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- 19 Mapping

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Bill Strickland was the first scholar to note, in a talk given at Stanford in 1980, the strategic use of the term [[underlined]] minority [[/underlined]] to [[underlined]] contain [[/underlined]] and defuse the [[underlined]] Black [[/underlined]] challenge of the Sixties...The term [[underlined]] minority, [[/underlined]] however, is an [[underlined]] authentic [[/underlined]] term for hitherto repressed Euro-American ethnic groups who, since the sixties, have made a bid to displace Anglo-American cultural dominance with a more inclusive Euro-American mode of hegemony. (her emphasis; Minority discourse 2, 234-235).

Then there is the increasingly popular "multicultural" which many of us use, helplessly, in grassroots and academic organizing. It is confusing because it has two meanings, sometimes interchangeable, as described by Jeff Jones and Russell T. Cramer in a 1989 report on "Institutionalized Discrimination in San Francisco's Funding Patterns." They use the term as a substitute for a bicultural "minority": 

"Multicultural is not used interchangeably with "multi-racial" or to describe arts organizations representing a variety of cultures; instead the term refers specifically to nonprofit groups whose artists, boards, and staffs are African American, Asian American, Native American or Latino, and whose artistic products reflect a non-Western European (check quote) cultural tradition.

I use multicultural in the other sense, as a mixed or cross-cultural group or as a general term for all of the various communities together, including white.

Finally, the word "ethnic," which is ambiguous in its application to any group of people anywhere (though rarely to WASPS) who maintain a certain habitual or intellectual bond to their originary cultures. It sometimes serves as a