Blum

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Summary:
“Antiracism, Multiculturalism and Interracial community:
Three Educational values for a multicultural society.”

Lawrence Blum is a philosophy professor at University of Massachussetts. He starts off his article stating four values that are important to the education program. They are antiracism, multiculturalism, sense of community and individuality. Racism is when a person or group has attitudes over another. The goal of antiracism is to be “without racist attitudes”. Multiculturalism is the understanding of another’s culture, and the ways of a culture. Community involves saying that people in a community have a somewhat “bond” to other people of races and ethnicities. Individuality is recognizing the person as an individual when that person is a different race and different ethnic group.
He states that these values are different from each other. He also states that these values support each other, but there is tension between them.

Antiracism.
Blum defines racism as “referring both to an institutional or social structure of racial domination or injustice-as when we speak of a racist institution-and also to individual actions, beliefs, and attitudes, whether consciously held or not, which express, support or justify the superiority of ones racial group to another”.(16)
Antiracism branches off to three parts; (a) all individuals are equal. We not only need to comprehend this, but we need to feel it. (b) what people don’t grasp about racism is “a psychological, historical phenomenon” and ( c) opposing racial actions and attitudes. (17)
Blum also makes it a point to say that when the victims or racism don’t take a stand for

themselves, they “made their own history”. (17)

Multiculturalism.
&nbs...

... middle of paper ...

...hite”. The other is to give let the students experience some type of discrimination, being both the discriminator and the one being discriminated against.
In his conclusion, he states that differences need to be recognized, respected and understood. He states that the United States needs to have a “pluralistic community“ . (22) He quotes Robert Bellah, “one which involves a sense of bond and connection stemming from shared activity, condition, task, location, and the like-and grounded ultimately in an experience of shared humanity- yet recognizing and valuing cultural differences (and other kinds of differences as well). (Blum 22)

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