We Really are all Multiculturalists Now

Abstract

Treating multiculturalism as a social fact, this article develops the argument that it ought to be construed as a form of political claims-making advanced by spokespersons on behalf of what can be described as communities of fate. After brief examinations of the claims-makers and those groups that claims are made on behalf of, five types of claims are analyzed: (1) exemption, (2) accommodation, (3) preservation, (4) redress, and (5) inclusion. This leads to a concluding section devoted to analyzing the politics of identity as constituting an effort to ovecome the burdens of stigmatization, with a focus on the respective contributions of Goffman, Taylor, and Alexander.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions generously offered by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Thomas Faist, Tariq Modood, Ewa Morawska, and Giuseppe Sciortino and have tried as best I can to respond to them. Before being presented as the Midwest Sociological Society Presidential Address in St. Louis, MO, on March 25, 2011, an earlier version of the article titled “Rethinking Multicultural Civil Society” was presented as the keynote address at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Ethnic Relations and International Migration at the University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland, on October 21, 2010.

NOTES

Notes

¹ A parallel argument contends that multiculturalism replaces a progressive political concern for redistributive policies aimed at overcoming disparities in economic inequality (see Barry 2001:326; for a critique, see Banting and Kymlicka 2006:15–6).

² Thomas Faist (2009) argues that diversity should be viewed as a novel mode of incorporation, similar to but distinct from multiculturalism.

³ One commentator contended that “community of fate” is too essentialist a term to properly describe the social category that can be described as multicultural. This is not accurate because my definition stresses the role of subjectivity in group definition, basically paralleling for a broader concept Weber's (1978 [1922]:389) definition of the ethnic group as entailing a “subjective belief” in a community of “descent.” I concede that the term “community of fate,” which a literature review will attest is used in rather indiscriminate ways, needs further clarification, but I have concluded that this is a large enough task to make such an undertaking impossible here. It will be addressed in a subsequent article that analyzes the triad of identity, culture, and communities of fate.

⁴ For discussions on whether or not there is such a thing as deaf culture, see Rutherford (1988) and Peters (2000).

⁵ In the 2010 midterm elections, voters rejected three of the Iowa Supreme Court justices who were up for retention votes, the result of a campaign by the state's powerful Christian Right and by money from anti-gay groups nationwide. This was the first time in the state's history that any judge had failed to win reappointment to the bench.

⁶ Virtually all the major theorists of multiculturalism use the language of stigma, but to my knowledge none of them reference Goffman.

⁷ Goffman (1963:139) recognizes that stigmatization serves different purposes depending on the type of stigma. Thus, for racial, ethnic, and religious groups it serves to reduce competition; for those with “a bad moral record,” it's a mode of social control; and for those with physical or mental handicaps, it functions to segregate them from certain arenas of social life, such as the marriage market. While his account stresses the commonalities across types of stigma, his simultaneous awareness of the distinctiveness of each type can point to a resolution of the difference between expansive (e.g., Young) and constricted (e.g., Kymlicka and Taylor) perspectives on multicultural claims-makers, with the latter being seen simply as a subset of the former. This might mean, for example, that culture is a factor for one subset—such as ethnonational groups—while it isn't for another—such as ex-convicts.