myth of american multiethnic praxis

Myth of American Multiethnic Praxis, Part I



2020 is a year for making crucial choices about one's identity and a future for American government. It will be less than a happy year.  How shall people identify themselves as they complete census forms?  How could census figures be rendered useless for the allocation of public funds if 46% of our population checked "OTHER" and wrote "human" on the blank line?  It will not happen, of course, but it is tempting  to consider how a national information crisis would awaken indifferent citizens to the looming dangers of the post-human, the post-racial , the post-true..



We do not have to imagine a crisis. We can cherry-pick from an array of crises. Our fairly dim recognition that politics is linked to polis is one of them.



 Voting in November 2020 will ensure that we shall be burdened for many years with a crisis of great magnitude. The woman or man who is declared the new POTUS will be "elected" by the constitutional tyranny of the Electoral College not by the popular vote.  Our knowing that "democracy"  like "justice" is a best a dubious proposition will be intensified.  Let us refrain from deluding ourselves.



The myth of American multiethnic praxis is responsible, in part, for the fact that most American citizens have not yet imploded in irreversible anger.  That myth is a calming drug.  It makes inequity, lies and counter-lies, inequality, the progressively widening gap between wealth and poverty, improved neo-fascism, and loss of trust in one's neighbors seem quite "normal."  With the help of commendable technologies, our nation is becoming a rewriting of John Milton's Paradise Lost. And soon one morning, we may suddenly discover we are cyber-barbarians.



Myth of American Multiethnic Praxis, Part II



"Every idea of realism or non-realism is based on a conscious or unconscious conception of reality.  What is considered realism or non-realism in art always depends on what reality is and how it is conceived. A materialist examination of the problem therefore begins by positing this dependence as fundamental " (67).



Karel  Kosik, Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World. Boston: D. Reidel  Publishing Company, 1976)



My claims about the myth of American multiethnic praxis sprang from the attention I gave to two sentences from Peter Brooks' review of Walter Benjamin's The Storyteller Essays (NYRB, January 16, 2020, p. 50).  Brooks asserted that



"When we fail to see stories as ways of representing reality and take them for reality itself, they become myths, such as of the 'master race; or the 'invasion' of our nation by murderous immigrants.  We seem to find ourselves in a confusion of living and telling that needs constant critique."



In my childhood and youth I naively assumed that we had constant critique of American democracy, somewhat reliable guides from journalists and public intellectuals regarding what was true or not true in our daily lives.  In my adulthood and old age, I think we are bereft of trustworthy critique in public life; we are too impatient to distinguish story from myth and remarkably happy to use supreme myths to navigate actuality and reality.  We who claim to love democracy and who advocate that everyone in this world should enjoy the benefits of democracy  journey on Das Narrenschiff.

My claims invoke what Albert Camus described as the absurd, and they are fodder for heated debate and refutation.  The majority of American citizens are  pragmatic; they do not fret about ideals and myths, because they are safely and  sufficiently anti-intellectual . The burden of worry is carried by a minority of citizens who once inhabited  or who still live in matrices of creativity, ideology, and philosophical quests.  It is probable that the majority knows very little and cares nothing about the so-called culture wars of the 1980s, the vigorous arguments about centers and margins and hegemony which begat the myth of multiethnic praxis  They freely dismiss the origins of what the 21st century has tossed into   the quicksand of  "diversity."



What remains in 2020 of our nation's long experimentation with democracy and struggles to effect human rights and social justice is seasoned with fear and deception.  In theory, we entertain stories about viable links among our color-coded population ----yellow, black, red, white, and brown.  The links are fragile, compromised by discrepancies in praxis.



Our lip-service to the multiethnic has not yet destroyed the hegemony of the black/white binary in American society and politics.  Our color-coded groups care very little for one another, and the notion of solidarity against the dehumanizing  forces in our nation is a capital capitalist joke.  I am amuse d by how noisy our mass media can be in dispensing "information" about African American voting trends and how extremely silent that media is in  dealing with Asian American  or Hispanic American voting habits.  As a person who has deep investment in literature and literacy, I applaud the noble efforts of fellow writers and  our allies in the plastic and visual arts to promote multiethnic consciousness , but I suspect

 that Korean American readers give scant attention to  works  by indigenous writers (Native Americans) who are outside an academic canon.



One of the most honest discussions of the myth of the  multiethnic is Wen Liu's "Complicity and Resistance: Asian American Body Politics in Black Lives Matter." Journal of Asian American Studies 21.3 (October 2018): 421-451. [[  DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2018.0026 ]]

Liu's abstract,  which I quote verbatim, is simply enlightening-----



ABSTRACT  The portrayal of Asian Americans as the exemplar of American multiculturalism and the ideal "postracial " futurity has read a body politic easily recruited by neoliberal governmentality to disguise racial inequality.  Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the Black Lives Mater movements based in New York City, this article focuses on the split within Asian American body politics between those for and against the centering of Black lives.  Whereas an Asian American body politic risks being co-opted as a form of anti-Black white assimilation, the author also highlights the resistance of Asian for Black Lives activists and their attempt to recuperate Asian American identity for cross-racial solidarity.



One can up the ante by suggesting that all ethnic body politics in our nation are daily co-opted and abused by both conservative and liberal governing agents and agencies.  Our praxis has many rows yet to hoe in the Delta of our minds.







Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            January 12, 2020