Mural by Damon Lamar ReedMore on the center's mural:
at the University of North Texas Multicultural Center
It is appropriate that such an intellectually empty concept should also
have such an artistically barren piece to showcase one of its centers.
The Multicultural Center celebrates its remodeled offices with an 11 a.m. ceremony Sept. 1 [2010] in the University Union, Courtyard.
[...]
The center’s new floor-to-ceiling mural, which welcomes visitors at the front door, shows the different populations that the center serves. The contemporary mural by Chicago artist Damon Lamar Reed depicts college-age people of different cultures.
Reed was one of six artists to submit proposals for a mural to reflect the aspects of access, diversity, equity and inclusion. He said he used the center’s motto, “Your window to the world,” to create his proposal [Reed's proposal was accepted, and he designed the mural].
The article below was published 2 1/2 years ago by columnist Thomas Sowell. It was posted recently on National Review Online.
Multiculturalism is now an over-dissected topic. I would have hoped the National Review would have asked asked Sowell for his insights on multiculturalism now, not 2 1/2 years ago, whether its perception, and its presence, has changed at all. The answer, of course, is yes. There is even more of what Sowell is writing about, and even less discussion about it.
Even more pressing, what about Sowell's views on (warnings against) Islam? After all, it entered, and stays, in our society using the "multiculturalism" identity. So far, there is nothing from Sowell.
I recently wrote to a group of friends regarding Islam:
We have our own Antichrist (as Hildebrand describes Hitler) in the guise of "The Religion of Peace" which we need to call by its real name, not "Radicalism," Terrorism," "Radical Islam," but simply Islam.And at the Hildebrand Project facebook, one poster quotes from My Battle Against Hitler:
This is now the old and tired argument which we've dissected so many times, and especially as Larry Auster would do tirelessly and repeatedly. In one article (among many), he calls Mohammed The Successful Hitler. So it is astonishing that this truth still hasn't permeated our society. It is at our peril if we let it remain in this naive, but now deliberately obtuse, manner.
It is precisely our struggle against evil that God wills, even when we suffer external defeat...
The Dogma of Multiculturalism:-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The fallacy of “equally valid” cultures polarizes society
By: Thomas Sowell, Senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
March 15, 2013
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogma of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.
Multiculturalism is a tempting quick fix for groups that lag; it simply pronounces their cultures to be equal with others, or “equally valid,” in some vague and lofty sense. Cultural features are just different, not better or worse, according to this dogma.
Yet the borrowing of particular features from other cultures — such as replacing Roman numerals with Arabic numerals, even in Western cultures that derived from Rome — implies that some features are not simply different but better. Some of the most advanced cultures in history have borrowed from other cultures, because no given collection of human beings has created the best answers to all the questions of life.
Nevertheless, since multiculturalists see all cultures as equal or “equally valid,” they see no justification for schools to insist that black children learn standard English, for example. Instead, each group is encouraged to cling to its own culture and to take pride in its own past glories, real or imaginary.
In other words, members of minority groups that lag educationally, economically, or otherwise are to continue to behave in the future as they have in the past — and, if they do not get the same outcomes as others, it is society’s fault. That is the bottom-line message of multiculturalism.
George Orwell once said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them. Multiculturalism is one of those ideas. The intelligentsia burst into indignation or outrage at “gaps” or “disparities” in educational, economic, or other outcomes — and denounce any cultural explanation of these group differences as “blaming the victim.”
There is no question that some races or whole nations have been victimized by others, any more than there is any question that cancers can cause death. But that is very different from saying that deaths can automatically be blamed on cancer. You might think that intellectuals could make that distinction. But many do not.
Yet intellectuals see themselves as friends, allies, and defenders of racial minorities, even as they paint them into a corner of cultural stagnation. This allows the intelligentsia to flatter themselves that they are on the side of the angels against the forces of evil that are conspiring to keep minorities down.
When they cannot come up with hard evidence in any particular case to support this theory, that just proves to the intelligentsia how fiendishly clever and covert these pervasive efforts to hold down minorities are.
Why people with high levels of mental skills and rhetorical talents would tie themselves into knots with such reasoning is a mystery. Perhaps it is just that they cannot give up a social vision that is so flattering to themselves, despite how detrimental it may be to the people they claim to be helping.
Multiculturalism, like the caste system, paints people into the corner where they happened to have been born. But at least the caste system does not claim to benefit those at the bottom.
Multiculturalism not only serves the ego interests of intellectuals, it serves the political interests of elected officials, who have every incentive to promote a sense of victimhood, and even paranoia, among groups whose votes they want in exchange for both material and psychic support.
The multicultural vision of the world also serves the interests of those in the media who thrive on moral melodramas, as well as serving the interests of whole departments of ethnic “studies” in academia and a whole industry of “diversity” consultants, community organizers, and other miscellaneous race hustlers.
The biggest losers in all this are those members of racial minorities who allow themselves to be led into the blind alley of resentment and rage even when there are broad avenues of opportunity available. And we all lose when society is polarized.
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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