Two lovable mobsters in Cole Porter’s musical Kiss Me, Kate sing a song with the following refrain:

Brush up your Shakespeare
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the girls you will wow.

I’m too old to wow any girls, but I’m trying to keep senescence at bay by enriching my mind. So I applied to Santa Monica’s Emeritus College to further my exploration of Shakespeare. What I found on the application form shocked me.

It asked for my ethnic background and offered an appalling 20 different designations from which to choose: “African-American, Mexican/Chicano, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian Indian, Asian (Other), Korean”—you get the picture. The form also said, “The state requires this information for new students.” (My state assemblyman’s office confirmed that.)

With a wavy line I crossed over all the choices and on the margin wrote “American.” The front-desk attendant smirked when I handed in my application. I knew where on the list I was going to be placed. Since they receive more applications than they can seat, it may be coincidental that I was not accepted.

The designations I crossed out convey the message that we have lost sight of the overarching ideology of what it means to be American. The noble experiment our Founding Fathers envisioned—to subsume multiple ethnicities into one American identity, one that would become an American eidos by which we are defined—is no longer viable. How many times have you spoken to someone whose English was either nonexistent or so fractured as to be incomprehensible?

Multiculturalism is a curse. Hyphenating Americans is racist and divisive, leaving us with pockets of varying ethnicities that identify more with their former homelands than with America. President Teddy Roosevelt once said, “In this country we have no place for hyphenated Americans.”

Roosevelt also said that “Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.” Sounds harsh, doesn’t it? But he urged all who come to our shores to embrace the concept of being an American—our history, our political system (warts and all), our language, and our sense of decency.

{pagebreak}

In his book The Disuniting of America, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was dismayed by many immigrants’ unwillingness to embrace the concept of Americanism. We perpetuate such division by opening our sympathetic arms to those who even after a few years continue speaking a language not our own or who are loyal to a country other than the United States. And we foolishly believe it makes us better Americans to accept their refusal to assimilate.

There are apologists in our midst who believe that by embracing everyone, we become everyone, which somehow makes us more humane. But who are we, then? When everyone is everyone, what happens to the concept of being American? Who, then, is an American?

If the trend continues—if universities continue to emphasize our differences rather than the ideology of Americanism—we may find ourselves being ripped apart like Yugoslavia by various ethnic groups who had never coalesced around a single American identity. By focusing on our ethnic background we’re ignoring more important matters and instituting a quota system rather than a value system—a willingness to work hard and a respect for our beloved country—which should be the criteria of intellectual curiosity.

Our nation’s motto used to be E Pluribus Unum. We seemed to have lost sight of that unifying concept and have chosen to make our motto more like E Pluribus Pluribus.