Postwar Pluralism, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Origins of Multicultural Education

Abstract

The rise of multiculturalism in American society has rarely, if ever, been linked to the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Many scholars believe that the Court viewed its opinion as the beginning of the end of ethnoracial divisions. In his call for a postethnic America, the historian David A. Hollinger goes a step further and argues that those who struggled against segregation “had little incentive to embrace the pluralist emphasis on the autonomy or durability of ethno-racial groups.” As the multicultural movement blossomed in the early 1990s, the liberal historian John Higham joined Nathan Glazer and other racial neoconservatives (who opposed social engineering to bring minorities into the mainstream) in pointing an accusatory finger at the black power movement and white guilt as the parents of multiculturalism. Most recently, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn has extended this line of interpretation, claiming that therapeutic race experts, fueled by black power's identity politics, hijacked the civil rights movement and forged an excessive multiculturalism. To such critics, multiculturalism, like black power, smacks of separatism, overwrought group consciousness, the suffocation of individualism, and the decline of class politics.1