[01:30.59]Beside her a Spanish-speaking family patronized a cart with two signs: 'Italian Ices' and 'Kosher by Rabbi Alper'"
[01:42.14]On the day before Memorial Day,1983,a poet called me to des cribe a city he had just visited.
[01:50.52]He said that one section included mosques,built by the Islamic people who dwelled there.Attending his reading,
[02:00.08]he said,were large numbers of Hispanic people,40,000of whom lived in the same city.
[02:07.87]He was not talking about a legendary city located in some mysterious region of the world.The city he'dvisited was Detroit
[02:17.93]A few months bifore,as I was visiting Texas,I head the taped voice
[02:24.35]used to guide passengers to their commections at the Dallas Airportannoucing items in both Spanish and English.
[02:33.89](1)This trend is likely to continue;after all,for some southwestern states like Texas,where the largest minority
[02:44.21]is now Mexican-American,Spanish was the first written language and the Spanish style lives on in the western way of life.
[02:54.24]Shortly after my Texas trip,I sat in a campus auditorium at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
[03:03.25]as a Yale professor-whose original work on the influence of African cultures
[03:10.17]upon those of the Americas has led to his ostracism from some intellectual circles
[03:17.80]-walked up and down ,The aisle like an old-time Southern evangelist,dancing and drumming the top of the lectern,
[03:26.50]illustrating his points before some Afro-American intellectuals and artists who cheered and applauded his prformance.
[03:36.50]The professor was "white."After his lecture,he conversed with a group of Milwaukeeans-
[03:44.47]all of whom spoke Yoruban,though only the professor had ever traveled to Africa.
[03:51.78]One of the artists these told me that his paintings,
[03:56.28]which included African and Afro-American mythological symbols and imagery,were hanging in the local McDonald's restaurant
[04:07.22]The nest day I went to McDonald's and snapped pictures of smiling youngsyers eating hamburgers
[04:14.88]below paintings that could grace the walls of any of the country's leading museums.
[04:21.36]The manager of the local McDonald's said, "I don't know what you boys are doing,
[04:27.78]but I like it,"as he commissioned the localpainters to exhibit in his restauant.
[04:34.26]Such blurring of cultural styles occurs in everyday life in the United States to a greater extent than anyone can imagine.
[04:44.21]Yet members of the nation's present educational and cultural elite still cling to the notion that the United States
[04:53.83]belongs to some vaguely defined entity they refer to as "Western civilization,"by which they mean,
[05:03.15]presumably, a civilization created by people of Europe,as if Europe can even be viewed as completely uninfluenced
[05:13.29]by the rest of the world.Is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony,which includes Turkish marches,a part of Wistern civilization?
[05:24.18]Or the late-nineteenth-and twentieth-century French paintins,whose creators were influence by Japanese art
[05:33.11]And what of the cubists .through whom the onfluence of African art changed moder painting?Or the surrealists,
[05:42.96]who were so impressed with the art of the Pacific Northwest Indians that,in their map of North America,
[05:50.90]Alaska dwarfs the lower forty-eight states in size?
[05:56.34]Are the Russians,who are often criticized for their adoption of "Western"ways by Tsarist dissidents in exile,
[06:06.11]members of Western civlization?And what of the millions of Europeans who have black African and Asian ancestry,
[06:16.06]black Africans having occupied several European countries for hundreds of years?
[06:23.01]Or the Hungarians,who originated across the Urals in a place called  Greater Hungary ?
[06:29.80]Or the Irish,who came from the Iberian Peninsula?
[06:35.10]Even the notion that North America is part of Western civilization because our "system of government"
[06:43.93]is derived from Europe is being challenged by Native Americanhistorians who say that the founding fathers,
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