Contested Diversity: Integration and the Roots of “Multi-Culturalism” in Postwar Los Angeles

Russell Kazal, University of Toronto

Today’s conservative assault on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs represents only the latest in a long line of attacks on diversity as a value, exemplified in the late twentieth-century “culture wars” waged by the American Right against multiculturalism. Yet the case of Los Angeles suggests that such fights, and multiculturalism itself, have much longer roots. Scholars tracing the emergence of multiculturalism as an ideology valuing ethnic diversity often point to the early 1970s as the moment when that stance crystallized in the United States, breaking sharply with older notions of assimilation and racial integration. A language of “multi-culturalism” and “multi-cultural education” was certainly evident during these years in activist and education reform circles in Los Angeles. This ideology, however, with its radical and liberal variants, was both new and old. Southern California had a history stretching back to the 1940s as a hotbed of multiracial pluralist ideologies, rooted in the region’s extraordinary ethnic diversity, its left and Mexican-American, Japanese-American, and Black civil rights mobilizations, and a growing web of “inter-racial” and “human relations” commissions. Activists, officials, and reformers over the 1950s increasingly defined the region’s “diversity” in terms of multiple “cultures” distinguished by color -- a vision some began to label “multiculture” or “multi-cultural,” even as they tied it to the cause of racial integration. A cohort of these liberal activists, in fact, recast their campaigns for school desegregation by the late 1960s and early 1970s as a fight for what they now called an “integrated multicultural education” that would bring together students of different “cultures.” The opposition they encountered by the 1970s represented a conservative reaction against both a new “identity politics” of cultural affirmation and the long-standing integrationist goals they continued to pursue across that decade.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 160. Past as Prologue: Migrant Labor, Migrant Rights, and “Multiculturalism” in Late Twentieth-Century Los Angeles