John Winthrop and American Multiculturism
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Description: Article by Dr. David R. Williams of George Mason University.
JOHN WINTHROP AND AMEIRCAN MULTICULTURALISM John Winthrop and the Origins of American Multiculturalism: Not simply the oldest American dead white European male, nor the authoritarian Puritan patriarch, nor a sainted Pilgrim Father, John Winthrop needs to be rescued from all of those who would paint him either as an American saint or a demon. At the moment, he particularly needs to be rescued from those, making room in their anthologies and surveys for new voices, are tempted to abandon him as irrelevant or as downright harmful. These current efforts to bring previously marginalized voices into our classes are a healthy movement long overdue. But, as its critics fear, the multicultural challenge to the canon does require, to accommodate the recovery of neglected texts, the replacing of some older chestnuts. Anthologies are already too large to consume entirely in any one course, and undergraduates are reading less not more in our finite fourteen week semesters. Hence, before the new voices overwhelm the old, it may be time to determine within the context of the academic concerns of the present which of the older, traditional texts ought to be retained. Having dethroned the mainstream WASP tradition with its hegemonic tendencies, we multiculturalists need to concede that this WASP tradition is, if no longer dominant, at least one part of the American multi-ethnic scene, and that it deserves to retain at least a slice of the new multicultural pie. I would like to begin with Winthrop. More specifically, Winthrop's most anthologized piece of writing, his speech on "Christian Charity," requires a new reading, one tied to the politics of the 1990s but located within the context of the politics of 1629. The arguments against any such assumption of a new "true" reading of original authorial intent is first that it is impossible, that any reading is done from a particular perspective and cannot hope to escape the contingencies of race, class, and gender, and second that it is irrelevant since the r
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