Multiple identities, one community

Multiculturalism makes us think in terms of single identities

us who, kemosabe?

It seems to me like a return to what multiculturalism was supposed to be, rather than what it has become. It’s largely unimportant what the official definition of the word is – what is relevant to us is how the philosophy has affected policy and what results it has achieved. And what it has tended to achieve so far is a sort of Balkanization, where the leadership views and caters to groups based on religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation rather than common interest.

It seems to me like a return to what multiculturalism was supposed to be, rather than what it has become.

what was it supposed to be and who supposed it thus? and where is this valhalla that you live in where *multiculturalism* created *balkanization*?

Re what h. e. baber wrote, I don’t think that because “multicultural” methods were deployed to lessen minority self-esteem in lieu of other forms of individual and community redress necessarily means that those MC methods are invalid or ineffective. How about promoting them along with the other more expensive methods?

Alan Caring’s statement makes a pleasant nod to multicultural policies and those they’re meant for, but his plea that we think instead of “community” as one larger, supposedly inclusive community strikes me as regrettable. Surely a primary recognition of MC education and policies is that the operative “mainstream” has itself beem exclusionary of o/Other identities, practices, and so on. If minorities wanted to join in, fine, they could drop that which distnguished them as such and (try to) assimilate. Claims of tolerant, truly appreciative inclusiveness was and are bullshit, both in Britian and the US–sure, we like those Indian restaurants, but we sure wish those “Pakis” would go back where they came from. And non-black Americans sure love that black entertainment, but they still don’t want blacks living next door.

Regarding Caring’s last point, of COURSE there’s more to anyone than any one label multiculturalism would apply to him or her–that’s not a reason to scrap or even downplay such identities. It’s the lack of real tolerance for such foregrounded components of identity that inspires a push for recognition and appreciation of them–and that causes the “balkanization” so decried by such Conservatives in sheep’s clothing as Caring.

Agreed–the promotion of cultural identity is a response to the reluctance of the larger society to integrate and assimilate immigrants and members of minority groups. But it also makes integration and assimilation more difficult and saddles members of these groups with identitities and cultural affiliations that they may not want unto the ninth and tenth generation.

Mercifully in the US for all the multiculturalist rhetoric and fakery de facto after a generation or two immigrants assimilate and intermarry. But where ethnic diversity is more than a cute myth it is opressive to people who are stuck with it. Consider for example well-meaning attempts in some European nations to accommodate the cultural norms of immigrant groups that force young teenaged girls into arranged marriages, etc.

ethnic diversity is more than a cute myth it is opressive to people who are stuck with it.

indeed. bring on the inquisition.

Drapeto, it would be enlightening to read your own views in extenso some time. You rather leave us guessing what they might be from the fragments of acid disapproval you occasionally direct at others in the comments here.

i find unimaginable but… multiplicity as the lived experience of multiculturalism has been theorized by numerous critics for decades — no one who has read bridge called my back or kim crenshaw thinks “multiculturalism is about single identities”.

my acid disapproval is that even highly educated, liberal-to-left white people seem to have highly segregated bookshelves. i’d unacidly suggest that no one with any steepedness in the literature would find my views unguessable.

Just ask, for instance, a Korean American how “saddled” they feel by their Korean heritage…It’s homogenizing whitened hegemony that’s oppressive, especially when it insists on assimilating ethnic/racial otherness in its own terms.

Yes, indeed, a little empirical data might be helpful because there is no a priori reason to believe that assimilation is imposed by the majority on unwilling ethnic minorities. There are certainly members of minority groups that want to preserve some attachment to their ethnic heritage but there are others who don’t. Sticking them with an “identity” to which they feel no attachment or suggesting that they ought to feel an attachment to their “heritage,” learn their ancestral languages and exhibit ethnic pride is oppressive and just plain racist.

Historically it’s been the indigenous white majority that resisted the attempts of immigrants and members of minority groups to assimilate. Now with multiculturalism the new presbyter is the old priest writ large. It reminds me of how Americans feigned horror when Spiro Agnew pledged to help retain the “ethnic purity of neighborhoods” but were convinced that it was ok when he said that what he meant was the “ethnic character of neighborhoods.”

just to clarify, i don’t think multiculturalist policies make people with lived experience of multiplicity think in “singular identities”. this fact — that lived experience of multiplicity makes multiculturalist policies not have the effect of making “us” think in terms of single identities — has been theorized etc.

There are certainly members of minority groups that want to preserve some attachment to their ethnic heritage but there are others who don’t.

And what’s the problem? everyone chooses for themselves.

The same applies for “majorities”.

There may be people in non-minority groups who do not want to preserve attachment to their heritage either. Why aren’t they oppressed? Not because they don’t get pressures to conform (or, what can individually be perceived as pressures to conform) to whatever group they belong to. But because they’re not a minority subject to racist attacks. They don’t have the tabloids and a whole party campaining against them like the BNP. That’s the difference.

Sticking them with an “identity” to which they feel no attachment or suggesting that they ought to feel an attachment to their “heritage,” learn their ancestral languages and exhibit ethnic pride is oppressive and just plain racist.

To who? And who is forcing anyone in Britain to march in an ethnic pride parade every week?

I don’t see attachment to one’s culture, language, religion, etc. as a problem in itself. The problem is not even the forming of different communities – that’s a natural phenomenon. It happens all the time along other lines less evident than nationaliry, origins, language, etc. The problem is when there is hostility and violence and racism.

Single identities and multiple communities or multiple identities, one community – it’s all the same, it doesn’t change a thing as long as tangible manifestations of violence and intolerance persist in a vicious circle. Maybe that should be addressed rather than concepts. Debates on definitions of multiculturalism alone do not alter what happens in everyday life. Theories are derived from reality, not the other way round. I see no chance of influencing a change in mentalities and actions by simply changing theories about what the ideal kind of multicultural integration should be.

h.e.baber – ethnic restaurants and St Patrick’s parades seem like a very cheap idea of the benefits of having more than one culture in the same country. If that’s the “nice side”, I prefer the “dark” one. (Not in the terms you describe it though).

We dealt with this historically by promoting integration, “Americanization” and assimilation,

Err, that would be historically in terms of recent history only, surely?

Besides, the possibilities are not only total assimilation or segregation. It’s a false dichotomy.

Well, I can’t speak of America, a truly immigrant AND recently immigrant nation. But I can of Britain (well, England really, since relatively few post-1948 immigrants settled elsewhere in the British Isles).

The first point to clarify is that my friend Bob’s comment about English “mongelism” is, though oft-heard, less true than many might wish. We’ve just been all over this at Matty’s blog so I won’t repeat it again now. Suffice to say that the two UK genetic studies of reliable scope, both carried out by UCL (2001 and 2003), reveal an unsurprising historic England of north-European peoples, remarkably similar in genotype. The later study even supports the notion of ethnic cleansing by the invading Anglo-Saxons, forcing the real Britons across Offa’s Dyke in the west.

I realise the utility of the notion of mongrelism as a justification of sorts. But it is not sound and if one is seeking to explain to one’s own people the necessity of far-reaching policies that they do not like one must treat with them with scrupulous honesty.

I hold not a single left of centre political conviction. I am an English Nationalist. I do not, however, wish that fact to put my next observation beyond the liberal pale. It is not meant in any “acid” way.

The liberal-left has, over the last thirty years, garnered all power on the cultural dispensation in these islands. You have not used it tenderly, my friends. You have sought to impose upon us an equality which you yearned for, perhaps, but which was utterly foreign and unwanted by us. It is an extraordinary role to have so willingly taken upon yourselves, no less fundamental and far-reaching than the early Christians who came to baptise the pagan English.
They, one presumes, walked willingly into the water.

So my urging would be to listen harder and to talk little. Be more humble before your own people. They are not “white” cadavers for hegemonic experimentation in a cultural marxist laboratory. They are the most adventurous, creative and courageous people the world has ever seen. They need their freedom, not your equality.