Barbara Ehrenreich's Teach Diversity With A Smile

In “Teach Diversity – with a Smile,” journalist Barbara Ehrenreich explains the current conflict between people who would like to replace our Eurocentric bias in education with a multicultural approach and those critics and conservative scholars who are leading the backlash against multiculturalism and “political correctness.” Writing for readers of Time magazine, Ehrenreich uses her own experience growing up in the 1950s to explain that her narrow education left her a “victim of monoculturalism,” ill-equipped to cope with America’s growing cultural diversity. Ehrenreich applauds multiculturalism’s goal of preparing people for a culturally diverse world, but she is impatient at the “haughty stance” of the P.C. people because they mistake “verbal purification for genuine social reform” and they arrogantly bully people and “correct” their language. Since actions speak louder than words, Ehrenreich argues, the multiculturalists should focus more on genuine social reform – paying equal salaries to men and women, creating access for people with disabilities, and reducing date rape and alcohol abuse. The solution to the problem, …show more content…
When she explains that her monocultural education gave her a social map that was “about as useful as the chart that guided Columbus to the Indies,” she helps us understand how vital multicultural studies are in a society that is more like a glass mosaic than a melting pot. Interestingly, even her vocabulary reveals – perhaps unconsciously—her Western bias: Jacobins, pensees, fiat, and politesse are all words that reveal her eurocentric education. When Ehrenreich shifts to discussing the P.C. movement, her commonsense approach to the silliness of excessive social correctness (“the other guy’s –or, excuse me, woman’s – point of view”) makes us as readers more willing to accept her compromise