As it appeared in Progressive Librarian #4.38-45 Winter 1991/1992
Editorial note: While the authorship of this document is lost in the mists of history at the moment, we know the following people worked on it in 1984: Maryo Ewell, Mark Miller and Arlene Goldbard. It was copyrighted and posted on the Internet in approximately 1996 by an ad hoc group that included Michael Schwartz, who gave CAN permission to post it on our Web site for historical interest. Schwartz believes that the last issue of ACD's magazine, Cultural Democracy, also came out in 1996. We would appreciate hearing from anyone who has more recent information about the Alliance for Cultural Democracy. (For more information about the concept of cultural democracy, visit Webster's World of Cultural Democracy.) -Eds.
PART 1: THE FOUNDATIONS
* In order to advance the struggle for those political and
economic rights recognized by all people in pursuit of a democratic,
just and peaceful world;
* In order to make that world manifest through the perpetuation
and unfettered expression of creativity from all our peoples and
cultures in a common wealth of wisdom, vision, knowledge, and means;
* In order to supplant passivity with creative action,
desecration with beauty, waste with husbandry, alienation with
community, exploitation with cooperative harmony, and cultural
chauvinism with appreciation and respect for human diversity;
* In order to secure our very existence as we preserve and
nurture the living planet that sustains us, WE DECLARE AND NOW ACT TO
GUARANTEE THE CULTURAL RIGHTS OF ALL PEOPLE.
Among these rights are:
* Participation
All people-as groups, communities, or individuals-possess the
right to participate in the creation of their own cultures. All
people must be guaranteed the right of access to their own and
others' cultural heritages. Culture is used here in the broadest
sense, as the entire fabric of life, which would include social
traditions, religious beliefs and practice, values, ethics,
ideologies, material and technological possessions, written and oral
histories-and all the arts. The creation of cultural expression
should be a social process open to all. It must not be abridged
socially, economically, or educationally by another or a dominant
culture. The means of production, distribution and communication
cannot justly be monopolized by any elite.
* Community and Place
A major part of cultural expression is the traditional and the
innovative interplay between people and their environment or place.
Each environment is a unique pattern of animals, plants, soils,
climate, terrain, and other natural resources, as well as human
technology, history and surrounding communities-local, national, and
international.
The suppression or destruction of cultural expression-like the
violation of the natural, economic, social, or political rights of
any community-upsets the delicate balance between people and place
and can push a culture towards extinction.
Therefore, everyone has a right to community and place. Forced
removal from community or place, loss of control over its resources,
and the destruction, alteration, and pollution of place by the
capricious, careless, self-serving, or hostile actions of a ruling
elite or a foreign power violates that right.
* Language
A culture's visual and verbal language is its most profound and
vital means of expression. It enables people to name and define the
world they experience or create. It embodies the history, values,
orientation, and traditions of a people and provides a critical means
to express ideas and organize action in the face of present and
future challenges.
Language evolves as people interact with each other, with their
environment, and with other cultural groups. Language binds people
together and, as such, is a crucial instrument of survival. Therefore
the expression of a people's language must never be denied or
discouraged by another or dominant culture.
* Cultural Exchange
Each culture discovers truths, gains perspectives, produces
goods and technology, or creates universally powerful imagery
simultaneously unique to that culture and potentially valuable to
others.
The peaceful resolution of all conflict is facilitated by
mutual understanding and communication. The growing technical and
economic interdependence of the world's peoples and the need to bear
mutual responsibility for global problems and to share insights and
solutions require continuous and complex exchanges of information.
Therefore all peoples are entitled to interaction with people
like and unlike themselves, to the knowledge, beauty, and resources
freely shared by cultures other than their own.
* Redress of Cultural Grievances and Conflicts
All communities of people have the right to a formal means of
local, national and international redress of grievances and
conflicts. Such redress must be offered within a framework of
jurisprudence built upon principles of cultural as well as political
and economic human rights.
PART II: PREPARATION FOR ACTION
A precondition of a just and peaceful world is a climate in which all
people, as groups, communities, or as individuals can assert with
pride their own cultures and actively respect the cultures of others.
Above, in THE FOUNDATIONS, we have articulated fundamental human
cultural rights to which all people are entitled. We have done so in
the knowledge that our multicultural life and expression is unduly
determined by a profit-directed elite. The corporate, social,
religious, artistic, and civic institutions it creates and controls
comprise a "dominant culture" which owns or dominates most of the
means by which cultural expression is created, defined, taught,
communicated, and rewarded in our country and much of the world. Its
expression is predominantly commercial and is often militaristic,
sexist, classist, and homophobic.
Cultural chauvinism is a hallmark of the dominant culture. It support
and promotes expression that reflects the values and tastes of those
who have dominated urban European-American life and culture. It
limits or misrepresents the multicultural expression of other
peoples, including those of the working classes and the poor, people
of the Third World, people of color, and people who reside or
participate in rural, regional, or alternative communities-in short,
any who represent other traditions and values.
Now, as residents of the United States in the late 20th Century, we
identify some of the public arenas in which our people must take
action to secure their cultural rights.
* Education
Universal public education for children is required by law in
most nations. In the schools children are formally and systematically
exposed to mass-cultural values. Early learning informs a child about
the proper way to speak, dress, and behave in order to win broad
social acceptance. Yet American public education predominantly
reflects those values of the dominant culture and children are easily
bewildered about the value of their own personal, familial, or
cultural identities, especially if they diverge from the so-called
"norm".
State and local school district policies must create a
curriculum in which cultural pluralism is nurtured and respected. The
climate of each school must be conducive to each child's assertion of
her or his cultural identity, and must encourage inter cultural
respect.
At present, through both curricula and climate, schools tend to
reinforce a value system in which questioning and criticism of
authority are discouraged; in which competition is fostered and
cooperation is discouraged; in which single standards of excellence
are accepted; in which arts and other creative explorations are
considered "leisure" or "entertainment" or a reserved for "gifted"
students; in which passivity is learned behavior; and in which
students are consumers of curriculum rather than creative
collaborators in the learning and teaching process.
We believe that written and unwritten policy must acknowledge
that all students are entitled to their rights; to an education
shaped by local cultures and needs; where numbers warrant, to an
education that is bilingual or multilingual; to a curriculum which
actively teaches and values the stories and images of the many
cultures that have shaped human history; to a learning climate in
which critical thinking is encouraged along with the creative
assertion of identity; and to a curriculum that celebrates and
reinforces cultural diversity and respect.
* Public Communications
The information that people receive enables them to make
decisions about what the world is like and what they themselves are
like. The advent of sophisticated, centralized information
dissemination systems means that millions of people can be exposed
simultaneously to a single piece of information. While this can
potentially draw the people of the planet together, all too often it
promulgates a single notion of "reality." If cultural democracy is to
flourish, people must have access to multiple sources of information,
and must be able to produce as well as to consume them.
In public communications, as well as in education, people
should have access to all information, and above all, should be
equipped to respect passion and subjectivity and personal experience,
as well as objectivity. Currently, centralized network media, like
the educational system, promotes the dominant culture, and offers
either stereotypes or absence for all "others." News reporting
suggests that questions, opinions, criticism and dissent reflect
disorder rather than the characteristics of a democracy at work.
Within the public communications arena the legitimacy of
alternative media and points of view, as well as the right and
ability of all people to exercise and express critical judgment, must
be recognized.
We believe that written and unwritten policy must acknowledge
that all people are entitled to their rights; to an opportunity to
share in the ownership, operation, and policy development of local
television, cable vision, radio, press, and electronic information
networks; to wide public awareness of local access laws, adequate
information on the use of equipment and the broadcasting process, and
access to the airwaves at times when broad audiences can be reached;
to the ability to narrow-cast to people of shared culture or interest
as well as to broadcast to a wide audience; to regional or national
media in which multicultural imagery and multiple viewpoints are
visible, so that a wide range of options are available without cost
differential.
* Arts
Through the arts individuals and groups can uniquely
communicate experience, perspectives, beliefs, hope, outrage,
despair, desire, problems, and solutions. For cultural democracy to
flourish, every cultural group, community and individual must have
the means, opportunity, and public arena to make and to exhibit its
arts, and to interact with its audiences. Participants, audiences,
producers, and funding sources must acknowledge multiple standards of
excellence and recognize the value of the creative process which
emerges directly from cultural tradition and is a powerful instrument
for cultural change.
Currently, the dominant culture attempts to define "the arts"
and then dissociate them from the cultures of our people in two prime
ways. First, they are considered commodities, generally marketed to
and primarily accessible to college-educated, middle- or upper-class
people. The dominant culture tends to house its art in specialized
arts centers which isolates them from daily life and alienates them,
through rarification, from most people's culture. Second, public
funding agencies tend to support a single standard of so-called
"quality" in the arts that reflects the values of the dominant
culture and rarely fund artists or arts organizations critical of the
dominant culture and political status quo, or simply peripheral to
them.
We believe that written or unwritten cultural policy must
acknowledge that all people are entitled to their right to make art,
regardless of economic or cultural situation. This implies access to
opportunity, instruction, materials, tools, space, public display,
and to both critical and unspecialized feedback. It includes the
right: to take for granted the respect of other cultural groups and
of funding sources for excellence internal to any culture; to make
and participate in the arts in the workplace, the park, the shopping
mall, or anywhere that people gather, as much as in specialized art
spaces; to compete for public funding in an arena in which the art of
dissent or of varied cultures is considered a valid and valuable form
of public expression.
* Participation in the Creation of Public Cultural Policy
The participation of every individual in setting policy for his
or her society is theoretically guaranteed by many governments, but
is often neither supported nor encouraged. The right to social
participation and straightforward access to the process are hallmarks
of cultural democracy, as are the subtler means of engendering the
desire and power to participate.
Currently, those who find it easiest to effect the public
process of cultural policy making at the Federal, State and Local
levels tend to be supporters of the dominant culture and those who
monopolize the resources necessary to frame both the issues and
solutions within a lopsided public debate. People without access to
information, funds, attorneys, or the media are therefore indirectly
barred from the participatory process. There is a pervasive
assumption that those who do manage to voice dissent are
troublemakers. Such people are dismissed rather than acknowledged as
partners in the dialogue. There is no arena for resolving conflicts
in which one culture is threatened by another.
At the Federal level perhaps the greatest obstacle to
participation in cultural policy development is the official and
false assertion that there in no U.S. cultural policy! Written or
not, a policy is in place and is used to unjustly allocate public
cultural resources.
We believe that written and unwritten public policy must
acknowledge that all people are entitled to their rights: to choose
to participate in public debate, regardless of gender or sexual
preference, income, class, ethnicity, geography or culture; to
information that encourages participation and conditions which enable
people to participate without fear of being excluded; to publicly
provided resources which enable otherwise disenfranchised people to
participate equally in public process; to the expression of dissent
in an arena in which dissent and challenge are valued; to access to
an articulated legal process of resolving conflicts arising from
cultural differences in an atmosphere of mutual respect, and to a
formal mean of national and international redress of cultural
grievances and conflicts.
* Public Services and Funding
Publicly funded institutions have a direct responsibility to
taxpayers and to the people whose lives they affect. Clients must
play a role in shaping the policy of service organizations. Public
funding agencies must develop guidelines providing genuinely equal
opportunity for people of all cultures and viewpoints to compete for
funding. Universities and other institutions must articulate policy
for interaction with the communities in which they are located.
Currently, clients of public service agencies receive services
that they are rarely given the opportunity to help define according
to their own needs, and they seldom have any opportunity to challenge
the status quo. Public funding bodies tend to fund generic, "model"
projects in preference to locally or culturally-specific or
experimental or radical solutions to problems. Universities and other
institutions are de-emphasizing community service and local
interaction. They increasingly ignore the communities to which they
should be responsible.
We believe that written and unwritten policy must acknowledge
that all people are entitled to their rights: to participate in
setting policy for those public service institutions that affect
their lives; to a democratic tax structure that equitably returns tax
dollars and services to communities; to public support for local
initiative in solving problems of local concern in all arenas from
education to economic development to public art.
CONCLUSION
A society in which a single culture or a single set of standards
flourishes is a society both weak and impoverished. The potential
collective strength of this country lies in our ability to recognize
and be inspired by our diversity. We are people of different
histories, languages, traditions, skills, values, ideologies and
tastes. Our social life must be constantly challenged and reinvented
as a collective project. There is no preordained system that will
produce adventure and joy. All people have a right to cultural as
well as to political and economic democracy. The three are mutually
reinforcing and all three are necessary to the survival of any one of
them as well as to the survival of society itself.
Within a structure of cultural democracy and self determination,
however, each culture must maintain the right to challenge racism,
sexism, homophobia, and classism internally and externally.
With the establishment of cultural democracy, we can truly
contemplate the possibility of a world free from violence, contempt,
and fear.
ALLIANCE FOR CULTURAL DEMOCRACY © 1996
