Abstract
Two distinct demands for greater equality run through the history of the Western world in the twentieth century. One opposes discrimination against people on grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, or physical condition. These inescapably given traits are commonly understood as personal, as internal, as part of the very substance of who we are. To use them as devices or reasons for subordinating outgroups affronts our sense of equal justice. Recognition of a moral equivalence of endowment is therefore a fundamental objective in modern society.
People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids?… We’ll, we’ll get our justice We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to work it out.
— Statement by Rodney G. King May 1, 1992, urging an end to the riots provoked in Los Angeles by a court’s exoneration of his tormenters.
(New York Times, May 2, 1992)
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Notes
John Higham. “From Process to Structure: Formulations of American Immigration History,” in American Immigrants and Their Generations: Studies and Commentaries on the Hansen Thesis after Fifty Years, ed. Peter Kivisso and Dag Blanck (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 18–41.
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper Collins 1944), 8–27. See also Walter A. Jackson. Gunnar Myrdal and: Harper Collins
America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill, N.C.:University of North Carolina Press 1990).
Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Quoted in Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York, Oxford University Press, 1990), 83.
Rogers M. Smith. “The American Creed and American Identity: The Limits of Liberal Citizenship in the United States.” Western Political Quarterly 41 (June 1988), 225–51.
James Fenimore Cooper. Notions of the Americans. 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 1828), 1: 239; Henry James, The Social Significance of Our Institutions (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861), 28.
John Higham, “Indian Princess and Roman Goddess: The First Female Symbols of America,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 100 (1990): part 1, 63–67; Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 222–23.
Jack M. Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement (Blooming- ton, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987), 204–13.
Murray Kempton, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” New York Review of Books, (23 Apr. 1992), 55.
Ira Katznelson, “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Books on Demand, 1989), 185–211.
“Democratic Platform Shows Shift in Party’s Roots,” New York Times, 14 July 1992.
David Brion Davis, “The American Dilemma,” New York Review of Books, 16 July 1992, 13–17.
Jonathan Okamura, “Situational Ethnicity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 4 (Oct. 1981): 452–65; William L. Yancey et al., “Emergent Ethnicity: A Review and Reformulation,” American Sociological Review 41 (June 1976): 391–403.
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© 1993 Johns Hopkins University Press
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Higham, J. (1993). Multiculturalism and Universalism: A History and Critique. In: Hughey, M.W. (eds) New Tribalisms. Main Trends of the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26403-2_10
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