Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (49 page)

Even so, the social and economic deprivations affecting many people of color, including immigrants, remained serious. To the extent that advocates of multiculturalism focused on campus speech codes, textbooks, and course offerings, as many did, they may have helped to divert public attention from these larger issues of social and economic justice. Some ethnic leaders continued to believe that this was the case. As one advocate for immigrants exclaimed, multicultural agitation was often “a pacifier, an antidote to the anger and outrage that we bitterly repress.”
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Gen. Colin Powell in desert gear, Saudi Arabia, September 1990.
SRA Rodney Kerns/Defense Visual Information Center, Riverside, California.

President Bush and his wife, Barbara, Saudi Arabia, November 1990. General Norman Schwarzkopf is at Bush’s left.
George Bush Presidential Library.

Condoleezza Rice, a specialist concerning Soviet and East European affairs on the National Security Council, with President Bush, Secretary of State James Baker (on Bush’s left), and senior staff, Helsinki, September 1990.
George Bush Presidential Library.

Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill testify at Thomas’s highly publicized confirmation hearings, held by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991.

Riots in Los Angeles: a police officer holding a gun on two suspected looters, May 1, 1992.
AP/Wide World.

Patrick Buchanan, seeking the GOP nomination, March 1992.
© Robert Maass/CORBIS.

H. Ross Perot, a presidential candidate, 1992.
© Reuters/CORBIS.

President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary. ©
Jeffrey Markowitz/CORBIS SYGMA.

Clinton with Senate GOP leader Robert Dole (left) and Rep. Newt Gingrich, 1993.
Clinton Presidential Library.

Demonstrations concerning abortion, outside the Supreme Court, December 1993.
AP/Wide World.

Somalis drag a dead American soldier on a street in Mogadishu, Somalia, October 1993.
© Watson/CORBIS SYGMA.

Oprah Winfrey holding a town meeting, November 1994. ©
Najlah Feanny/CORBIS SABA.