In the United States, multiculturalism became a way of talking—but not really talking—about racial disadvantage and inequality, which then got refracted through the prism of cultural differ enc, even where the cultural differences between white and black Americans were slight. When culture is employed as a euphemism for either race or ethnicity (and ethnicity, being thought to be more cultural, is itself commonly employed as a euphemism for race), this can encourage policymakers to propose cultural solutions to problems that are better understood as social or economic.
For many on the Left, this is what brings multicultural policies into disrepute. The pursuit of multiculturalism has been described as “a handy and inexpensive solution to the problem of ethnic politics,” or as diverting attention from structural and class domination, fragmenting what might otherwise be class-based oppositional movements. For me, this evokes memories of socialist critics of feminism who used to allege that women’s seif-organisation was undermining class unity, and my instinctive response is to say that this take on multiculturalism ignores the real harm that can be done to people when their cultural identities are trivialised and ignored. But it would be an appropriate criticism if something that has little or nothing to do with culture is misrepresented in exclusively cultural terms...
The deconstruction or de-essentialising of culture looks the more radical position because it rejects fixed notions of culture and refuses to see the other as profoundly different from oneself. But it can also be seen as worryingly ethnocentric because of the extraordinary potency it attributes to Western anthropology, Western human rights activists, or the Western media in producing this thing called culture. Marshall Sahlins puts it like this:
There is a certain historiography that is quick to take the 'great game' of imperialism as the only game in town. It is prepared to assume that history is made by the colonial masters, and that all that needs to be known about the people's own social dispositions, or even their 'subjectivity', is the external disciplines imposed upon them: the colonial policies of classification, enumeration, taxation, education, and sanitation. The main historical activity remaining to the underlying people is to misconstrue the effects of such imperialism in their own culture traditions... In the name of ancestral practice, the people construct an essentialized culture: a supposedly unchanging inheritance, sheltered from the contestation of a true social existence. Thus they repeat as tragedy the farcical errors about the coherence of a symbolic system supposed to have been committed by an earlier and more naive generation of anthropologists.
... Renee Rogers, who failed in her 1981 bid for damages against her employer, American Airlines, because she did not manage to convince the court that wearing her hair in cornrow braids was a crucial part of 'the cultural and historical essense' of a black American woman. On the whole, claims regarding cultural discrimination have found a less ready audience than those concerning religion or race...
[A case of honour killing in 1995: Shabir Hussain] clearly raised the spectre of culture being invoked to explain and minimise violent crimes against women. It also returns us to one of the earlier questions, about whether intensely held religious convictions should be treated differently from intensely held political convictions, or whether culture should be elevate above other concerns. One might imagine a parallel case in which a member of a white racist organisation claimed that he found it deeply offensive to see his siter with a black lover, and that something blew up in his head that caused a complete and sudden loss of self-control. There have been occasions in the not-too-distant past when that would have been regarded as a legitimate enough claim-but it is hard to imagine any court today accepting this as provocation... Critics of multiculturalism might also say it is because a public discourse of cultural pluralism gives credence to claims about culture or religion in a way that no longer holds for race...
There is a large literature on veiling... In one particularly subtle account of a Bedouin society in Egypt in the late 1970s, Lila Abu-Lughod argues that the deference expected of women (and most visibly expressed in veiling) was part of a social system that attached a high value to autonomy in men and scorned docility in women. 'Those who are coerced into obeying are scorned, but those who voluntarily defer are honourable.' This was clearly a double-bind situation-women were expected to veil, but were also expected to do it voluntarily-and Abu-Lughod does not present the life of Bedouin women as one of great self-determination. To the contrary, she shows how women have expressed their feelings of anger, frustration, or unhappiness in a subversive tradition of poetry that they shared only with other women. This was not a life of freedom and gender equality, yet it was also not a life of passive submission. Representing these women as constrained by their culture does not begin to capture the complexity of their choices...
In a study published in 1995, Francoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar had argued that there were three distinct patterns of hijab wearing in France... younger girls at school or college who wore it at their parents' insistence, but thereby bought the freedom to go out by themselves, attend college, and continue their education... most of these young women stopped wearing the hijab a few years after leaving school... when the Stasi Commission produced its report in 2003, it claimed that there had been a resurgence of sexism in France's Muslim communities, and that young women were now exposed to high levels of verbal, psychological, and physical pressure... For many young women, it reported, covering one's head in public places-including at school-was becoming the only way to avoid being stigmatised as sexually loose or a heretic. For those who refused, the fact that others of their age group were wearing the hijab made them even more vulnerable to accusations of impurity. The commission therefore doubted whether young girls really were choosing the headscarf...
Consider smoking, which is clearly influenced by both gender and class. A number of countries have now introduced bans on smoking in public places. One counterargument to such initiatives is that this policy is unfair to working-class people because it fails to take into account the way that class affects the capacity to give up smoking. it is easy enough, it is said, for the middle classes, most of whom have already given up smoking and whose lifestyle is increasingly smoke free, to support a ban; but for someone who is out of work or living on the poverty line, being able to smoke may be one of the few reamining pleasures in life. By what right, then, do the complacent middle classes impose their own view of the healthy life on others? John Roemer provides a more theoretical version of this in his discussion of equality of opportunity. He maintains that if the propensity to smoke is statistically correlated to sex, race, and class, such that a black male steelworker is more likely to be a heavy smoker than a white female college professor, then the steelworker can be said to have had less opportunity not to smoke than the professor. He should therefore be seen as less accountable for a failure to give up smoking. So if the society decides that heavy smokers must pay their smoking-related medical expenses, the steelworker should not be expected to pay as much as the (more culpable) heavy-smoking professor.
This line of argument has clear echoes of the cultural incapacity one... people do not take readily to this kind of argument when it is offered in relation to class... [Sometimes] they reject it because they see the suggestion that being working class makes you less capable than others of giving up smoking as insulting or patronising... a class exemption would be regarded as enormously insulting...
On the whole, notions of inability are not now used in relation to either gender or class. You don't hear people saying, 'I can't do this because I am working class,' or (except sometimes, tongue in cheek), 'I can't do this because I am a woman.' Few would deny the constraints asociated with gender and class, but there is a willingness to accept that people act autonomously even as they bow to gendered or class constraints. There is much less willingness to accept that people are acting autonomously when the constraint reflects culture."
- Not Chapter 1, Multiculturalism without Culture, Anne Phillips