multiculturalism’s failure
By shag carpet bomb • Jan 23rd, 2008 • Category: Books, Trouble with Diversityfrom archive : s0metim3s, which is a topic I’m going to write more about when I get time to review Walter Benn Michael’s _The Trouble with Diversity_. I mentioned it awhile ago and pointed at a review that intrigued me.
To pose the question of the materiality of race is also …m to pose the question of multiculturalism’s ‘failure’. This failure is understood … as the failure of multiculturalism to sufficiently deliver on its promise of a redistribution or expansion of recognition and rights when confronted with what are said to be intractable racial differences.
However, this putative failure was always the very condition of multiculturalism (emph added) … . Multiculturalism is a theory and policy of social order, of the restoration or institution of that order (and its boundaries) grounded in the recognition and management of differences-in-unity. In that policy, and in that process of managing the passage from the ostensibly particular differences of the otherly-complexioned to their integration into the apparently neutral terrain of social identity (citizenship), distinctions were always made between proper and improper forms of difference.
What multiculturalism promised, then, was recognition (and rights) as the reward for appropriate expressions of difference – which is to say, both appropriate and appropriable: differences that can be appropriated as property; competition as the proper expression of difference (or conflict); relation conceived entirely in the register of exchange. Multiculturalism is, in other words, a particularly contractual version of the promise … will not disturb the social ordering (and valuations) of difference.
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