Is Multiculturalism Good for Anyone?

Plural Monoculturalism

Is multiculturalism good for anyone?

It depends what you mean by “multiculturalism” and that in turn will make a very significant difference in what you mean if, like me, your argue that it is not.

Sometimes multiculturalism is understood as genetic diversity: a society is multicultural in this sense if it comprises citizens of different races and ethnic backgrounds. There is nothing particularly good about multiculturalism thus understood but there is nothing bad about it either. To reject this multiculturalism, to hold that nations should to restrict immigration in the interests of maintaining ethnic purity or exclude citizens from full participation because of ancestry is to embrace racism.

More often we think of multiculturalism as a state of affairs where the customs, cuisines and artifacts of diverse cultures are available. This is a good thing to the extent that it provides more variety and so more options for everyone. When it comes to the harmless, superficial features of culture—food, costume, music and dance, language, entertainment and crafts—the more the better: there is no reason to believe that the superficial aspects of Anglo culture are inherently superior and, indeed, compelling reason to believe that some features of the culture,

e.g. cuisine, are inherently inferior. As Susan Okin famously argued however, it is quite another matter when it comes to some of the deep features of culture, including the role of women and practices that enforce that role, some cultures are seriously defective. Curries and salsa dancing enrich culture; female genital mutilation, forced marriages and wife-beating do not. Nevertheless so long as we restrict ourselves to what Stanley Fish has called “boutique multiculturalism” we can probably agree that absorbing features of diverse cultures is a good thing.1

Much of the time however when Americans think of multiculturalism they have in mind what Sen has tagged, “plural monoculturalism,” the doctrine that individuals ought to remain faithful to their ancestral cultures and that a good society ought to be a “salad bowl,” where diverse groups maintain their separate identities and interact peacefully without coalescing. On this account the development and persistence of ethnic communities should be encouraged and individuals, in the interests of “authenticity,” should maintain, reestablish, or invent, connections to their ancestral cultures, however remote. This is the doctrine that I shall refer to when I talk about “multiculturalism” without qualification.

I argue that plural monoculturalism is bad for almost everyone because it restricts choice and so undermines desire satisfaction. It benefits members of the “helping professions” and “community leaders” who obtain funding and achieve professional recognition by promoting multicultural projects but sets back the interests of most members of ethnic minorities, particularly visible minorities, insofar as it locks them into “identities” that are ascribed, immutable, salient and scripted. As a preference utilitarian, I assume that welfare is to be identified with the satisfaction of individual’s rationally considered and informed desires. The more options we have, the more likely we are to achieve desire satisfaction and so the better off we are. Moreover, most people prefer having a wide range of options as a good in and of itself: even if, given our actual desires, the narrow range of options we have does not thwart us, ceteris paribus, most of us would still prefer to have the widest possible range of options. We value positive freedom as such.

1 Fish, S. (1997) “Boutique Multiculturalism, or, Why Liberals are Incapable of Thinking About Hate Speech.” Critical Inquiry 23:2

Multiculturalism restricts the range of options available to members of ethnic minorities and so undermines their wellbeing. Consequently, I suggest, we should reject the salad bowl in favor of the melting pot.

Before continuing with the argument it is worth noting what this thesis does not entail.

First, it does not entail imposing tighter restrictions on immigration. Advocates of such policies underestimate the ability and even more importantly the desire of immigrants to assimilate. So, for example, Samuel P. Huntington,worries that Hispanics by and large are less willing and able to assimilate to the dominant Anglo culture than earlier waves of immigrants. Arguably he does not take seriously the fact that they are currently doubly disadvantaged in being a visible minority and in being the latest immigrants. I suggest that he is, as a matter of empirical fact, wrong: my empirical conjecture is that more generous immigration policies would in fact facilitate assimilation.

Secondly, I do not dogmatically assume that most immigrants and other members of ethnic minorities want to assimilate: I argue that they do. What is striking in the literature and rhetoric of plural monoculturalism is the extent to which writers assume, without producing data or argumentation, that minorities like their ancestral cultures and want to preserve them, that they want to maintain distinctive communities, and that they only conform, grudgingly to mainstream culture in order to obtain extrinsic social and economic benefits. I shall suggest that this is a consequence of false empirical assumptions and, more interestingly, conceptual confusions about the notion of preference.

Finally, I note that promoting assimilation as a goal does not mean adopting “color-blind” policies that deny the brute fact of pervasive, ongoing discrimination. In the aftermath of the recent riots in French immigrant suburbs we saw the shortcomings of this policy. While committed to assimilation as a goal, the French government refused to recognize the fact of discrimination and dogmatically assumed that official colorblind policies would make French citizens colorblind. Au contraire. Most of us recognize that only draconian, ongoing state intervention involving strictly enforced affirmative action regulations, will go any way toward ameliorating gross, ongoing discrimination against women and members of visible minorities. Formal equality under the law is virtually worthless because the practices that lock women and minorities out of the mainstream are informal. Critics of liberal feminism sometimes imagine that adopting assimilation as a goal entails committing to gender-blindness and color-blindness as means. That is false: it is an empirical question whether such policies facilitate assimilation—and empirical evidence suggests otherwise.

Because of ongoing discrimination, immigrants and other minorities find it difficult, costly and or impossible to assimilate and the ideology of plural monoculturalism further reinforces their exclusion by promoting the doctrine that they do not want to assimilate or, in any case, should not want to. Multiculturalism imposes “thick” identities on members of minority groups that exclude them from the mainstream, restrict their options and therefore undermines their wellbeing.

What is white privilege?

At this point critics will ask: “what is so great about the mainstream?” The answer, I suggest, is simply that it is the mainstream: the majority culture is the culture that imposes the “thinnest” identity on its members. To be a member of the majority culture is to be generic and that is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

There are a variety of benefits that attach to being white but the chief privilege of whiteness is negative: whiteness is, as it were, transparent—to be white, in the US, is to lack a “thick” racial identity. In this respect white privilege is like male privilege: of all the innumerable benefits procured to men in virtue of being male, the most important perhaps is that of being socially generic. In most social contexts we do not expect men to exhibit a characteristically masculine point of view or explain their behavior by reference to gender. We rarely talk about “male faculty,” “male politicians” or even “male writers” but we still talk about female faculty, female politicians and female writers. We only characterize individuals’ occupations or preoccupations as “male” where the activities in question are strongly identified as female: there are male nurses and male feminists.

This is symptomatic of the fact that being female is a “thicker” identity than being male: it is more salient and more tightly scripted. Minority racial and ethnic identities are like this too: we talk about “black faculty,” “Hispanic politicians” and even occasionally “Jewish writers” though the last category seems to be defined more by authors’ literary preoccupations rather than their ancestry alone. In any case, I suggest, being stuck with a “thick” identity is a bad thing.

The operative word here is “stuck.” The circumstances of our lives are both, as Anthony Appiah notes, parameters and limits. Most of us do not want to be naked transcendental unities of apperception: we seek out group loyalties and cling to empirical characteristics that define us. I am proud to be a Johns Hopkins alumna: I kick in $40 to the alumni association every year and go to the annual crab feasts with my husband, also a Hopkins PhD, where we commiserate with other Hopkins alums about how miserable it was. Our oldest son is at Hopkins too and when he gets his degree I will loan him my flashy gold regalia. JHU is our family thing.

That is a (mildly) thick identity—but it is an identity that I chose and one whose “thickness” I choose. I decided to go to Hopkins—probably unwisely. In addition, I choose to make it a big deal in my life, that is, to make it thicker than it had to be: I go to the crab feasts, support the lacrosse team and display the logo merchandise on my car, in my office and, occasionally, on my person.

Ethnic identity, by contrast, is both ascribed and salient. It is ascribed insofar as it is unchosen and immutable. Under the multicultural regime, you are born Italian or Jewish, Irish, Black or Puerto Rican and cannot get out of it. Moreover if you are a member of a visible minority group in all likelihood you cannot even “pass.” Being black or brown is like being female: you are not only stuck with it—and you are stuck with being identified with it.

Ethnic identity is, in addition, socially salient: under the multiculturalist regime ethnic identity is thick, and individuals for the most part cannot determine how thick it will be for them.

A property is socially salient within a community to the extent that members of the community take it to predict or explain beliefs, character traits, tastes or other socially significant psychological characteristics. Social salience is a matter of degree: it depends upon how many other characteristics it is thought to predict or explain, how important they are, how many members of the community believe it has this explanatory or predictive power and the degree of conviction with which they hold this belief…

The salience of a property does not arise from its visibility or noticability. Freckles are highly visible but wholly non-salient. In many communities, by contrast, some invisible ethnic origins, occupations and avocations are salient: people have notions of what Germans and Italians, lawyers, librarians and academics, stamp-collectors and soccer fans are like.

Finally, for some properties, which are salient to a given degree, the absence of these properties, or possession of other properties of the same category may be less salient or non-salient. People have notions about what used car salesmen are like; they don’t generally have preconceived ideas about what veterinarians, geologists or copy-editors are like.2

Even where our characteristics are chosen and our affiliations are voluntary, and indeed even where they are highly valued, we rarely want them to be socially salient: no one wants to be a “typical lawyer” or a “typical middle class suburbanite,” and no one wants others to make assumptions about his character, tastes, interests, abilities, commitments and beliefs, or to explain his behavior, on the basis of such socially salient characteristics.

Where socially salient characteristics are ascribed, immutable and visible, so much the worse: no one, but no one, wants to hear “just like a women” or to deal with remarks about his “natural sense of rhythm.” This is how clichés about the importance of “treating people as individuals” and “not putting them in boxes” cash out: we do not want our personal characteristics, particularly ascribed and immutable characteristics, to be socially salient. We do not want to have to fight our way out of boxes.

Almost everyone has known, at some time or other, what it is like to fight their way out of a box. If you are identified with any socially salient group, whether as a member of a racial or ethnic minority, a political liberal amongst conservatives, a woman in most social settings, a Christian in Academia or an atheist anywhere else, if you are old or very young, disabled or just physically unprepossessing, you confront a swarm of tacit assumptions about your intelligence and abilities, your beliefs, moral commitments and interests, your lifestyle and character, that you have to fight your way through in order to be seen for who you. And sometimes no amount of effort will get you through.

Multiculturalism, when it is more than a fiction or entertainment, puts people whose racial or ethnic characteristics are socially salient into boxes and imposes on them the burden of fighting their way out to establish their individuality. Multiculturalism thus restricts choice: most people have fairly strong preferences about how they want others to view them. They want to be seen for who they are. The salience of ascribed ethnic identities makes this difficult for members of ethnic minorities.

Finally, in addition to being ascribed and salient, ethnic identity is scripted. Multiculturalism not only promulgates doctrines about what members of ethnic minorities are like: it promotes normative claims about what they ought to be like. As Anthony Appiah notes, even where ethnic scripts are self-affirming they impose constraints on individual choice:

An African-American after the Black Power movement takes the old script of self-hatred, the script in which he or she is a nigger, and works, in community, to construct a series of positive black life scripts…What demanding respect for people as blacks or as gays requires is that there be some scripts that go with being an African-American or having same-sex desires: there will be expectations to be met; demands will be made. It is at this point that someone who takes autonomy seriously will want to ask whether we have not replaced one kind of tyranny with another. If I had to choose between Uncle Tom and Black Power, I would, of course, choose the latter. But I would like not to have to choose.3

2 Baber (2001). “Gender Conscious.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 18(1)

3

Appiah, K. A. (1996) “Race, Culture, Identity” in Color Conscious K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutman, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 98-99.

Legal scholar Richard Thompson Ford notes that the “difference discourse” of multiculturalism is especially problematic for minorities who are unwilling, or unable, to play their assigned roles:

Because difference discourse often establishes lists and canonical accounts of group identity, it tends to favor traditional behavior over behavior that is novel or transgressive within the group…In this respect, rights-to-difference include proscriptions and mandates, not only for those who would assert them and their contemporaries but also for future generations…Every racial group (with the telling exception of whites) has a derogatory term for people who fail to exhibit their assigned racial culture: there are African American ‘Oreos,’ Latino ‘Coconuts,’ Asian-American ‘Bananas’ and Native-American (you guessed it) ‘Apples.’4

Decades ago sociologist David Riesman noted the plight of individuals who were “marginally marginal”—middle class blacks who “talked proper,” “mannish” career women and others who were doubly disadvantaged by being saddled with membership in socially salient disadvantaged groups and either unwilling or unable to play the “scripts” associated with group membership.

Even in the 1950s when Riesman was writing, before multiculturalism, marginally marginal individuals faced social opprobrium and were regularly trapped in double binds. During that period, women were, in Riesman’s terminology, “marginalized” to the extent that they were de facto excluded from public life and the professions, and locked into suburban domesticity or, if unmarried, into a narrow range of women’s occupations. Marginally marginal females who could not or would not play their prescribed “feminine role” were trashed. As Betty Friedan noted, the behavior and aspirations of such women were construed in the categories of psychological pathology, as maladjustment, neurosis, self-hatred or penis envy.

In the wake of Friedan’s expose of the feminine mystique, the second wave of feminism effectively dismantled the pop-psychological theories that defined marginally marginal women as deviants. But, remarkably, these psychological theories were refurbished and recycled by multiculturalists to beat up on marginally marginal Oreos, Coconuts, Bananas and Apples, individuals who were said to be black, brown, yellow or red on the outside but white on the inside and who were therefore held to be held to be self-hating and inauthentic.

Like women, damned if they were suitably feminine but doubly damned if they weren’t, minorities under the multicultural regime were caught in double binds because the scripts for members of racial and ethnic minorities quite often rehearsed racist stereotypes and prescribed behavior that was, in the larger social context, unacceptable. Naïve members of racial and ethnic minorities regularly fell into traps by innocently following advice that they were not supposed to take seriously. At “diversity workshops” minorities were encouraged to wear “ethnic” costume and supervisors were urged to be “sensitive” to their non-Western conceptions of time. Black employees who showed up late the next day wearing dashikis were reprimanded and sent home to change.5