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| Minorities - Challenging Existing ConventionsJust three approaches have traditionally dominated U.K. |
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Multiculturalism made the assertion that minority cultures or ways of life were not sufficiently protected by simply ensuring the individual rights of their members. As a consequence minorities should also be protected with special group rights or privileges (Kimlicka, 1996). This involved not criticising or offending any way of life or minority group, a direct contradiction of the liberal view enamoured of human rights due to its focus on the individual. Thus multiculturalism was the reverse of the liberal trend as it made the indigenous community retreat (i.e. through political correctness) rather than the newcomer yield (e.g. through citizenship tests and integration).
Multiculturalism offered socially excluded minorities more than just liberalism's tolerance and requirements to integrate within a greater dominant cultural framework. Instead multiculturalists denied a common identity or overarching culture ever existed or could ever exist. By denying these altogether, the theory of multiculturalism offered all minorities total 'recognition' by proclaiming that all cultures were equal (or at least equally wrong) no matter how absurd or disruptive others thought they were.
The struggle for recognition
Multiculturalists sought to reverse the universalising trend of the Enlightenment, to celebrate every single culture (rather than just one as the liberals did). So it was inescapable that every step they took to wrap 'minority' cultures in cotton wool and push them into the foreground served to push the 'dominant' identity and culture, variously perceived as Caucasian, Western, liberal, male, middle-class and heterosexual, into the background.
According to Charles Taylor, this was due to the struggle for 'recognition' at the very heart of the multicultural project (1994). This struggle harked back to Hegel's dialectic of the Master/Slave relationship. This dialectic begins with two independent beings that launch a quest for recognition from each other and engage in a fight to the death. This recognition is necessary because Hegel believed '...self-consciousness is only by being acknowledged or recognised (J.B. Baillie translation, 1949)'. The two sides attempt to cancel out the other in order to become certain of their own true selves till one is defeated. As the victor cannot receive the desired recognition from the vanquished if he does not exist, the dialectic continues when the victor, chooses to enslave the vanquished rather than slay him hence the Master/Slave relationship. Multiculturalists like Taylor felt minorities took the position of the Slave in this scenario and felt they had to engage in a post-Hegelian struggle for recognition with the Master (the dominant segment of society):
"The age of dignity is born. This new critique of pride, leading not to solitary mortification but to a politics of equal dignity, is what Hegel took up and made famous in his dialectic of the master and the slave. Against the old discourse on the evil of pride, he takes it as fundamental that we can nourish only to the extent that we are recognized. Each consciousness seeks recognition in another, and this is not a sign of a lack of virtue. But the ordinary conception of honor as hierarchical is crucially flawed. It is flawed because it cannot answer the need that sends people after recognition in the first place. Those who fail to win out in the honor stakes remain unrecognized. But even those who do win are more subtly frustrated, because they win recognition from the losers, whose acknowledgment is, by hypothesis, not really valuable, since they are no longer free, self-supporting subjects on the same level with the winners. The struggle for recognition can find only one satisfactory solution, and that is a regime of reciprocal recognition among equals (Taylor, 1992, p.88)".
The multiculturalists were so focused on equal respect for all they felt they had to drive back the dominant culture. This was because they felt the public domain of any society could never be completely neutral, as the principal, leading faction would already have set the current cultural parameters (i.e. the liberals had already filled this sphere with their republican values).
When minorities claimed equal respect they were demanding to be part of the re-structuring of that public sphere on their own terms. It was undeniably true (to multiculturalists at least) that marginalised sectors of society would always ask why the dominant group had their worldview universalised while its own was parochialised and privatised. They felt aggrieved at the liberal attempt to combine a mono-cultural public realm with a multicultural private realm as the public recognition and institutionalisation of one culture could cause other cultures to be viewed as subsidiary, unimportant, even abnormal. They worked to alter this situation and this led to political correctness, an immediate by-product of multiculturalism. The sentiment of not offending any minority group left traditionally dominant sections of society reeling. Some asked where political correctness would stop. Recent history proves almost any group that viewed itself as an excluded minority could attempt to gain ground through multiculturalism. The U.S. provides many examples. The phrase 'handicapped' (cap, hat or begging bowl in hand) had to be shelved in favour of 'disabled'. The reform of education agenda to conform to the 'multi-cultists' led to a public outcry. Short people were soon referred to as vertically-challenged, the bald were follicly-challenged and it has been de rigeur for sometime to wish others Happy Holidays rather than Happy Christmas (or even Happy Xmas).
Multiculturalism rapidly overwhelmed the liberal agenda to take its place as the Master in the Hegalian Master/Slave dialectic and its dominance over academics, public policy practitioners and politicians was often extraordinary. Worldwide, multiculturalism probably reached its zenith with the formation in 1994 of Nelson Mandela's South African 'Rainbow Government' and domestically in 2000 with the publication of the Runnymede Trust report, 'The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain', chaired by Bhikhu Parekh that called for a community of communities and a revision of Britain's 'national story' to a more inclusive version (cf. 'The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain', 2000).
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