“Babbitt”
The title character of Sinclair Lewis’ novel Babbitt is positioned as the symbol of white Protestant middle-class capitalist bourgeois values which the artists comprising the Harlem Renaissance specifically set out to reject. These values are dismissed as “Babbitry” by the author.
Labor Strikes
In an economic system in which the minority ownership class holds all the power, what becomes the only way for the majority to express power and, through that expression of power, establish their own identity? The answer is the labor strike. What should have been only a unifying act of us-against-them pitting the powerless against the powerful becomes in the response one of the epicenters of the backlash against multiculturalism as owners exploited ethnic and racial differences in a successful effort to divide and conquer their enemy by pitting workers against each other based on differences which overcame the rationality of sticking together based on common cause.
Railroad Infrastructure
One of the foremost examples of multicultural contributions to America is the workforce which literally built the infrastructure allowing the steam locomotive to alter the economic paradigm of trade. It was, of course, almost entirely a workforce of minority immigrant groups that was responsible for laying down the millions of miles of railroad tracks which affected this change that was instrumental in America’s rise to world dominance.
Caliban
Caliban is a character in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. He is native to an island which has been taken over by a white magician and is characterized as a carnal, uncivilized beast whom the white man must rule for his own good. Take a guess which members of American society Caliban is intended to symbolize.
The Mirror
The “different” mirror of the title is history. Or, more precisely, the historical narrative which has been written to reflect that history. When one reads the historical record of America is it often like looking into a mirror that does not offer a reflection looking back. The reflection has been written out of the historical record and so the call for a different mirror is a written account offering a purer and more truthful accounting.
