Community Essay : Does Minority Mean Inferior? : ‘Despite noble intentions, multiculturalism marginalizes the cultures it hopes to highlight.’

In the United States today, the words ethnic and cultural have become household terms. We live in an environment that is increasingly defined by its cultural, ethnic and racial diversity. Our schools have implemented bilingual programs and miss no opportunity to declare cultural preservation as a primary goal of their teaching.

The awareness of the links between culture and learning has also prompted our universities to design multicultural programs that integrate perspectives from different ethnic and racial groups in curricula across disciplines. There is a general willingness to cross over cultural lines and to redraw boundaries. Indeed, the moment seems perfect for us Armenian Americans to take a good look at ourselves and to (re)negotiate our own orders as an ethnic minority in a so-called majority culture.

Although Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines ethnic as, “of or relating to races or large groups of people classed according to common traits and customs,” it is no secret that in the United States, “ethnic” generally refers to anybody who is nonwhite or non-European American, and consequently, inferior and marginal. As one student so tellingly put it, “The word when defined doesn’t hurt, but the way it is expressed hurts.”

I am particularly concerned with the classification of the literature by writers of Armenian descent as minority, and, therefore, second-rate. Although it is true that good writing is hard to come by, it is also true that most mainstream anthologies do not include the works of William Saroyan, winner of America’s own measure of greatness, the Pulitzer Prize, and arguably one of the dominant personalities on the American literary scene during the Depression and World War II eras. Saroyan’s “A Time of Your Life,” a superb play that deals as much with the modern American reality as it does with universal human concerns, is seldom anthologized. Nonetheless, it is deemed worthy of study in our “ethnic literature” classes.

Thus, in effect, instead of integrating the large variety of cultures that come together to make up this country, the focus on multicultural education has, despite noble intentions, resulted in the exclusion of these cultures. I realize that deploring the absence of literature from the core culture is a way of paying homage to the dominant culture. Yet, we cannot ignore the fact that the creation of the ethnic/mainstream dichotomy has helped perpetuate the marginal position Armenians, as an ethnic group, have found ourselves in America since the beginning of the century.