The fact is, nothing could be more truly Chicana than the Chicana who wants to be more than a wife, mother, housekeeper. That limited concept of wome… - Elizabeth Martínez

It seems nostalgia runs rampant among many Euro-Americans: a nostalgia for the days of unchallenged White Supremacy-both moral and material-when life was 'simple.'

The era called the sixties can be said to run from 1955 (the Montgomery bus boycott) to 1975 (when the mass movements had died down and most activists were moving on to new forms of struggle or non-political priorities). But many of the authors of those two dozen books end the era in 1970, not because the decade formally ended then but largely because that was when male-led, white student protest sharply declined. This dating negates high points of struggle by peoples of color (such as the Native American armed occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973) and by the women's movement, which reached its heights after 1970. By their dating of the era, our authors impose an overwhelmingly white male definition on it.

The anti-diversity war rages not only in academia but in the whole society. Like the anti-affirmative action campaign, it is profoundly racist and sexist. Both represent much more than a backlash: they are tactics for solidifying a rightist ideology to sustain the Right's political hegemony, to guarantee that a racist, sexist and capitalist agenda holds the center of U.S. political culture. This in turn calls for demonizing progressive ideas and people that might impede right-wing domination over ideological space. It calls for blocking the study of U.S. history as a history of racism, sexism and imperialism at work. The U.S. political culture must be kept ahistorical, even anti-historical. The war on multiculturalism parallels the way in which reactionaries sought to use the Gulf War to regenerate patriotism and thereby annul the Vietnam War syndrome with its national self-doubt.