Rating: 
Summary: A Book that Affirms or Insults, Depending on Who You Are
Review: As a Non-white person living in America in 2004, finding myself bombarded by racist messages on television, in movies, at work, and in private social interactions, I can honestly say I don't care very much about whether Schlesinger's version of America stays in tact. I say, let institutionalized racism fall apart as soon as possible! As a nation that deeply wants to be recognized as a democracy, Americans can no longer ask, with a straight face, as the author does, that non-white people accept second-class citizenship. Or can we? Is taking pride in democracy the same thing as taking pride in "Western democracy?" The author has yet to reconcile his sense of Western cultural superiority from his publicly declared egalitarian values. In sum, the political correctness of this book does not address the underlying racism, which is hidden because it challenges the moral consistency of Schlesinger's thought. I hope these comments add new analytical dimensions to some readers' interpretations of his works.
Rating: 
Summary: It's sad that this book is probably controversial
Review: I found Arthur Schlesinger�s survey of multiculturalism in America to be a welcome and refreshing monograph. The Disuniting of America � aptly titled � is a clear headed and straightforward account of how and why the country is are genuinely threatened by the intellectual descendents of the cultural sensitivities that allowed us to shake off (mostly) generations of intolerance and bigotry.Half cheerleading for American history, Schlesinger shows that America is indeed become fractured along whatever lines � ethnic, racial, religious to some extent � people can dream up. This is not, repeat not, the logical consequence of our national awakening of the sixties. More and more we find in America groups choosing isolation and the politics of mass attack. As a distinguished historian, Schlesinger has countless examples of how the national ideology was formed very early in our history. Citing de Tocqueville and others less famous, he shows how wild and revolutionary was the idea then, and quite a bit now, that a nation could form basing personal identity not on religion, or tribe, or language, but on the �melting pot� as it came to be known. E pluribus unum, from many one, is changed today so often to just pluribus. In more concrete terms, we get a review of how multiculturalism�s worst self satire has become the norm in, for example, education, a subject discussed at great length. We see how history, an old and distinguished practice, is becoming polluted by charlatans who consider it more important to promote myths that to report on reality. When self-esteem becomes the motivating goal behind primary school history lessons, and the past itself becomes something of an obstacle, we can be sure that something is seriously wrong. Of course, what makes Disuniting special is the author. Besides being a noted liberal, something the reader is never tempted to forget, he is also a clear-headed thinker and writer. This is not just a collection of anecdotes, indistinguishable from a Rush Limbaugh rant or off-the-cuff blog from the National Review. This is a warning from someone smart enough to realize, and articulate enough to express, that the answer to white on black racism is not black on white racism. That maximum tolerance for new ways of thinking and living does not mean minimal tolerance for old ways. And to return to the original and dominant theme, lest we Balkanize (or even Rwanda-ize) our own country, and turn into a land where crackpot religious leaders can condemn authors to death for writing the wrong books, let us remember that we as a country have held together now for more than two centuries by, to put it succinctly, holding together. It was a strength even in the bad old days, and should be our crowning glory now.
Rating: 
Summary: thought-provoking
Review: I originally was assigned to read this book for a class, and it turned out to be one of my favorites regarding the issues of multicultarism and America today. Schlesinger explores many things, including inclusiveness in History texts regarding minorities, the use of hyphens when describing ethnicity (African-American, for example) and particularly, the fragmentation of ethnic groups in America. This book was utterly thought-provoking. I don't agree with everything Schlesinger says, but I'm rather glad I read it.
Rating:
Summary: thought-provoking
Review: I originally was assigned to read this book for a class, and it turned out to be one of my favorites regarding the issues of multicultarism and America today. Schlesinger explores many things, including inclusiveness in History texts regarding minorities, the use of hyphens when describing ethnicity (African-American, for example) and particularly, the fragmentation of ethnic groups in America. This book was utterly thought-provoking. I don't agree with everything Schlesinger says, but I'm rather glad I read it.
Rating: 
Summary: racist reality not confronted
Review: I totally agree with the last comment. A lot of you gave this book five stars because you feel "minorities" are acting paranoid, acting out. You're thinking, i've never had a racist thought in my life! Never called anybody names! My people give other peoples freedom, gives them jobs, saves their souls, and do nice things like correcting their English. if you say that, then chances are you don't have any close friends who are not "White." If you say you do, then they probably act and speak like you. It's time for American writers to start talking about racial conflict in this divided nation openly, instead of pumping out these passive-agressive texts using political correct language. Thumbs down to Schlesinger's one-sided book.
Rating:
Summary: racist reality not confronted
Review: I totally agree with the last comment. A lot of you gave this book five stars because you feel "minorities" are acting paranoid, acting out. You're thinking, i've never had a racist thought in my life! Never called anybody names! My people give other peoples freedom, gives them jobs, saves their souls, and do nice things like correcting their English. if you say that, then chances are you don't have any close friends who are not "White." If you say you do, then they probably act and speak like you. It's time for American writers to start talking about racial conflict in this divided nation openly, instead of pumping out these passive-agressive texts using political correct language. Thumbs down to Schlesinger's one-sided book.
Rating: 
Summary: Not A Good Book At All
Review: Riding the wave of Anti-Afrocentrism, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr wrote the book The Disuniting of America. An expert on American Presidencies, Schlesinger Jr promotes the idea of America as an integrationist melting-pot rather than a multiculturalist disaster waiting to happen. Because "Canadians have never developed a strong sense of what it means to be a Canadian" they are not privy to what Americans have enjoyed in e Pluribus Unum. Schlesinger acknowledges that racism is a shameful act and that "white Americans have been racist in [their] laws, in [their] institutions... customs, conditioned reflexes, in [their] souls." But while these unfair conditions still exist, Schlesinger argues that assimilation and integration are the way forward, citing Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. in an attempt to allow the American sentiment to prevail over all others.
Compounding the problems of political correctness, the search for children's self-esteem, individual community development, ethnic separatism and the teaching of history as "filiopietistic commemoration" several internal factors working together in the United States for making this issue a large one are highlighted. The constant ethnocentrism in cultural politics, in Schlesinger's opinion, speaks negatively to educational practises, thereby causing a neo-segregationist cause furthered by Afrocentrism's insistence that there is a specific "Africanity" (to coin Molefi Asante), Afrocentricity and cosmological sensibility that makes blacks fundamentally different from whites. Afrocentrism's insistence that the person of colour is a feeling being whereas the person of non-colour is a reasoning being is, in Schlesinger's opinion, ludicrous. For example, the thespians' world has been dramatically, continuously corrupted by questions of race. Would Shakespeare have wanted Denzel Washington to play his Richard III as he did in New York before he broke into more popular films? Is it more disturbing that Mr. Washington has perfect posture (Richard III was written by Shakespeare to be a deformed-looking creature, a victim of "lookism" if you will) or that Denzel Washington, as he describes himself, is a "bird" (a black person)?
"We have a different way of responding to the world," he said. "We have different ideas about religion, different manners of social intercourse. We have different ideas about style, about language. We have different aesthetics... The job [to be the director of a film about black people] requires someone who shares the specifics of the culture of Black Americans... Let's make a rule. Blacks don't direct Italian films. Italians don't direct Jewish films. Jews don't direct black American films."
This quote by the brilliant black playwright August Wilson, insisting on a black director for the film of his play Fences more specifically troubling to Schlesinger: "By the Wilson rule, only Norweigans would be permitted to direct Ibsen, only Danes to play Hamlet." This is of course simplifying the argument, and attributing something wholly unrelated to Afrocentrism to Afrocentrism. The notion that the skin colour or general appearance or sexual orientation of the actor should be somewhat similar to his character so as to convince, appease and comfort the audience is not a new one created and espoused solely by proponents of Afrocentrism. Placing Afrocentrism more directly in his eye-view than D'Souza, Schlesinger is threatened by anything that attacks traditions of the USA as an integrationist melting-pot, especially where it makes race-relations all the more uncomfortable.
Be that as it may, Schlesinger's readings and analyses are narrow. He trivialises the entire 1996 Oakland, California Ebonics scandal just as D'Souza trivialised the University of Michigan race-relations scandal of 1991: black people were acting up and asked for too much to compensate for their deep-rooted sense of paranoia. He also discusses this paranoia as an overarching "susceptibility". He asks: "Considering what we now know about the plots against black Americans conducted by J. Edgar Hoover and executed by his FBI, who can blame blacks for being forever suspicious of white intentions?" Still, he trivialises several members of the black community's insistence that the presence and general use of hard drugs in the ghettos of the United States is the doing of the government, describing it as "a more extreme version of the persecution complex... [present in] a society of jostling and competing groups."
The first response to this is an obvious one. A gram of liquid or powdered cocaine, more expensive and more often available in richer, whiter communities can cost a drug dealer two years in jail according to the law, whereas a gram of solid rock-cocaine, the exact same substance in a different form, cheaper more often available in poorer, blacker communities can send a drug dealer to jail for ten years on charges of possession with intent. So for the exact same crime, your average white drug dealer goes to jail for about half a college career whereas your average black drug dealer goes to jail for about an entire secondary school career. The second response to this comment is not as obvious but more rooted in an historical problem. When J. Edgar Hoover as stated before plotted and planned against black groups in the 1960's, and when from 1932 to 1972 the US Public Health Service conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis in what is now commonly known as the Tuskegee Experiment, all protocol, both scientific and political, had been thrown out in the name of racism.
In 1990, a New York Times-WCBS-TV survey found that 10 percent of African-Americans believed that the U.S. government created AIDS as a plot to exterminate blacks, and another 19 percent could not rule out the possibility that this might be true. As outrageous and unreasonable as this may sound, at one time the Tuskegee experiment must have seemed equally farfetched. Who could imagine the government, all the way up to the Surgeon General of the United States, deliberately allowing a group of its citizens to die from a terrible disease for the sake of an ill-conceived experiment? In light of this and many other shameful episodes in our history, African Americans' widespread mistrust of the government and white society in general should not be a surprise to anyone, nor should it be trivialised by the likes of Schlesinger. As previously stated Schlesinger's readings and analyses are narrow and often unthinking, blaming Afrocentrism for such common things as the phenomenon of black paranoia, which threaten academic values of accuracy and objectivity when played out on paper.
Rating:
Summary: Astute analysis from an icon.
Review: Schlesinger isn't just "another conservative" lamenting the onslaught of multiculturalism. He genuinely believes in the now out-of-vogue "melting pot" vision of America, which obviously infuriates many modern liberals. After all, "melting pot" implies "white" and "male." Heaven forbid. Arguably, the most important aspect of the melting pot vision is the governmental and legal system of the United States. Modern liberals and various interest groups are trying to change this presently (which is their right, of course), but disturbingly trying to also rewrite its history. For instance, as Schlesinger writes, the New York State curriculum has mandated that study of the American Founding include reference to the "Haudenosaunee political system" -- in effect, the Iroquois Confederation. Schlesinger correctly notes that this "influence" on the Constitution's Framers was "marginal," and on European intellectuals it was non-existent. (After all, wasn't it virtually only Ben Franklin's quote, after visiting the Iroquois, that said essentially, "If they can do [create a confederation], why can't we?") But, no other state has as effective an Iroquois lobby as New York.
Rating:
Summary: Astute analysis from an icon.
Review: Schlesinger isn't just "another conservative" lamenting the onslaught of multiculturalism. He genuinely believes in the now out-of-vogue "melting pot" vision of America, which obviously infuriates many modern liberals. After all, "melting pot" implies "white" and "male." Heaven forbid. Arguably, the most important aspect of the melting pot vision is the governmental and legal system of the United States. Modern liberals and various interest groups are trying to change this presently (which is their right, of course), but disturbingly trying to also rewrite its history. For instance, as Schlesinger writes, the New York State curriculum has mandated that study of the American Founding include reference to the "Haudenosaunee political system" -- in effect, the Iroquois Confederation. Schlesinger correctly notes that this "influence" on the Constitution's Framers was "marginal," and on European intellectuals it was non-existent. (After all, wasn't it virtually only Ben Franklin's quote, after visiting the Iroquois, that said essentially, "If they can do [create a confederation], why can't we?") But, no other state has as effective an Iroquois lobby as New York.
Rating:
Summary: Courageous
Review: Schlesinger served the Kennedy administration, heavily involved in advancing Civil Rights. Any memory of pre-1960s America justifies his passion. Even lynching of Blacks was not illegal until Truman made it so in 1948 and images of fire hose and German Shepard attacks on peaceful Black protestors or their White supporters remains a stark memory. His book, however, is an alert to those of reason regardless of affiliation that the movement has run off its tracks. But that hasn't stopped its wreckage from continuing to plow a path of ruin through its original intent. As Schlesinger puts it, "A culture of ethnicity has arisen to denounce the idea of a melting pot, to protect and perpetuate separate ethnic and racial communities." Its underlying philosophy is that America is not a nation of individuals but a nation of groups, he says; ethnicity is the defining experience; division into ethnic communities establishes the structure of American society and the fundamental meaning of American history. "Multiethnic dogma abandons historic purposes, replacing assimilation by fragmentation, integration by separation." Our modern movements succeed where the Klan failed. Referencing multiculturalism he asks if it is the school's function to teach racial pride? When does obsession with difference threaten identity? Since this 1993 book this obsession has become an educational standard. Our calendar is split into months for one race pride or another (except white and European). It starts early - believing the purpose of history is therapeutic. He notes, "Once ethnic pride and self-esteem become the criterion for teaching history then certain things cannot be taught." Schlesinger asks the question, "Why does anyone suppose that pride and inspiration are available only from people of the same ethnicity?" One wonders. Schlesinger's core warning is the same as that of the Founders, that "the virus of tribalism lies dormant, flaring up to destroy entire nations." But that has not stopped the derailment of Civil Rights. As Schlesinger notes, Black America's valid leaders - like so much from the Left that began for the right reasons - have been hijacked for the benefits of opposition, not unification.
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