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  3. The premise with which the multiculturalists begin is unexceptional: that it is important to recognize and to celebrate the wide

The premise with which the multiculturalists begin is unexceptional: that it is important to recognize and to celebrate the wide

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问题    The premise with which the multiculturalists begin is unexceptional: that it is important to recognize and to celebrate the wide range of cultures that exist in the United States. In what sounds like a reflection of traditional American pluralism, the multiculturalists argue that we must recognize difference, that difference is legitimate; in its kindlier Versions, multiculturalism represents the discovery on the part of minority groups that they can play a part in molding the larger culture even as they are molded by it. And on the campus multiculturalism, defined more locally as the need to recognize cultural variations among students, has tried with some success to talk about how a racially and ethnically diverse student body can enrich everyone’s education.
   Phillip Green, a political scientist at Smith and a thoughtful proponent of multiculturalism, notes that for a significant portion of the students the politics of identity is all-consuming. Students, he says, "are unhappy with the thin gruel of rationalism. They require a therapeutic curriculum to overcome not straightforward racism but ignorant stereotyping. "
   But multiculturalism’s hard-liners, who seem to make up the majority of the movement, damn as racism any attempt to draw the myriad of American groups into a common American culture. For these multiculturalists, differences are absolute, irreducible, and intractable-occasions not for understanding but for separation. The multiculturalists, it turns out, is not especially interested in the great American hyphen, in the syncretistic (and therefore naturally tolerant) identities that allow Americans to belong to more than a single culture, to be both particularizes and universalisms.
   The time-honored American mixture of assimilation and traditional allegiance is denounced as a danger to racial and gender authenticity. This is an extraordinary reversal of the traditional liberal commitment to a "truth" that transcends parochialisms. In the new race/class/gender formation, universality is replaced by, among other things, feminist science Nubian numerals (as part of an A, fro-centric science), and what Marilyn Frankenstein of the University of Massachusetts-Boston describes as "ethno-mathematics," in which the cultural basis of counting comes to the fore.
   The multiculturalists insist on seeing all perspectives as tainted by the perceiver’s particular point of view. Impartial knowledge, they argue, is not possible, because ideas are simply the expression of individual identity, or of the unspoken but inescapable assumptions that are inscribed in a culture or a language. The problem, however, with this warmed-over Nietzscheanism is that it threatens to leave no ground for anybody to stand on, so the multiculturalists make a leap, necessary for their own intellectual survival, and proceed to argue that there are some categories, such as race and gender, that do in fact embody an unmistakable knowledge of oppression. Victims are at least epistemologically lucky. Objectivity is a mask for oppression. And so an appalled former 1960s radical complained to me that self-proclaimed witches were teaching classes on witchcraft. "They’re not teaching students how to think," she said, "they’re telling them what to believe."
"Multiculturalists relativism" is the notion that there is no such thing as impartial or objective knowledge. The author seems to be grounding his criticism of this notion on ______.
选项 A、the clear evidence that science has indeed discovered "truths" that have been independent of both language and culture.
B、the conclusion that relativism leaves one with no clear notions of any one thing that is true.
C、the absurdity of claiming that knowledge of oppression is more valid than knowledge of scientific facts.
D、the agreement among peoples of all cultures as to certain undeniable truths—e,g., when the sky is clear, day is warmer than night.
答案B
解析 最后一段，作者介绍Multiculturalists relativism并随即进行批判，提出这种理论threatens to leave no ground for anybody to stand on，即如果认为每个人的观念都烙有其所处文化的印记从而不客观的话，那么一切事物的客观性都值得怀疑。
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