as proved the case in many of the Progressives’ efforts, schooling was sculpted edge of that key, indispensable to unlocking the door to ‘change.’ “Armed with certain knowledge of their own superiority, boundless optimism in humanity’s plasticity, and unflappable confidence in their ability to direct social evolution, the ‘friends of the Indians’ launched the most comprehensive and sustained assault on Native ways of life in U.S. history.” Ostler finds the exemplar of the Progressive mindset in Richard Henry Pratt, who persuaded the U.S. Army to use abandoned military barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania for a school dedicated to ‘modernize’ Indian children. Pratt had the children’s names Anglicized, their hair cut, their behavior regimented in military drills and enforced by corporal punishment (seldom used by Indian parents). His intention was to return the students to the reservations, where they could work to reform their people. It didn’t work. Returning students were out of place, and “by the late 1880s, assimilationists were wringing their hands over the ‘relapse problem,'” as the Sioux clung to their guns and religion. Ostler himself wrings his hands over this American attempt at “cultural genocide”—a rather inflammatory term for regime change—but the Progressives of course did not restrict their ambitions to the ‘Red’ peoples. Whites, too, were to undergo regime change animated by progressive-historicist principles in many ways antithetical to natural-rights constitutionalism.

Regime change had been, and would have continued to be, difficult enough without the intervention on Progressives. After viewing a performance of the Sun Dance, a U.S. observer told Chief Red Dog, “Our grandfathers used to be like yours hundreds and thousands of years ago. Now we are different. Your religion brought you the buffalo, ours brought us locomotives and talking wires.” True enough, but what did that signify to Red Cloud? He preferred the buffalo. Such “heathenish dances,” along with polygamy, reluctance to send children to American schools, and giving away annuity goods seemed wicked to the Americans but not to the Sioux. Attempts to convert the Sioux to Christianity were equally futile, as they inclined to think of Jesus as one god among many, another bearer of spiritual powers, a new way “to obtain spiritual power.” Sioux religiosity wasn’t founded on doctrine but on practice; any practice might be tested for its effectiveness, and if it worked it worked. 

Depending upon Indian chiefs, yet attempting regime change many chiefs didn’t want, the Americans floundered. They never found the right balance of persuasion, inducement, and coercion. Their efforts did exacerbate factionalism among the Sioux, who divided into those who wanted some form of regime change, those who wanted to go through the motions, and those who wanted to resist.

Of the latter, Chief Sitting Bull was among the most recalcitrant. “The most experienced” U.S. Indian agent in western Sioux country, James McLaughlin, had enjoyed some success in winning over some of the previous hostile Sioux tribes. Sitting Bull was another matter. McLaughlin found him “a stocky man, with an evil face and shifty eyes, pompous, vain, and boastful.” The American nonetheless attempted to show him the advantages of the American regime by taking him to St. Paul, Minnesota. Sitting Bull despised the place, and the people who lived there. “The whitemen loved their whores more than their wives,” he sneered; they dressed them better and treated them more affectionately. They disrespected their own president. He was, he told a newspaper reporter, “sick of the houses and the noises and the multitudes of men,” telling a missionary lady that he would rather “die an Indian than live a white man.” Having observed the saloons of St. Paul and the abuse of alcohol on the reservations, he lamented, “With whiskey replacing the buffaloes, there is no hope for Indians.” At one point, Ostler pauses to deplore the fact that Americans hadn’t yet acquired the “cultural pluralism” of anthropologists like Franz Boas, going so far as to claim that the Sioux were farther along the road of toleration. But evidently not.

Sitting Bull, who by now had fled to Canada, welcomed the remnants of Crazy Horse’s people to the land of exile, where he intended to reconstitute the Sioux nation under its traditional regime. Back in the United States, the less militant Sioux bands continued to have difficulties with the Indian Office, which ignored President Hayes’s guarantees and placed its agency along the Missouri River in order to save money on transportation of supplies. Yet another U.S. commission was sent to find facts, and even one of its number conceded that the Sioux chiefs were right. The agents were making a liar out of the President. Pressures were building. As for Sitting Bull, his people suffered from harsh Canadian conditions. He returned to South Dakota in July 1881, surrendering his weapons to the United States and soon joining a ‘Wild West’ show in which he was featured along with Annie Oakley, whom he took on as an adopted daughter. He made good money, giving most of it away to needy Sioux.

As in Georgia in the 1820s, so in South Dakota in the 1880s. While the federal government in Washington continued to cast around for a formula which would make regime change work, governors and other American settlers in the territory began to push for further land acquisitions. This provoked both the Sioux and the American Progressives. The issue stalemated until the end of the decade, when Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, whereby the Sioux could exchange more land for monetary compensation, and the United States Supreme Court ruled against tribal sovereignty in United States v. Kagama. “Against enormous pressures, the western Sioux had managed to create a unified opposition against land cession, only to see this shattered.” 

Many of them turned to a self-styled prophet, a messianic figure named Wovoka, who had been born about three decades earlier in Nevada. Wovoka reported having experienced an apocalyptic dream vision in which “God”—Wakan Tanka, in the form of Jesus—told him that if the Sioux performed a certain dance “at intervals, for five consecutive days each time,” the Whites would disappear from Sioux lands and the Sioux would reunite with their ancestors now living in another world. This was the origin of the Ghost Dance, which seized the imagination of Sioux desperate for the renewal of their way of life. After all, “if whites were the bearers of a superior way of life, how could they have rejected and killed God’s Son? By pointing out that Europeans had killed the Messiah” in his previous manifestation and then having him claim Indians as his chosen people, Wovoka and his followers hoped to reverse the flow of power. The moral powers of the universe would no longer support the strong.” The Ghost Dance would precipitate this true regime change, without the violence that had proven futile against American might.

Ostler notes that “most Plains Sioux never even saw a Ghost Dance, let alone danced in one.” As usual, the nation factionalized into those who regarded the prophecy, and the policy it recommended, as true and those who took it as rubbish. Typically, “bands with a history of strategic cooperation with U.S. officials generally rejected the Ghost Dance,” and the only bands “seriously to consider the Ghost Dance were those with a history of direct resistance to the reservation system.” Many Ghost Dancers imagined that their dresses and shirts would make them invulnerable to American weapons, in the event of any attempt to suppress the movement by force. 

The federal government was not amused. In “the largest military operation since the Civil War,” a substantial U.S. Army force moved against the militant tribes. Army officers had continued to believe that the civilians had botched the job of governing the Sioux, and President Benjamin Harrison signed off on the expedition, worried that the forces on the ground couldn’t protect the American settlers against what he mistook for a potentially violent uprising. Ostler speculates that Harrison may have recalled his father’s victory over the Tecumseh movement in 1811 in the Battle of Tippecanoe; on more solid ground, he points to the still fresh memories of Custer’s Last Stand. At any rate, “because there was no real evidence that the ghost dancers threatened settlers’ lives, the decision to send troops arguably violated Article I of the 1868 Treaty, which states that the ‘Government of the United States desires peace, and its honor is pledged to keep it.'” Obviously, Harrison and the Army officers thought they were keeping the peace, but it is quite likely that they overreacted, with bloody consequences.

“Before the military campaign began, between 4,000 and 5,000 Lakotas were living in Ghost Dance camps. A month later there were no more than 1,300 people at the three remaining Ghost Dance sites,” including Sitting Bull’s band. The threat of armed force, added to the manipulation of food supplies, discouraged the majority, who returned to Indian Agency territory. Poised to attack Sitting Bull’s position at the Standing Rock Agency, the Army halted at the news that Sitting Bull and several in his inner circle had been killed—some “would say murder[ed]”—by Indian agency police sent by his now-enemy James McLaughlin to arrest him. The remainder of his band fled. A few days later, as the Ghost Dancers at another site retreated toward the agency territory, Army troops intercepted and attempted to disarm them. Ostler judges that had the Army officers allowed them to return “without interference, almost certainly the massacre [at Wounded Knee] would not have happened.” (Unfortunately, he steers his narrative into ‘postmodernist’ territory. Quoting a report written by the captain of the Army detachment, who recounts that he found one “squaw” who was “moaning”—pretending to be ill—while concealing a “beautiful Winchester rifle” underneath her and another who “had to be thrown on her back” in order to recover the gun she was hiding, Ostler describes such language as “sexualized,” the stuff of “a rape fantasy.” One might suppose that the ensuing massacre was evidence enough of atrocity.) 

In his conclusion, Ostler tells of the continued practice of the Ghost Dance among some of the Sioux people. “In recent years, Indians have seen the increase in bison populations and the revival of traditional cultural and religious practices as at least partial fulfillment of the Ghost Dance’s potential.” More, “to many Native people,” not only the Sioux, “it is abundantly clear that western civilization will inevitably collapse under the weight of its technological madness and moral bankruptcy,” fulfilling “Wovoka’s prophecy.” That remains to be seen. Such ‘prophecies’ have been issued before. 

On the legal front, in 1980 the United States Supreme Court affirmed Sioux claims that the United States obtained the Black Hills illegally, ordering monetary compensation for the loss. This the Lakotas refused to accept, calling the Black Hills sacred land, never to be sold. Thus the regime struggle continues. ‘Sacred land’ isn’t a category under in the American regime and its constitutional law. There is tax-exempt real property owned by religious organizations which have sanctified it to their own satisfaction, but such property continues to be understood in American courts as a natural and civil right, not a sacred thing. To recognize land as sacred would be to abandon natural and constitutional right, returning to the feudal conceptions of right and of law held by the European aristocrats to whom Tocqueville compared the Indians.

As for Ostler’s political agenda, he cannot be accused of harboring aristocratic leanings. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American Left has propounded a fake cultural pluralism or relativism, predictably at the service of socialist-egalitarian sentiments. The communalism of the Sioux and other Amerindian nations appeals to them. Perhaps most of all, the prospect of breaking up the American Union with the hammer of ‘multiculturalism’ seems to them the best prospect for advancing their ideological interests. Readers who see this will adjust their sights to his rhetoric while learning a lot from the real research he has done. 

 

Notes

1. Thomas G. West: Vindicating the Founders (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
2. Ostler points out that the Sioux might well have adapted to farming life because their hunting habits were relatively recent, concurrent with their arrival on the Great Plains. “Although Plains Sioux people (especially men) often spoke scornfully of farming as something inimical to their identity altogether (and, at best, women’s work), most could have easily found ancestors only a generation or two before with extensive horticultural experience.” When they lived near the Missouri in the late 1700s, they grew crops, and the eastern Dakotas and Arikaras had grown corn for many generations.

 

James A. Banks: Cultural Diversity in Education: Foundations, Curriculum, and Teaching. New York: Routledge, 2016.

 

“As cultural, ethnic, language, and religious diversity increases in the United States and the world, the challenge of educating citizens to function effectively in a pluralistic democratic society deepens.” Banks asserts that this diversity “enriches the nation because it provides alternative ways to view the world and to solve social, economic, and political problems.” It simultaneously poses a new problem, “how to balance diversity and unity,” so that Americans continue to enjoy “a shared civic community in which all groups participate and to which they have allegiance.” Banks would avoid “cultural repression and hegemony” while avoiding “ethnic and cultural separatism and the fracturing of the nation-state.” He claims that this will require “substantially reformed” school curricula and “social structure[s]” and educators who “acquire new knowledge, commitments, and skills.”

By deploying the term ‘culture’ instead of ‘regime,’ Banks obscures the matter. “Culture” is the key word for anthropologists and sociologists; for them, ‘culture’ consists of ‘mores and folkways.’ Its political equivalent would be ‘way of life.’ Aristotle’s key word, ‘regime,’ comprehends not only a political community’s way of life but its rulers, its ruling institutions, and its purpose(s). Despite the seemingly unpolitical terms he deploys, Banks obviously intends a regime change or revolution, both in the schools and in the United States. The rulers of American schools would reorient their hearts and minds; they would alter the ruling institutions of the schools. School curricula, embodying the purpose of the education on offer, would also be “substantially reformed.” In all, “the goals, norms, and culture of the school” would be transformed into a condition of “educational equality” for all students, whatever their “racial, ethnic, and social-class” character. That is, the purpose of the schools will be a form of political egalitarianism, inasmuch as Banks conceives of “educational” equality as dependent upon all the dimensions that rule educational life.

This rule consists of five dimensions: “content integration;” the “knowledge construction process;” prejudice reduction, an “equity pedagogy; and “an empowering school culture and social structure.” What does this jargon mean? Content integration means “the extent to which teachers use examples and content from a variety of cultures and groups to illustrate key concepts, principles, generalizations, and theories in their subject area or discipline.” Knowledge construction means “help[ing] students to understand, investigate, and determine how the implicit cultural assumptions, frames of reference, perspectives, and biases within a discipline influence the ways in which knowledge is constructed within it.” That is, whereas content integration appears to take diverse cultural materials for the purpose of illustrating ‘abstractions’ within each discipline, knowledge construction implies the more radical claim that the abstractions themselves are not really abstract; what one calls knowledge is really constructed by cultures. To put it in Platonic-Socratic terms, there is no ‘ascent from the cave’ of opinion, since there is finally nothing more than opinion. 

Prejudice reduction aims at modifying “students’ racial attitudes” by means of “teaching methods and materials.” Although knowledge is only cultural, and most cultures imbue certain attitudes toward ‘race,’ multicultural education attempts to alter those attitudes, transforming the existing American culture or way of life, evidently in the direction of substantially increased egalitarianism. This begs the question, Where does the principle of egalitarianism come from? From what does it derive its moral and political authority, if not (according the claim of multiculturalism) some culture? Equity pedagogy confirms this egalitarianism with regard to ‘equality of opportunity’; it consists of teaching methods that “will facilitate the academic achievement of students from diverse racial, cultural, and social-class backgrounds.” Not only will teaching methods do this, but the design of the school’s ruling institutions will “empower” these students. As Banks’s argument unfolds, however, it won’t be so much the students who are empowered, and assuredly not elected school boards, but teachers and administrators. Multicultural education will empower them because it demands a particular kind of specialized knowledge in, yes, multicultural education, a kind of knowledge unlikely to be possessed by members of the general public and only to be achieved by students as they work their way through the program of multicultural education.

With regard to content education, Banks adjures that “the infusion of ethnic and cultural content into the subject area should be logical, not contrived.” He then proceeds to contrive an example of content that illustrates the political inflection of his project. In “language arts,” students may study Ebonics, the English dialect spoken by many African-Americans, by reading and listening “to speeches by such African Americans as Martin Luther King, Jr., Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California, Marian Wright Edelman, Al Sharpton, and President Barack Obama”—evidently not speeches by such African Americans as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Condoleeza Rice, or Candace Owens. Evidently, Ebonics speaks ‘Left,’ and only ‘Left.’ In history, content education will include “study about the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Iroquois and other highly developed civilizations that developed in the America prior to the arrival of Europeans in the fifteenth century.” Will such practices as child sacrifice, slavery, cannibalism, and genocide, practiced by some or all of those highly developed civilizations, receive the same attention the atrocities committed by Europeans receive? Evidently not: “concepts such as ‘The New World’ and ‘The European Discovery of America’ are not only ethnocentric and Eurocentric terms but are also normative concepts that serve latent but important political purposes, such as justifying the destruction of Native American peoples and civilizations by Europeans such as Columbus and those who came after him.” Indeed, “The New World” is a concept that “subtly denies the political existence of Native Americans and their nations prior to the coming of the Europeans.” Never has newness carried such weighty political freight. Yet when Miranda looks at the rogues assembled in the last scene of The Tempest and exclaims, “O brave new world, that has such goodly creatures in’t!” and her father gently corrects her with “‘Tis new to thee,” one notices in European civilization a certain self-awareness about the newness of the New World and of its newest discoverers. Is multiculturalism itself not a product of Western civilization, at the same time being one of a long list of claims to rule which characterize every ‘civilization.’

What justifies multicultural education? Banks explains that we live in “global times,” by which he means that “migration within and across nation-states is a worldwide phenomenon” which exists to a degree seen “never before in the history of the world.” Hundreds of millions now live “outside their nation of birth or citizenship.” This amounts to 3.1% of the world population. Given the fact that this is still a very small percentage of the world population, why does it justify regime change in American education? And, given the admitted need for political union in any nation-state, lest it disintegrate, why would ordinary methods of civic education not suffice to meet the challenge of political ‘acculturation’?

The answer lies not in “global times” but in Banks’s reconception of rights. “The assimilationist conception,” whereby education is understood to ‘acculturate’ immigrants in accordance with the ‘norms’ of the American regime—regards “the rights of the individual as paramount and group identities and rights as inconsistent with and detrimental to the freedom of the individual.” This is misstated. The natural rights defended by the United States Constitution as it was understood by its framers inhere in human beings as such, and therefore in individuals. The natural rights of persons belonging to a particular ethnic or linguistic group differ in no way from those belonging to any other group. The practical problems arise in securing those rights by matching civil rights and duties to the natural rights those rights and duties are intended to secure. Banks quotes the leftist historian Eric Foner, who claims that it was the Abolitionists, not the Founders, who were “the authors of the notion of freedom as a universal birthright.” In so saying, Foner is either mistaken or lying. The “authors” of the notion of freedom as a universal birthright were the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. The authors of the document which acknowledged those natural rights were Thomas Jefferson and the members of the Continental Congress who revised his original draft. The authors of the document that established the governing institutions which secured those rights for American citizens were the Framers of the Constitution. The slaves were not citizens; the founding generation made many of them citizens in the northern states but not in the southern states. The Abolitionists wanted to extend slave emancipation to the southern states but could find no way to do so. Their solution was to accept the dismemberment of the Union, which would have done nothing to emancipate the slaves. Abolition only occurred as a result of a vast civil war, foolishly initiated by the southern secessionists, who expected to win it. None of this had anything to do with “group rights.” This notwithstanding, Banks insists that “a differentiated conception of citizenship recognizes that some groups must be treated differently in order for them to attain equity.”

He also contends that “groups with power and influence usually define their interests as the public interest and the interests and goals of marginalized groups as ‘special interests.'” He overlooks the tendency of “marginalized” groups to do exactly the same thing. Hence the refusal of those who adhere to the claim that “black lives matter” to admit that “all lives matter.” Banks classifies self-identification of human beings into four categories: cultural (race, ethnicity, gender, language, “sexual orientation”), national, regional, and global. This ignores self-identification as individuals and as families. Why does he ignore such obvious categories? Because they interfere with socialism, his obvious regime choice. They interfere with socialism because the ineluctably natural categories of person and family interfere with the ‘groupishness’ that socialism needs and also with the historicism modern socialism endorses. His socialism diverges from older forms of modern socialism because another category he excludes from self-identification is socio-economic class; his version of ‘consciousness’ centers on culture as conceived by anthropologists and sociologists, not on class. 

The most immediately political form of self-identification is nationality. Here he does address the regime question, although superficially. “In democratic nation-states, each student should develop a commitment to democratic ideals, such as human dignity, justice, and equality,” a commitment shared by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All very well, but what should students in China be developing a commitment to? Or students in Russia? Or in Iran? The regimes in those countries utterly despise “democratic ideals.” Are those regimes, are those ‘cultures,’ to be brought to the bar of human rights? And, if ‘culture’ is determinative of cognition, how is that possible? And why is it justified?

Understandably, Banks prefers to focus on the democratic regimes. His teachers would ensure that students respect nationality while avoiding nationalism. “Some attention should be devoted to a discussion of patriotism, which is a love and devotion to one’s country.” “Teachers should help students understand that people who love their country may have very different views on national events and developments and that criticism of the actions of government leaders is not necessarily unpatriotic.” It is not. On the other hand, it might be quite unpatriotic. So, for example, a substantial number of German-Americans in the 1930s joined groups that excused the Nazi regime in ‘the old country,’ invoking George Washington’s Farewell Address as justification for non-involvement in European wars. Their dissent was not necessarily patriotic, although it was unquestionably nationalistic, in this instance Germanophilic. Although Banks assures his readers that “students can develop a reflective and positive national identification only after they have attained reflective, clarified, and positive cultural identifications,” he offers only the writings of Will Kymlicka as proof of this—a slender reed. What we do know is that a non-nationalistic patriotism is quite possible when founded upon the principles of American constitutionalism, as seen in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the two world wars. It cannot guarantee that Americans will ‘live up to’ those principles any more than socialists can guarantee that instruction in accordance with their principles will guarantee conduct consistent with them.

“Global identification” poses additional problems for Banks. He deems it necessary “because we live in a global society in which the solutions to the world’s problems require the cooperation of all the nations of the world.” If so, I can only wish the world the very best of luck, given the sharp differences among the regimes ruling those nations. “Most students,” he laments, “have rather conscious identifications with their communities and nation-states, but they often are only vaguely aware of their status as world citizens.” No surprise, there: no one could be more than vaguely aware of his status as a ‘world citizen’ because no one is a world citizen; no one is a world citizen because the world has no civitas. The world does have the ‘law of nations,’ but this depends for its enforcement on the more powerful regimes in the world. Those regimes often do not agree with one another, as they adhere to moral and political principles that not only differ from one another but contradict one another. This becomes obvious even from Banks’s curricular suggestions. Remarking that students have “very few heroes or heroines, myths, symbols, and school rituals…designed to help students develop an attachment to and identification with the global community,” he can only point to Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Kofi Annan as examples. I deem it unlikely to be a coincidence that all of these persons are ‘men of the Left.’ Teachers “should realize that it is vitally important for students to develop a sophisticated understanding of their roles in the world community,” but if there is no real world community then sophistication will incline toward sophistry. And so, if “an important priority of civic education should be to help students develop global dispositions and the ability to think about community and national issues from a global perspective and to use a global lens to view issues, problems, and possible solutions,” such dispositions, such a perspective, and such a lens either will dilute their attachment to their regime by confusing students about the principles at stake, or it will tend to form American students into emulators of Gandhi, King, Mandela, and Annan rather than, for example, of Washington and Lincoln—neither of whom was a ‘globalist’ although both upheld natural rights. Banks prefers to quote an author who lauds “the possibility of both engagement in and enchantment with the world.” The religious language is apt, inasmuch as logic evidently has nothing much to do with this project.

Banks hopes for “a delicate balance of identifications,” which turns out to be governed by “democratic values exemplified in the constitutions of democratic nation-states, such as justice, human dignity and equality.” Again, on what basis? What justifies a given ‘culture’? What justifies a given political regime—which, according to Banks, depends upon a ‘culture’? 

He nonetheless confidently recommends the production of “transformative citizens” in schools. Transformative citizens comprise the highest level of citizenship, in Banks’s rank ordering. Merely “legal” citizens have rights and obligations to their nation-state but don’t participate in its governance; “minimal” citizens get out to vote for “conventional candidates and conventional issues”; “active” citizens go beyond voting by writing to their elected representatives, campaigning for candidates, and so forth; “transformative” or “deep” or “postconventional” citizens take action “to actualize values and moral principles beyond those of conventional authority.” That is, they intend to change the regime; whether violent or non-violent, they are revolutionaries. Transformative citizens “promote social justice even when their actions violate, challenge, and dismantle existing laws, conventions, and structures.” That’s the kind of citizenship Banks has in mind. Students in elementary, middle, and high schools should be given a “reimagined and transformed” civic education that “effectively educates students to function in the twenty-first century,” by which he means that ‘the knowledge that underlies its construction needs to shift from mainstream to transformative academic knowledge,” a form of knowledge that “consists of paradigms and explanations that challenge some of the key epistemological assumptions of mainstream knowledge.” That would be deep, indeed, were we to suppose that Banks and his fellow multicultists rank with (for example) G.W.F. Hegel, who did indeed work out a new kind of logic, whatever one may think of it. 

According to Banks, “mainstream citizenship education” grounded in “mainstream knowledge and assumptions” fails to “challenge or disrupt the class, racial, and gender discrimination within the schools and society,” nor does it prepare them for “what their role should be in a global world.” It emphasizes memorization of “facts about constitutions and other legal documents, learning about various branches of government, and developing patriotism to the nation-state” without inculcating “critical thinking skills, decision making, and action.” By these lights, it must be astonishing that revolutionaries schooled in the old liberal arts could have conceived of the things they did. It is hard to resist the thought that “transformative citizenship education” in “transformative academic knowledge” preparing students “to challenge inequality within their communities, their nations, and the world,” to “develop cosmopolitan values and perspectives,” and to “take actions to create just and democratic multicultural communities and societies” would serve not so much philosophic deepness but an ideological rigor of the Left.

Consistent with the rhetorical strategy useful for the implementation of his project, Banks offers a history of American education beginning not with the Founders but with the late 19th century ‘nativist’ movement. Banks remarks the anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant edge to nativism, ignoring the fact that George Washington had welcomed Catholics, Jews, along with all major Protestant denominations then in the United States on the basis of their natural right to freedom of religion. Nativism, therefore, flatly contradicted the principles of the American regime and of the education conducted in that regime in accordance with those principles. “The outbreak of the Great War in Europe in 1914 greatly increased the suspicion and distrust of immigrant groups in the United States,” Banks notices, without explaining why Americans might not be suspicious of newly-arrived persons who might incline to supporting one side or another in a foreign conflict, potentially embroiling the United States in that conflict. He acknowledges that the same period saw an intensification of what he calls “the assimilationist ideology,” which was obviously Americans’ attempt to do what every regime (including the one Banks favors) does, namely, to persuade children that the principles of the regime are true. “What in fact happened, however, was that most of the immigrant and ethnic cultures stuck to the bottom of the mythical melting pot,” as “Anglo-Saxon culture remained dominant,” inducing “other ethnic groups…to give up many of their cultural characteristics in order to participate fully in the nation’s social, economic, and political institutions.” But if all cultures are ‘relative,’ equally valuable, what could be wrong with that? Unlike the African slaves, the other immigrants came to their, ahem, ‘new world,’ voluntarily. And as for changing “cultural characteristics,” what else does Banks propose, in his educational regime? 

Not that everything about “Anglo-Saxon culture” was bad. On the contrary, Banks allows, the influence of that culture “has been, in many cases, positive,” with its “ideals of human rights, participatory democracy, and separation of church and state.” He gives no reason for adjudging these “ideals” “positive.” Such an attempt would involve him in an ‘ascent from the cave,’ the possibility of which he has already denied. 

Banks traces subsequent efforts to accommodate immigrant and other groups more fully into the American ‘culture.’ These include Horace Kallen’s “cultural pluralism,” Hilda Taba’s “intergroup education,” William Connolly’s “new pluralism.” and finally Banks’s “multicultural education,” which requires not only curricular reform but “total school reform,” including alteration of “the ethnic and racial composition of the school staff, its attitudes, the formalized and hidden curricula, the teaching strategies and materials, the testing and counseling programs, and the school’s norms” as well as “the languages and dialects of the school” and “community participation and input.” “The reform must be systemwide, or systemic, to be effective.” It is what any serious political thinker will see as a regime change in the schools aiming at regime change in the country in which it is undertaken. Students will become “bicultural”—as “comfortable within the adopted culture as he or she is within his or her primordial or first culture.” This suggests that multiculturalism in any profound way is impossible, inasmuch as it would require the integration of many different languages, “norms,” and so on within the same human soul, and to do so within every human soul in the school. But even bicultural education would require a selection of elements from each of the two ‘cultures’ selected, inasmuch as any two ‘cultures’ will feature aspects incompatible with one another. Again, ‘democracy,’ ‘equality,’ and similar locutions will govern this selection, but where do these come from, if not (as Banks has already conceded) from the Anglo-Saxons?

Inasmuch as the origin of an idea doesn’t necessarily determine its content, there is no reason to suppose that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ideas (or ‘French’ ideas, or ‘Chinese’ ideas) are not universally valid, except that Banks has already claimed that even mathematics and science are ‘cultural’ products, marked by ‘cultural hegemony.’ In terms of ‘social studies,’ for example, Banks argue that describing the collision of United States citizens with Amerindian nations and tribes in the Midwest as “The Westward Movement” is Eurocentric. “The Lakota Sioux were already in the West”; they weren’t moving at all. (They had, of course, undertaken their own westward movement only a few generations earlier, occupying lands settled by other Amerindians nations and tribes, but Banks doesn’t mention that.) Such a unit in a history class “might be called ‘The Invasion from the East,’ if viewed from the Sioux perspective. “An objective title for the unit might be ‘Two Cultures Meet in the Americas.'” But two ‘cultures’ might meet without warfare. What really happened was that two regimes met, two regimes animated by principles and practices that contradicted one another, leading to war and to the victory of one regime over the other—a common enough occurrence, throughout the course of human events, even within ‘cultures,’ as seen in intra-European, intra-Asian, intra-American, and intra-African wars. 

To avoid ethnocentricity, Banks applies his “transformative” approach to curricular reform. This involves “the infusion of various perspectives, frames of reference and content from various groups that will extend students’ understandings of the nature, development, and complexity of U.S. society.” So, for example, when studying the American Revolution, students would learn “the perspectives of the Anglo Revolutionaries, the Anglo Loyalists, African Americans, Indians, and the British.” Very good, but this begs the question: who was right? “The emphasis…should be on how the common U.S. culture and society emerged from a complex synthesis and interaction of the diverse cultural elements that originated within the various cultural, racial, ethnic, and religious groups that make up U.S. society.” But evidently, according to Banks, there is no really common U.S. culture, only a “mainstream” culture, which he intends to undermine and replace with elements borrowed from “marginalized” cultures, all arranged in an egalitarian regime pattern which itself derives from members of, well, the dominant culture, such as himself. He adds to this academic exercise a call “to require students to make decisions and to take actions related to the concept, issue, or problem they have studied.” This will “empower them,” “help[ing] them to acquire a sense of political efficacy.” But for what purpose, if not to advance the political regime envisioned by Banks and the schools that adopt his program? 

Thus, the first part of Cultural Diversity in Education is philosophically incoherent but quite systematic politically. It is likely that Banks understands this, that his ‘theoretical’ claims are aimed at obfuscating the revolutionary character of his politics. And yet the second part of his book essays a discussion of just those “conceptual, philosophical, and research issues” that bedevil his presentation of his “transformative” educational politics.

He begins with the definition of ‘culture’ offered by the well-known anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhorn: “culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially attached values.” As mentioned earlier, this amount to what Aristotle understands as one component of a regime, namely, its Bios ti or way of life. Banks adds that cultures are “dynamic, complex, and changing” but also ‘systematic’ in the sense that “any change in one aspect of a culture affects all of its components.” Within many cultures or “macrocultures” “microcultures” also exist. These microcultures differ from the macrocultures in language, “learning styles,” and many other characteristic Banks has already remarked, but each microculture shares “to some extent” the “national values” upheld by the culture or way of life that predominates in the national state. 

“Multicultural education suggests a type of education concerned with creating educational environments in which students form a variety of microcultural groups such as race/ethnicity, gender, social class, regional groups, and people with disabilities experience educational equality.” To achieve such “equality,” multiculturalism must be “critical,” a term Banks explicitly borrows from “critical race theory,” a term critical race theory in turn borrows from Marxism (as in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy). This now leads Banks to include economic class and politics in his notion of “ethnicity.” That is, unlike Aristotle, who regards a way of life as a subset of ‘regime,’ Banks follows the anthropologists’ model that makes ‘regime’ a subset of culture. Thus ‘ethnicity’ has little to do with biology, as the root of the word suggests. For example, “some African Americans have so few cultural traits that are Black and so little identification with African Americans as an ethnic group that we might call them ‘Afro-Saxons.'” The same goes with groups whose national origins differ from their existing national location.

Banks claims that “intergroup problems frequently arise, not because of the nature of the cultural differences between Whites and people of color, but because of the race of the individual or group who exhibits the specific cultural characteristic.” So, Mexican children may be punished for speaking Spanish in school but if whites learn Spanish, if may be “viewed as a useful and esteemed language.” Banks does not pause to consider that the whites in question are likely speaking Spanish in a Spanish class, whereas the Mexican children might be speaking it in order to say things a non-Spanish speaking teacher doesn’t understand. “This kind of racism can be called cultural racism.” On the other hand, it may not be racist at all. It may be the act of a teacher trying to run a class.

How to explain academic disparities between whites and “people of color”? Banks dismisses explanations based on genetics, going so far as to claim that “race is a social construct.” He also dislikes the “cultural deprivation” argument, which holds that persons of color suffer from “poverty, fatherless homes, and social disorganization” resulting in “cognitive deficits” over time. He remarks that this explanation conflates “cultural difference” with “conditions of poverty.” He rejects the notion that difference in culture should be interpreted as a form of deprivation because it violates “the principles of cultural democracy.” If cultural democracy means treating all ways of life as equal, it undoubtedly is. He endorses Amy Gutmann’s demand that “civic equality recognition require schools to recognize the community cultures and languages of students from diverse groups,” but one must then ask, ‘Recognize’ them in what ways and on what basis? If Banks and Gutmann reply, ‘On the basis of equality,’ why so? 

The “cultural difference” paradigm “rejects the idea that students of color have cultural deficits”; on the contrary, “African Americans, Mexican Americans, and American Indians have strong, rich, and diverse cultures.” Academic underachievement arises not from cultural deficiencies but from “cultural conflicts.” Therefore, “the school must change in ways that will allow it to respect and reflect the rich cultural strengths of students form diverse groups and use teaching strategies that are consistent with their cultural characteristics.” Banks calls this “equity pedagogy.” As usual, Banks does not provide a criterion by which one can confirm that what he calls rich cultural strength are indeed rich or strong. 

Banks also rejects explanations based on “cultural ecology,” which maintain that cultural minorities score low on tests because they resist education itself as ‘white.’ He counters that the resistance is not to education but the use of education to achieve cultural assimilation. He prefers the explanation of “protective disidentification,” a process whereby students feel threatened by academic expectations that alienate or seem to degrade them and react by reducing their efforts to meet those expectations. Lower test scores follow. 

Seeing that he needs some sort of moral criterion for making the judgments he makes, Banks turns to a comparison of “cultural pluralist ideology”—he now acknowledges cultural pluralism as an ideology, dropping the philosophic pretensions he had paraded earlier—with “assimilationist ideology.” Pluralism deems “cultural and ethnic identities” to proliferate “in pluralistic Western societies,” as various groups champion their own “economic and political interests.” “The energies and skills of each member of a cultural or ethnic group are needed to help in that group’s liberation struggle. Each individual member of the group has a moral obligation to join the liberation struggle. Thus, the pluralist stresses the rights of the group over the rights of the individual.” It must be said that the shift from calling this a philosophy to calling it an ideology comes just in time, inasmuch as the “thus” does not follow logically from the premise. It is obvious that the rights of individuals might easily provide the basis for claims of equality, even if the need to organize politically—itself an individual right—will be indispensable to securing those rights.

More plausibly, cultural pluralists regard minority cultures as important sources of “psychological support” for persons living in “a modernized society controlled primarily by one dominant cultural, economic, and political group.” Since these cultures “are well ordered and highly structured but different from each other and from the mainstream dominant culture,” school curricula “should be revised to reflect the cognitive styles, cultural history, and experiences of cultural groups, especially students of color”; this will reduce their “learning and adjustment problems.” This in turn will begin to provide students with “the skills and commitments needed to participate in civic action to help empower their cultural group.” 

In his account of the assimilationist ideology, Banks sees a strong confidence in the, well, transformative power of modernity. “The assimilationist tends to see ethnic attachments as fleeting and temporary within a modernized world,” considering “the modern state as universalistic rather than characterized by strong ethnic allegiance and attachments.” Such attachments are deemed “dysfunctional in a modernized civic community”; they “harm the goals of the modern nation-state” by leading to “the Balkanization of society.” In America, assimilationists endorse “values” such as those enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. “The school’s primary mission within a democratic society should be to socialize youths into the national civic culture” by promoting “a critical acceptance of the goals, assumptions, and possibilities of democratic nation-states.”

Banks situates his own “multiculturalist ideology” between those of pluralism and assimilationism. Calling pluralism “useful” because “it informs us about the importance of culture and ethnicity within a society and the extent to which ethnic groups determine the life chances of individuals,” he criticizes it for exaggerating “the extent of cultural pluralism within modern societies,” in view of the “high levels of cultural (if not structural) assimilation” that occurred in the United States and other similar countries. Cultural identities overlap. In failing to recognize this, or in resisting it, pluralists “appear reluctant to prepare students to cope adequately with the real world beyond their ethnic or cultural community.” They have not “clarified, in any meaningful way, the kind of relationship that should exist between competing ethnic groups that have different allegiances and conflicting goals and commitments.” They cannot say how “a strongly pluralistic nation will maintain an essential degree of societal cohesion.”

As for assimilationists, they do understand the need for “societal cohesion” and design their educational goals and methods accordingly. They fail not so much in their conception of goals but in their methods because “learning characteristics” are not uniform, across culture. They “assume that all students can learn equally well from teaching materials that reflect only the cultural experiences of the majority group.” Banks charges that assimilationists “ignor[e] the reality that most Western societies are made up of many different ethnic and cultural groups.” He offers little or no evidence that assimilationists ignore that reality; indeed, the term ‘assimilationist’ suggests that there are diverse materials to be assimilated. What he really wants to do is to address the regime question, the question that the anthropological concept, ‘culture,’ tends to obscure: “Who defines the common culture? Whom does the definition benefit? Whom does it harm?” Those are political questions. According to Banks, “the common culture needs to be redefined with broad participation by different cultural, ethnic, and language groups,” thereby “reflect[ing] the social realities within the nation, not a mythical, idealized view.” 

But why so? To be sure, any regime must take account of the different ‘cultures’ or ways of life amongst the populations it rules. As part of the regime, schools must do the same. But the regime will still need to choose among the so-called ‘values’ and practices seen in the various groups. Social “realities” are one thing, the sources of moral and political principles quite another. But this is what Banks’s cultural egalitarianism denies—sort of. Except when it comes to such terms as ‘democracy,’ ‘social justice,’ ‘equity,’ and so on.

What, then, has he in mind? “In the multicultural, open society envisioned by the multicultural theorist, individuals would be free to maintain their ethnic identities” while participating “effectively within the common culture and across other ethnic cultures.” In a crucial admission, he writes, “Individuals would be free to act consistent with the norms and values of their ethnic groups as long as they did not conflict with the overarching values in a nation state,” such as (in the U.S.) “ideals such as justice, equality, and human dignity,” along with “toleration and recognition.” Indeed, “all members of society would be required to conform to the nation’s idealized values.” Banks modestly, and correctly, allows that “it is very difficult to resolve satisfactorily all the difficult questions inherent within” multiculturalist ideology. He nonetheless insists that it “must” be implemented. Indeed, “ways must be devised for marginalized ethnic groups to gain power in education and to participate in major educational decisions that affect the education of their youths.” One should notice that school boards, elected by majorities in local elections, would likely need to relinquish their authority to multiculturally-inclined professional educators. This has been a major problem with ‘Left’ conceptions of ‘democracy,’ a regime paradoxically inclined toward the imposition of self-defined ‘equality’ from above. Leninist vanguardism was a pathological instance of this, but other instances abound.

The ‘democratic’ elites Banks favors will engage in “transformative”—i.e., revolutionary or regime-changing—research, which “tries to see the world through the eyes of the people being studied.” But this alone cannot suffice, inasmuch as any competent researcher into the variety of regimes will do, and has done, exactly that, for millennia. That Banks does have something more in mind may be seen in his selection of W.E.B. Du Bois as his example of a transformational researcher. “Du Bois challenged the established historical research that stated that Northern Whites and Southern Blacks incompetently ruled the Southern states during Reconstruction,” showing that “it was during Reconstruction that the Southern states enacted their most progressive legislation, including the establishment of public schools.” Yes, but define ‘progressive.’ Multiculturalism opposes the claim that knowledge is “neutral and objective and that its principles are universal.” But except for the term ‘progressive,’ Du Bois’s revision of “established historical research”—much of it done by ‘Redeemer’ historians politically opposed to the regime change Reconstruction attempted—stands or falls on two bases: facts and a judgment concerning governmental competence. If the criteria for selection of the relevant facts and judgment about them are “compassion and a deep concern about justice and equality,” will these be defined in terms of the “overarching values” of the American “nation-state,” or by some other set of criteria, as suggested by the demand to include minority groups in the political process, while simultaneously giving that process over to educationists? 

With all that, Banks’s multiculturalism addresses a real issue, on those occasions when it comes down to earth. He cites a study conducted to find the causes of “poor performance on standardized achievement tests” by Amerindian students. The study found that teachers failed “to explain to the students the importance of the test,” resulting in “lack of student concern about test results.” Teachers also tended to denigrate Navajo “culture and language,” an approach which was indeed very unlikely to win their cooperation. The study found “a cultural mismatch between the home and the school,” a mismatch which would require a reconsideration of the teachers’ methods of instruction.

In Part III of his book, Banks addresses the “teaching strategies” consonant with multicultural education. He identifies six “stages” whereby a student can emerge from the limited horizon of his minority ‘culture.’ Initially, the student suffers from “cultural psychological captivity,” a condition in which “the individual absorbs the negative ideologies and beliefs about his or her cultural group that are institutionalized within the society.” Then the student experiences “cultural encapsulation,” a self-protective stance when he “participates primarily within his or her own cultural community and believes that his or her cultural group is superior to other cultural groups.” Perceived threats to that group provoke anger; he finds a “separatist ideology” attractive. Thus, the first two “stages” are ‘dialectical’ in the Hegelian-Marxist sense of contradictory antinomies, thesis and antithesis. 

Stage 3 amounts to an initial synthesis: “identity clarification.” Now, “the individual is able to clarify personal attitudes and cultural identity, to reduce intrapsychic conflict, and to develop clarified positive attitudes toward his or her cultural group,” learning the “self-acceptance” Banks deems “a requisite to accepting and responding positively to outside individuals and groups” with a “pride in his or her cultural group [that] is not based on the hate or fear of outside groups.” 

The fourth stage occurs when the new synthesis develops a new antimony, called “biculturalism.” This is “a strong desire to function effectively in two cultures.” That is, the new antimony is experienced not as a painful conflict but an erotic longing; the student’s soul has moved from Hegel’s Phenomenology to Plato’s Symposium, so to speak. The final synthesis begins to take shape in the fifth stage, “multiculturalism and reflective nationalism.” Having integrated a second culture into his soul, the student keeps on going, now “able to function, at least beyond superficial levels, within several cultures within his or her nation and to understand, appreciate, and share the values, symbols, and institutions of several cultures within the nation,” experiencing “a more enriched and fulfilling life” ready to “formulate creative and novel solutions to personal and public problems.” By “the nation,” Banks assures us, he means one governed by such “idealized values” as “human dignity and justice.” At the same time, this idealism has been synthesized with realism—an understanding of the United States “as the multicultural and multilingual nation that it is.”

In the final stage of multicultural education, the student has enlarged his soul still further into “globalism and global competency,” with the “abilities needed to function within cultures within his or her nation as well as within cultures outside his or her own nation in other parts of the world.” Even more remarkably, “this individual has internalized the universalistic ethical values and principles of humankind,” along with “the skills, competencies, and commitments needed to take action within the world to actualize personal values and commitments.” He will be a ‘citizen of the world,’ a true Brussels sprout, prepared for world government at the end of history.

Banks outlines a curriculum for students at each of these developmental stages. At Stage 1, students “best benefit from monocultural content and experiences that will help them to develop cultural awareness and a heightened sense of cultural consciousness,” learning “how their cultural group has helped to liberate as well as to victimize other cultural, racial, and ethnic groups.” In Banks’s example, “White students” learn “not only about how Whites have oppressed African Americans and Native Americans, but also how Whites have helped these groups to attain justice and rights within our society.” Oddly—but perhaps not so oddly, given his ideological leanings—Banks lauds John Brown as a figure to be studied without so much as mentioning Abraham Lincoln, a rather more thoughtful and historically important figure.

The Stage 2 curriculum consists of an inward turn, a sort of therapy. Students are granted “an opportunity to examine and understand their hostile feelings toward outside cultural groups”—this, on the assumption that students “develop more positive feelings toward themselves and others only when negative feelings toward other groups are uncovered and expressed in a safe and democratic environment.” The third stage curriculum, guiding the first synthesis, is “designed to reinforce the student’s emerging cultural identity and clarification.” Here, Banks avails himself of the techniques of ‘values clarification,’ pioneered in the 1970s by such educationists as Sidney B. Simon, Merrill Harmon, Leland W. Howe, Louis Raths, and Howard Kirschenbaum. ‘Values clarification’ aimed at decentering the student’s existing moral principles (called ‘values,’ a term borrowed from economics by sociologists) by means of arguments based on moral relativism, thereby compelling them to reformulate his own ‘value system,’ helpfully guided by (of course) the teacher, whose own ‘values’ crucially inflect the outcome. In effect, Banks’s “multicultural education” does this on an even grander scale. [1] One sees this many times in the course of the book, as when he pauses to recommend some “tentative conclusions” that “might” be reached when students address questions on affirmative action, housing discrimination, and school desegregation.

The fourth, “bicultural,” stage’s curriculum leads to understanding another culture in its own terms. This brings the student to the final stage, resulting in “a global sense of cultural literacy” and a consequent exposure to “moral and value alternatives” other than those of his own culture. At the same time, Banks expects the student to “embrace” ‘values’ “such as human dignity and justice, that are needed to live in a multicultural community and global world society.” Cultural, national, regional, and global ‘identities’ will all be balanced, albeit “never totally,” Banks hastens to caution.

All of this aims at regime change founded upon the “transformative academic knowledge” so yielded, in which students “must be given opportunities to construct knowledge themselves so that they can develop a deep understanding of the nature and limitations of knowledge,” which, Banks again claims, “reflects the social, political, and cultural context in which it is formulated.” Banks thus proposes an educational project that does not so much attempt to leave the Platonic-Socratic cave of one’s regime by a philosophic ascent guided by reason but to move the student ‘horizontally’ (democratically, if you will) by expanding the boundaries of his ‘cultural’ territory. Socrates’ rational construal will give way to Banks’s cultural construction and reconstruction. Because he regards such figures as Socrates as culture-bound, he rejects the traditional canon that has been “used to define, select, and evaluate knowledge in the school, college and university curriculum of the United States and in other Western nations,” a canon that “has traditionally been European-centric and male-dominated.” His anthropological notion of ‘culture’ precludes him from considering that reason or revelation might transcend ‘culture,’ making the culture in which a line of reasoning or an insight of revelation irrelevant to its truth.

Part of the difficulty stems from Banks’s egalitarianism. Philosophy and prophecy are not widely experienced. Banks wants students to achieve something like the effects of philosophizing and of prophetic insight by a means accessible to everyone. It is a kindly thought. 

It is not necessarily an accurate or equitable one. For example, he writes that “from the perspective of the Lakota Sioux, the Anglo settlers in the West were invaders and conquerors.” Undoubtedly so, but from the perspective of the Lakota Sioux, their own settlement of that territory was also a westward movement, whereas from the perspective of the half dozen or so Amerindian nations and tribes the Sioux warriors defeated upon arrival, they were invaders and conquerors. Similarly, we read that “ethnic heroes selected for study and veneration” in schools “are usually those who helped Whites conquer or oppress powerless people rather than those who challenged the existing social, economic, and political order.” Leaving aside the question of whether nations like the Iroquois, the Sioux, and the Comanche were really “powerless people,” did the ‘Whites’ not challenge the existing social, economic, and political order of Amerindians? Regimes get challenged quite often, by all manner of people. The more important questions are, What is the character of the regime being challenged? Are the challengers right? Perspectivism doesn’t get you to philosophy.

Banks nevertheless insists, “a curriculum designed to empower students must be transformative in nature and must help students develop the knowledge, skills, and values needed to become social critics who can make reflective decisions and can implement their decisions in effective personal, social, and civic action,” thanks to a curriculum in which “multiple voices are heard and legitimized.” But how so, if they contradict one another? And if this curriculum “can teach students to think” by learning “to consider the author’s purposes for writing or speaking, his or her basic assumptions, and how the author’s perspectives or point of view compares with that of other authors and resources,” why do Banks’s examples always point in one direction? At times this leads him to rather odd pairings, as when he invites teachers to have their students compare Christopher Columbus’s journal entry on the Taino people he encountered in the Caribbean with an archeologist’s imagined reconstruction of “a day in the life of the Tainos” coupled with a 1992 story set 500 years earlier about a twelve-year-old Taino girl. Banks lauds empathy, but empathy isn’t the same as imagining things. A better Banksian proposal is to teach “a key concept, revolution,” by studying “three American revolutions”: the Pueblo Revolt of 1680s, the 1776 revolution by the American colonists, and the Mexican Revolution of 1810. This is simply an exercise in what academics call comparative politics, and one need not be a multicultist to undertake it.

The real aim of all this is social action. Predictably, the choice of actions will be guided by teachers who serve as cultural mediators and agents of “change,” teachers who “help students understand the desirability of and possibility for social change,” going so far as to encourage the students’ “sense of moral outrage.” What sort of change? Outrage triggered for what purpose? Well, “many such teacher participated in social action in the 1960s and 1970s to promote social justice and civil rights” as those things were propounded by the New Left. (He’s evidently not talking about such ‘Sixties phenomena as Goldwater Girls or Students for Nixon.) Banks rightly observes that “teaching, like social science, is not a value-free activity,” but his “involved observers” of student action “should support and defend moral and ethical positions that are consistent with democratic values and ideals” as defined by Tom Hayden, Eldridge Cleaver, and Mark Rudd.

Despite his Popper-like rhetoric about openness and democracy, Banks uses the word “must” with great frequency, as in his averral that teachers “must be informed, critical, socially conscious, and ethical change agents who are committed to social, political, cultural, and educational equality.” Another example: “To create democratic and just schools, colleges, and universities, the established concepts and knowledge systems must not privilege any particular racial, ethnic, social-class or gender group, but must reflect the experiences of the diverse groups that make up the nation-state. Consequently, the cultures of the nation’s schools, as well as the curricula, must be reformed in ways that institutionalize and legitimize the knowledge systems, perspectives, ideologies, and behaviors of diverse ethnic, racial, cultural, social-class, and language groups. This requires that more liberatory and multicultural paradigms and canons be constructed and institutionalized within the nation’s educational institutions.” It can hardly be said that Banks himself doesn’t know what a regime is, although his presentation of educational and national regime change in anthropological and sociological terms might obscure his knowledge from his readers. Whether offering “egalitarian books and stories” on “sex-types” to students aged three to five or claiming that mental retardation and giftedness are “socially constructed categories,” and most obviously when urging educators to “attempt institutional or systematic reform of the total school,” Banks consistently urges his readers to demand changes derived from ‘Left’ ideology, often in the guise of arguing for perspectivism. The disadvantage of doing so is that he never gets around to justifying his claim to rule, by turns to ‘culture’ and to ‘science,’ neither of which can account for its basis in terms of moral and political reasoning. This can lead to some moments of exquisite comedy, as when he writes, “Teachers with an assimilationist ideology will most likely teach a unit on the U.S. Civil War differently than will teachers with a multicultural ideology.” He is thinking of the ‘perspectives’ of slaves and Indians, but a truly multicultural teacher might well begin with a lesson infused with empathy for the slaveholders. 

Banks concludes with several “principles for teaching and learning in a multicultural society.” Among them is the recommendation that “the curriculum should help students understand that knowledge is socially constructed,” along with the complaint that “students often study historical events, concepts, and issues only or primarily from the points of view of the victors.” “This kind of teaching privileges mainstream students—who most often identify with the victors or dominant groups—and cause many students of color to feel left out of the American story.” Since students of color most likely benefit from a revolution animated by the principle, ‘all men are created equal’; since they also benefit from a civil war in which the winners abolished slavery; since they benefit from victory over the Axis in the Second World War; since they benefit from the victory of the civil rights movement over proponents of laws segregating the races, it might be argued that the perspective of the winners can be quite salubrious. British imperialists, Southern oligarchs, Nazi tyrants, and ‘unreconstructed’ white bigots were the ones who were “silenced, ignored, or marginalized” by those victories. Neither triumphalism nor the valorization of the defeated will be encouraged by a ‘social-studies’ pedagogy affirming natural rights and the kind of regimes that secure them.

 

 

Note

1. For a discussion of ‘values clarification’ and its roots in John Dewey’s educational theories, see Paul Eidelberg and Will Morrisey: Our Culture ‘Left’ or ‘Right’: Littératteurs Confront Nihilism (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992, pp. 101-122.