Midwest (New Zealand) 3 (1993): 9-11. ================================================================= Common Coin Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett E pluribus unum is common coin--literally. The words appear on American pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. Thus coined, the phrase affirms unity in diversity. But buried in these three words is a multitude of meanings. What counts as different? And what kind of unity shall contain it? War is the great delineator of difference. In the American War of Independence (1776) and Civil War (1861-65), the differences that mattered were British, French, Spanish, Native American, and African American, for these are the differences that structured the battles over territory, sovereignty, and rights. Three waves of mass immigration further complicated the picture--the Irish and German influx during the mid-nineteenth century, millions of Southern and Eastern Europeans from 1888-1924, and the rest of the world since 1965. Growing xenophobia eventually closed the doors to immigration in 1924, and kept them closed for forty years. But by that time, millions of foreigners had already arrived. What was to be done with them? Proponents of Anglo-conformity did battle with those who would put a more human face on Americanization by celebrating "immigrant gifts" laid on the altar of America. The display forms of choice were pageants of democracy and immigrant homelands exhibitions and festivals, a kind of gallery of nations modelled on the foreign villages of world's fairs. In the years leading up to World War II, distinctions made o on the basis of race, understood as formal types that were immutable and ranked, were so dangerous that anthropologists such as Franz Boas fought for the right not to identify oneself or be identified by others on any grounds. Others, like Horace Kallen, struggled for the right to be different without penalty--Kallen coined the term cultural pluralism in 1915 and meant by it a federation of nationalities within America. After World War II, as the grandchildren of immigrants came of age, the "new ethnicity," the Civil Rights movement, the women's movement, post-1965 immigration, and the AIDS crisis shifted the grounds of difference and drew the lines in new and more places. We are in the midst of a pitched battle known here as the Culture Wars. The battle is being fought everywhere--our schools and workplace, museums and concert halls, churches and abortion clinics, banks and grantmaking agencies, our medical system and insurance companies, law courts and the military, in the halls of government and the mass media, in our streets and parks. Nor can the rose and its names be taken for granted. Just trace the shifts from negro and colored to black and African American. When the Census tries to count people from places where Spanish is spoken, they must navigate the terminological tangle of self- identification, which includes pan-ethnic designations (Hispanic, Latino, Spanish), ones based on country of origin (Cuba, Peru, etc.), historical experience in the United States (Chicano), or just plain American. Jews (except for Israelis, who form a very small percentage) cannot be counted at all because the Census has decided that Jews are a religious, not a national or ethnic, group, and the separation of church and state precludes the Census asking questions about religion. These are wars that can bring a president to ruin, or that's how it seemed during the recent election that ended the twelve-year Republican regime. Our public schools, the great Americanization machine, is a prime site. A borough school board in New York City was recently suspended over the inclusiveness of the proposed "Children of the Rainbow" curriculum. As its chief opponent, the board's president, declared, "I will not demean our legitimate minorities, such as blacks, Hispanics and Asians, by lumping them together with homosexuals in that curriculum." The New York City Schools Chancellor, who suspended the board, lost his job. In the trenches of the university, the call is for loose canons taught by cultural insiders and official recognition of gay and lesbian studies. And free speech, no matter what the content, which is after all the real test, is in jeopardy as universities clamp down on hate talk. Bills have come up declaring English the official language and the square dance the official dance, so far without success. And the services of "diversity consultants" are now being sought by corporations and businesses to help them meet affirmative action objectives and deal with bias in the workplace. Meanwhile pots of gold are appearing at the end of rainbows whose spectrum is being defined with painstaking precision. North Star Fund, a foundation committed to "progressive social change and equitable distribution of wealth, resources, and power," requires that applicants specify how many of their organization's members, board members, and staff fall into the following categories: low income, American Indian, Asian, Arab, Black, Latino, White, Other (to be specified), women, gay/lesbian, older, youth, and disabled. The intentions are good, but not the implications of requiring people to be so labelled. Why does "other" need to be specified, but "white" is left undifferentiated? Why, in this day and age, would we want to dignify identifications that are singular and clearcut and categories that are pure? Why valorize the involuntary nature of many, if not all, such categories and the racialist assumptions underlying them? Technically, one drop of black blood is enough to distinguish white from black, which is precisely what Adrian Piper's work contests when it argues that by this definition most Americans are black and most blacks are invisible. It takes more than a single drop to qualify as a Native American and the entitlements that such certification warrants. Visibility politics has come into its own, along with an affirmative racialism. Meanwhile, detractors of the National Endowment for the Arts and other grantmaking agencies protest that equity is the enemy of standards, as funding goes to the mariachi band but the symphony orchestra, which requires millions of dollars a year to survive, languishes. In a rush to stake out territory on the Mall in Washington, D.C., the national commons as it were, each group lobbies for its own museum--the latest to open is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. On Broadway, the casting of Miss Saigon has galvanized protests over who will play non-Caucasian roles and the larger issue of colorblind casting for any role. But even as our cultural institutions attempt to remedy the exclusions and inequities of history, they reproduce them in new forms. During the last two decades, sites long associated with a discrete historical experience and exclusive set of participants, whether Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock or immigrants processed at Ellis Island, have been competing for the status of definitive master narrative. Most recently, Ellis Island Restoration, just off the shore of Manhattan, offers a representation of immigrant history that is a model of inclusiveness. Ringing the island is a great fundraising device, the American Immigrant Wall of Honor. Anyone can sign on by paying $100 regardless of when he or his relatives arrived in the United States or through which port or under what conditions. Ours is an era of historical identification by consent (and dissent) rather than descent, as the thousands of names attest. Here, a representation of immigration that excludes no one also levels differences that matter to those who were brought forcibly as slaves or who never moved at all--their territories were expropriated or annexed--or who formed Chinese bachelor societies because only single men were allowed to immigrate. At dizzying speed, the grounds of difference shift, expand, contract, and fracture along ever more fault lines of increasing and diminishing emphasis. Our metaphors cannot keep pace. At one time the passport identities of immigration were celebrated in images of garden, mosaic, kaleidoscope, rainbow, orchestra, symphony, patchwork, fabric, quilt, and stew, in opposition to melting pot. Today, these banalities are yielding to multiculturalism, as if changing the name would change the game. Multicultural is a euphemism for what used to be called minorities, ethnic groups, the underrepresented, disenfranchised and underserved--even though in cities like Los Angeles they are in the majority. We like terms that appear to leave no one out, to value difference without ranking it. Our bastions of high culture, pressed by government and corporate funders to demonstrate their inclusiveness, are doing what they can in the name of multiculturalism. The neutral terms of outreach, access, and community signify those whom art museums do not normally include in their exhibitions, involve in their inner workings or explicitly address. These are the residents of the inner city or public housing, people with AIDS, gays and lesbians, the "multiculturals," and women. It goes without saying that school children are a prime audience and favored way of meeting the outreach agenda. Exhibitions like the 1993 Whitney Biennial are high visibility displays of the problem and a partial, but not adequate, solution. Even as this Biennial went out of its way to show work produced on the fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class, it did not, it could not, fundamentally alter the museum's institutional practices. While the exhibition did the right thing, so to speak, it did not change the concept and price tag for membership, where money buys varying degrees of exclusive access, or the privilege, for those who can pay $150, of day tours to private collections and historic homes along the Hudson River. Without the material base, the inclusive exhibition would not have been possible. But its price is finally the exclusive nature of the museum as an institution. Paradoxically, new categories articulate an old order--the West and the rest, the one and the many, the high and the low. Within the university, music--need I specify Western and classical?--is prime time, while ethnomusicology is a side event. In the museum, all those historically left out of collections and major exhibitions get to appear together in one show, preferably through work that takes as its subject their predicament. Most of the responsibility for outreach goes to the education department, which has the lowest prestige within the hierarchy of museum functions and proceeds only as far as external funding will take it. Special divisions in funding agencies, with names like folk arts, expansion arts, or special arts services, handle art forms and artists that the standard divisions of music, theatre, dance, painting and sculpture are unable or unwilling to consider--which is why Asian classical art forms such as Chinese opera end up in folk arts, where they do get a sympathetic hearing. There are no easy remedies. Inclusion is of course a start, but it does not go far enough if we do not examine and address how inclusions structure difference. This is why, appearances to the contrary, multiculturalism is basically a centering operation. Whether that means making the center more inclusive or contesting its location or creating multiple centers, multiculturalism is a diversion that leaves in tact the still relatively impregnable center, that which has the power not to be defined as multicultural. As Stuart Hall has noted, the hegemonic does not represent itself as ethnic, or in Arlene Croce's terms, as the preserve of anthropologists--or, in my terms, as multicultural--but rather speaks from the center in universalist terms, making "transcendent claims to speak for everyone, while being itself everywhere and nowhere"--even when coded as multicultural.