Cultural Pluralism is both a social reality and a social theory that emphasizes the retention of ethnic culture and customs by the diverse ethnic groups making up American society.Cultural pluralists are typically second‐ or third‐generation offspring of immigrants who feel at home speaking English and are comfortable with American economic life and democratic politics yet still wish to retain their ancestral language, religion, and customs as well as an emotional attachment to their ancestral country. As a theory, cultural pluralism was not systematically formulated, or even given a name, until the twentieth century. America's native‐born Anglo‐Saxon intellectuals generally emphasized the importance of homogeneity, unity, and assimilation, leaving the pluralist position to immigrant leaders. German Americans employed a phrase that summed up the cultural pluralism ideal in commonsense fashion: “Germania meine Mutter, Columbia meine Braut” (Germany my mother, America my bride). Just as individuals do not usually renounce allegiance to their parents and ancestral family when they marry, despite occasional friction and tension, the metaphor suggests, so too with ethnic groups.
Horace Kallen (1882–1974), a German‐Jewish philosopher who taught at
New York City's New School for Social Research, first used the term “cultural pluralism” in
Culture and Democracy in the United States, 1924. While Kallen continued for nearly half a century to champion the notion of dual cultural loyalties, arguing that this would enrich American culture, not endanger it, he also endowed the concept with a rigidity that was absent in the nineteenth‐century, commonsense notion. He often argued polemically that “people cannot change their grandparents,” thereby confusing ethnic or cultural loyalties with biological, genetic, or racial inheritance. Men and women cannot change their grandparents, but they can and do change their language and cultural values. Extreme assertions of diversity, such as Kallen's, imply a kind of racial or ethnic essentialism and separatism, not merely cultural pluralism.
The theory of cultural pluralism remained a defensive, minority position until the later twentieth century. After the African American
civil rights movement and the white ethnic revival of the 1960s and 1970s, however, pluralism became the mainstream intellectual position in the United States. It still remained controversial, however. Many argued that dual loyalties could distort American foreign policy, since members of an ethnic group may lobby for policies favoring their ancestral country. Others contended that bilingual education—one by‐product of the cultural‐pluralism ideal—retards the economic progress of immigrant children and weakens the American social fabric. Since the United States remains an immigrant‐receiving country, some form of cultural pluralism will likely continue to describe the American reality, even if the theory is modified or falls out of fashion.
See also
Ethnicity;
Immigration;
Nativist Movement.
Bibliography
John Higham . Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America, 1975.
Arthur Mann . The One and the Many: Reflections on the American Identity, 1979.
David A. Hollinger , Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, 1995.
Edward R. Kantowicz
