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530 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 7 (1993)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0530 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE America as a multicultural society was the theme of a special issue of The Annals published in 1981. Edited by Milton M. Gordon, a sociologist well-known for his writings on assimilation, it was a comparative examina- tion of the backgrounds, cultures, and characteristics of America's diverse peoples, with a principal focus on the largest ethnic groups and racial cohorts. While almost all of the articles addressed, in one way or another, the asymmetrical character of dominant-minority relations in this country and the ways various groups have sought to gain full equality, several focused primary attention on relations between minorities, including those long assumed to be allies. In the 12 years since that issue of The Annals was published, the positive, upbeat, unifying concept of multicultural-long associated with the ideol- ogy of hyphen-connecting pluralism-underwent a significant sea change. With the mere addition of a brief suffix, it turned from a descriptive adjective into a controversial shibboleth subject to a variety of interpretations. Multiculturalism became the rallying cry of a movement for group-based recognition for some who felt they had been too long relegated to the margins of society and to the footnotes of intellectual discourse. To others, not least certain old-fashioned liberal integrationists, the term came to be seen as representing a scary strategy that intentionally threatened to reverse the course of integration and tear apart the very fabric of society. The fact is that the tensions that underlay the new semantic-and ideo- logical-debate have long been a fundamental reality of life in the United States. From its inception, this country has been a nation of shifting coalitions of interest groups. Major interests often centered on the struggles of minori- ties trying to move into the mainstream and the resistance of those who felt threatened by the presence of the strangers in their midst. Periodically, smoldering embers of nativism were fanned afresh, making them central topics of public concern. There were flare-ups in the 1850s and the 1890s; in the period right after World War I, when the Ku Klux Klan was again on the rise; and in the 1930s. It happened again during the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s and, especially, in the early days of the Black Power and Black Consciousness movements that came in its wake. The militancy of African Americans and of other ethnic/racial, gender, and sexual-preference groups, whose leaders modeled much of their rhetoric and challenge on the consciousness-raising example of blacks and their allies, led to considerable gains. It also triggered another backlash, especially among those whom S. M. Lipset and Earl Raab once called the once hads-those with a greater stake in the past than in the present-and the never hads, who argued that, if it were not for those special-privileged minorities, we would be fine.1 1. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 460-82. 7

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