Although cultural homogeneity was long believed by resident Americans and recent immigrants to be the highest ideal for American society this idea has been gradually replaced by a belief in the development of a healthy multicultural society. Internal conflicts often arise from an undue emphasis on total assimilation, and during the twentieth century a number of forces and ideas have promoted a new way of looking at internal cultural difference. One such force was the radical shift in the makeup of immigrant populations as immigration began to shift in the late nineteenth century from Western to Eastern Europe and, much later, to the rest of the Americas and to Asia. This vastly increased the amount of cultural diversity in the country. Another force was the rise of the African American civil rights movement in the 1950s and subsequent rights struggles, such as the Native American and Latino movements, as well as non-ethnic initiatives such as Gay rights and Women's rights. Collectively the impact of these initiatives was to emphasize the already-present diversity in America and to place higher value on it. But the most important force--which, admittedly, grew out of the other two--is the development of multiculturalism as an ideal in itself, one which is capable of development via the arts, government efforts, and, most of all, education.
Multiculturalism promotes an interest in roots and places a value on diversity for its own sake. It rests on the recognition that a broadly based society, derived from a diversity of contributions, will be a happier and healthier society; one in which difference is valued rather than stigmatized. Multiculturalism is part of a struggle against numbing conformity and assumes that not only are all kinds of people welcome in America, but that they all may have valuable contributions to make. The theory of multiculturalism is that anything from art to politics to morals and social questions m...