Like Barack Hussein Obama before her, Harris represents the hybrid identity and possibilities of diversity that Americans alternatively embrace and fear. For those who fear it, DEI represents not only affirmative action policies in hiring and university admissions, but also subversive ideas polluting American education, media, and culture, from Marxism and post-modernism to the social construction of race and gender to the placing of Islam and other “non—western” religions on par with their so-called “Judeo-Christian” heritage.
One hundred years ago America faced similar questions. With nativism on the rise following the First World War, the government responded with fear, passing the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, severely curtailing immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and effectively ending it from Asia (restrictions not undone until 1965). While many citizens, including numerous immigrants, opposed this Act, the restrictions found supporters among a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, who violently excluded Blacks as well as Jews and Catholics from their definition of American. Contemporaneously, Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey led a popular but unsuccessful movement for African Americans to return to Africa in the face of relentless racism back home, while Ivy League universities enacted restrictive quotas for Jewish applicants.
A small number of American intellectuals, mostly long forgotten, proposed a different path. One such figure was Horace Meyer Kallen (1882-1974), a German-born Jewish immigrant to Boston and philosophy professor at the New School for Social Research. In his 1924 book, Culture and Democracy in the United States, now a century old, Kallen coined the term “cultural pluralism.” He argued that what defined and represented the best of America was its diversity coupled with its commitment to freedom, democracy, equality, and inclusivity. Cultural pluralism served as a kind of intellectual precursor to what we now call multiculturalism, a foundational idea for DEI policies today. You can trace a crooked but clear line from Kallen to DEI, which makes sense, because Kallen was the prophet of DEI avant la lettre.
Kallen had fleshed out the idea without naming it nearly a decade earlier, in a 1915 essay in The Nation called “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot.” As World War I raged across the ocean, Kallen offered cultural pluralism to the US as a relatively simple idea that opposed not only bigoted nativism but also the American melting pot, which he regarded as a front for “Anglo-Saxonism.” He argued that different ethnic groups could and should retain their ancestral cultures as they adapted to modern life and integrated into the US economy and broader social fabric. Each group should further develop its own art and literature and music in America, in conversation with all the other groups doing the same. His metaphor for cultural pluralism was the harmonious “symphony of civilization.”