Thomas Powers is Professor of Political Science at Carthage College in Wisconsin.

His new book is American multiculturalism and the anti-discrimination regime, The Challenge to

Liberal Pluralism.

That's our topic today.

Welcome, Professor Powers.

Thank you very much for having me.

Now, you identify anti-discrimination as the core idea or motivation behind the drastic changes in our political system in recent years.

Why anti-discrimination instead of, say, political correctness or identity politics?

Yeah, I think that the civil rights revolution, and I equate anti-discrimination with the civil rights politics or the

civil rights revolution, is the foundation of identity politics, and it's the cause of political

correctness, absolutely. Identity in particular is a central term in multicultural education,

and it's something that you can trace out as a sort of an

intellectual history behind the word identity. And a lot of people have focused on that. And,

but the reason that we are fixated with the word identity, for example, is because it plays a

crucial role in civil rights politics, because

it characterizes what is its stake for folks who take this very, very seriously. And I focus

on multicultural education, a guy named James Banks, has a whole theory of identity going back

to the 1970s, in which he says, identity helps us see what discrimination does, where it harms people,

and also where the solution is. He uses the term the psychological project because he wants

to recreate American identity around the problem of discrimination to try to fixate on a new understanding of identity that will

fight discrimination, that will help people who are victims of discrimination, protect their

identities, and then to change the identities of the majority, who understand themselves

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