Race, Cultural, and Ethnical Diversity - Coursework Example

Race, Culture, Ethnicity, and Difference In the contemporary world, the society is increasingly embracing the motto of “it is good to be different”. The respect for multiculturalism, celebration of difference, and avowal of identity politics are perceived as landmarks of an antiracist, progressive outlook. In part, at least, the antiracists embrace of difference and multiculturalism receives emphasis by some form of hostility to universalism. For majority of antiracists today, the enlightenment project in pursuit of a scientific, rational understanding of the social and natural world, as well as deriving universal principles from fragmented experiences, is essentially a racist fantasy (Clarke, 2003:198). This paper seeks to show that such is a dangerous and naïve view. Contrary from establishing a critique of racial thinking, the politics of difference appropriates many of its themes and thus reproduce the very assumptions that historically underlie racism (Kivisto, 2002:289). Most critically, the embrace of difference and multiculturalism tends to undermine the capacity to uphold and defend equality. The title of the final debate at the backyards/frontlines conference, titled equality and the politics of difference, highlights this problem. Equality does not have any meaning in its plural form; equality is not relative, with different meanings for different cultural, sexual, or racial groups. If it is so, then it ceases to qualify as equality, or rather becomes equality in racist ways: ‘equal but different,’ thus defending apartheid or segregation. Equality requires a common definition, yardstick, or judgment, not a plurality of meaning. Drawing upon Richard Rorty observations, the desire for equality and the embrace of diversity are not compatible. According to him, the ‘enlightenment liberals’ face a possibly irresolvable problem in their pursuit of both diversity and equality (Anthias, 2002:23). He states “liberalism forces them that doubts about human equality result from irrational bias, but their connoisseurship of diversity forces them to understand that most humans do not believe in equality.” This paper seeks to discuss critically three points. First, the paper seeks to show that ‘difference’ has always been at the heart of the racist agenda, not the antiracist. Second, it seeks to argue that cultural pluralism, contrary to the conception of being a liberate means of oppressed voices, is grounded in the same philosophy that led to the rise of the discourse of race (Etzler, 2005:16). Lastly, the paper seeks to show that in a profoundly unequal world, pursuing difference may lead to exacerbation of, and accommodation to, such inequalities. Brief History of Race Difference and Racial Discourse Referring back to Rorty, a self-avowed postmodern liberal, he provides a solution by arguing that equality may be good for the ‘whites’, but not necessarily for the minority groups. Very few would go this far, but his relativist vision of equality is among the implicit part of antiracist practice and theory. In the cause of diversity, the meaning of equality has changed. Nonetheless, scholars cannot be careless with equality, because it resides at the heart of all forms of emancipation politics. In effect, abandoning equality means abandoning the possibility of emancipation. The debate between universalism and pluralism extends beyond the realms of theoretical concern; it relates to some fundamental issues about social and political change. Ironically, the contemporary embrace of difference is hostile to universalism, which mirrors traditional racial theorists. The traditional racial thinkers did not embrace what they considered abstract universalism of enlightenment thinkers, which they perceived to deny, or even undermine the concrete reality of human differences. Rather, racial theorists embraced the particular and the relative. Dismissing any claims of universal humanity, the theorists perceived the notion that human groups are different in profound ways, and should thus be subject to such treatment (Hage, 2003:57). French racial thinker and historian, Hippolyte Taine, made a mockery of the enlightenment belief that ‘men of every century and race were identical: the barbarian, the Greek, the man of the eighteenth century, and the man of renaissance as if they came out of a common mould, all in conformity to certain abstract conception that serve human race .’ Drawing upon the jibe of Catholic reactionary Joseph, Taine concluded that the enlightenment philosophies ‘knew man, not many men’. Thus, they did not know or understand that the moral constitution of an age or a people is distinct or particular as the physical structure of an order of animals or a family of plants (Anthias and Lloyd, 2002:6). In other words, the substitution of relative ideas for abstract notion is among the greatest conquests of science. Racial discourse arose because of the degradation of enlightenment universalism, especially the espousal of Romantics notions on difference; the belief that humanity is divisible into discrete groups; that each groups deserves consideration in its own terms. In addition, that each group does not consummate with the others; that important societal relationships arise because of the differences between groups; and that equality is essentially an abstract and meaningless term. This conception developed in response to contradictions in the post-enlightenment society; the contradiction between the reality in unequal societies and an abstract belief in equality (Hargreaves, 2002:167). Prior to the development of modern concepts of race, modern concepts of humanity and development had to develop too. Racial inequality and difference only poses meaning in a world that embraces the possibility of a common humanity and social equality. The main achievement of the enlightenment was helping in the production of such a world. Despite their other emerging differences, enlightenment thinkers asserted that humans were naturally rational and sociable, and that there was a common human nature. Among the implicit beliefs was the idea that all humans were potentially equal (Clarke, 2003:198). Through the enlightenment philosophies, humanity had a concept of universality for the first time that could transcend all the perceived differences. Interestingly, however, is the fact that the enlightenment discourse did not contain any discussion of race. In comparison to writings both after and before, the writings in the eighteenth century exhibit a remarkable disdain arguments based on racial grounds. This is evident from the methodological text written for an anthropological society during that time by French Anthropologist Joseph Marie, as he did not consider it necessary to address the issue of race (Kivisto, 2002:291). In addition, the debate on slavery during the same century did not include race. With a few notable exceptions, majority of those in defense of slavery did not base their arguments on racial grounds but rather on sanctity of property. Nonetheless, enlightenment thinkers clearly held some racist views, some very openly and others overtly. There would have some degree of astonishment had it been any other way. Racial comments of scholars like Voltaire, Hume, and Kant are well known. What was absent however was any sustained race discourse. Robert Miles, Anthony Barker, and Michael Banton, in their different researches on racial thinking, argue that there was substantial literature in the eighteenth and seventeenth century about African and other minority groups, but the word race was seldom used in describing these people or accounting for the differences between them (Etzler, 2005:19). The enlightenment was not merely an intellectual movement. The belief in a common humanity and equality was an ideological embodiment of a wider political and social movement upon which feudal order crumbled and capitalism emerged (Hage, 2003:59). From the complex interaction between developing capitalist social relations and the ideology of equality emerged the race discourse. The egalitarianism, optimism, and tolerance characterized by the enlightenment movement, in part, derived from the stability of Europe during the first few decades of the eighteenth century. Some universal existed that social order was static, or perhaps that change would be contained and orderly. However, the social upheaval resulting from the emergence of market relations upset such perceptions and drew focus on the immanent contradictory attitudes of the bourgeoisie society towards the concept of equality. At the heart of the political program of the bourgeoisie was the belief in equality (Cunneen, 2001:49). However, the pursuit of that belief threatened to undermine the entire political program, for the defense of private property seemed to require inequality defense. Simultaneously, emerging capitalist ideologies demonstrated opposition to the irrational, narrow-minded nature of feudalism, asserting a strong conviction in a universal society and human equality. In practice however, the individual forms of the capitalist society imposed limits on the expression of equality (Leurdijk, 2004:95). In essence, capitalism literally destroyed the parochial nature of the feudal system and created new divisions: divisions that seemed more permanent than those in the old feudal did. With the persistence of social inequalities in the new society, thus acquiring a permanence stamp, these inequalities began representing themselves as natural, nor social. Racial discourse emerged as a means of solving the conflict between the reality of the persistence of inequality and the ideology of inequality (Lentin, 2004:64). From the racists’ point of view, the persistence of inequality was a result of the unequal nature of the society. The destiny of distinct social groups was essentially shape in part, by intrinsic properties. Humanity had discrete division, with different groups having particular properties, and the divisions between the groups unchangeable and immutable. Racial ideology became the inevitable product of persistence of differences in people, class, and rank in a society that embraced the concept of equality. Ultimately, race came to be the defining way of how people made sense of their surrounding world. There are two very important points worth noting. First, the idea of race was not an implicit category in the enlightenment movement. It essentially emerged because of the interaction between the social relations and the enlightenment categories of the emergent capitalist society. The enlightenment movement enabled the establishment of theoretical possibility of human emancipation for the very first time. However, it achieved this in social circumstances that imposed limits on the expression of the emancipation potential. In instance where social forces drawing upon the principles and logic of the enlightenment discourse attained significant strength, such as in the Haitian Revolution, they pursued equality beyond the envisaged limits of the scholars who drafted the declaration of Independence, or the declaration of Human Rights (Statham, 2002: 68). However, where such forces were weak, the contradictory attitude of the capitalists towards the concept of equality imposed more limits upon its expression. In this regard therefore, the racial narrative is also a narrative of containment of social emancipation movements. The second point is that universalism did not give rise to race. Rather, racial discourse developed in opposition of rationalism and universalism notions. Indeed, it was via the Romantics reaction to the enlightenment discourse that racial ideologies first emerged. Romantics opposed the ‘abstract nature of enlightenment universalism’, rather championing the pluralistic accounts of the human difference. Every people had unique aspects, and the expression of such uniqueness was present through the unchanging spirit of people as refined through history, or the concept of volksgeist (Anthias and Lloyd, 2002:10). This idea transformed to the concept of racial components and make-up, the unchanging substance, the foundation of all mental potential and physical appearance, and the basis for all difference and division within all humanity. Therefore, the root of modern racism lays Romantic visions of human difference, not concepts of universality. It is important to understand the intellectual and historical roots of racial ideas because Romantic notions of human differences lie at the centre of contemporary perceptions of cultural pluralism. Cultural pluralism and racial theory both display some hostility to the enlightenment universalism, but in profound and varying ways. According to scholars, two sets of questions that emerge from the debate of relativism and universalism: ‘is there only one kind of man, or are they many? Is there one world, or many?’ The first queries the biological unity of humankind, while the second questions the idea of a single objective or truth in understanding the world (Cole, 2004:38). The belief in one world assumes that common values and laws operate across all societies, although different people respond in manners to them. According to social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, his views differ from those of the enlightenment philosophers (Ratchliffe, 2004: 5-90). Spenser argues that people in early life are taught that the nature of human is the same everywhere, but this is an error that needs replacement with the truth that laws of thoughts are the same everywhere. Thus, in Spencer’s viewpoint, the same, and objective social laws operate in all cultures and societies, though different people respond to the objective laws in various ways, with the racial make-up of the individual groups determining the nature of response. On the other hand, belief in many worlds denies the common objective of understanding the world as well as place posits the plurality of ways of understanding and evaluating the world around (Noble, 2005:113). However, the social world is a making of the people who inhibit that particular society, thus every world is specific to the inhabitants and disproportionate with the other social worlds inhibited by other people. One may schematically therefore argue that the discourse of scientific racism asserts that there is only one world, but inhibited by different kinds of humans, while the discourse of culture holds that there is only one type of humanity, but they inhabit different worlds (Anthias, 2002:34). Indeed, the difference between the two is not straightforward or clear-cut. Many racial formalists deny the possibility of a single truth, while cultural relativists on the other hand agree on the concept of biological differences within human races. Nonetheless, the last decades on the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century show a shift from racial discourse to cultural discourse, which essential embodies the shift from the belief in a single world with different kinds of humans to the belief in a single humanity inhabiting different symbolic worlds or cultures (Hargreaves, 2002:171). Therefore, the discourse of culture and the discourse of race emerged from the degradation of universalism, but in different and profound ways. Racial theorists of the nineteenth century, with their characteristic disdain for the ideas of universalism, maintained a belief in the idea of reason as a social transformation weapon, as well as a companion for teleological history. Anthropology Considering this belief in the inevitable social progress, the growing gap between ‘primitives’ and ‘civilized man’ became evident in both Europe societies and other regions, which led to the perception by many that such differences were natural, thus in racial terms (Lloyd, 2002:64). It thus followed that Victorian social evolutionists posited a hierarchical view of humanity, indicating different groups of people as positioned in different points in the evolutionary scale, as well as believing that reason and progress were prerogative of a particular race. The driving force behind the change from the racial to the cultural view was the science of anthropology. Since inception of its ideologies, anthropology remains the most particularistic human sciences. With reference to Victorian social evolutionism and positivism, the concept manifested itself in the course of theories of biological differences and physical anthropology (Cole, 2004:42). In essence, the particularity of anthropology re-expressed itself culturally as the positive outlook disintegrated slowly. Among the significant figures in the remaking of anthropology was Franz Boas, a German American. Overestimating the impact of Boas is difficult, on both anthropology and the daily perception of culture, race, and difference. Contemporary ideas of multiculturalism and pluralism, of respect for all cultures, and of importance of history and tradition are among the significant themes in the works of Boas. Nonetheless, his legacy, similar to that of the concept of pluralism, remains ambiguous. Boas, as well as some of his students, played an integral role of replacing cultural theories of human difference in place of racial theories, thus helping in undermining the power of scientific racism. Nonetheless, the cultural concept developed by Boas rearticulated the theme of racial theory largely in different disguise. The main challenge for Boas was defining ‘the genius of people’ in terms not related to racial heredity. Ultimately, his answer was the anthropological concept of culture (McLennan, 2001:391). His disillusionment with ‘western values’ gave rise to his cultural relativism and philosophical egalitarianism. This disillusionment was the root ambiguity in treating the idea of equality. The resultant revolutionary egalitarianism from the enlightenment movement was forward-looking and positive. From scholars such as Condorcet to Marx, social progress could overcome artificial differences and divisions and perhaps reveal the essential commonality (Kymlicka, 2001:61). On the contrary, Boas egalitarianism held that such progress was impossible. Yes, humanity was equal, but not because of the possibility of overcoming differences, but because all differences were equally valid. However, this approach avoided inequalities and differences. In other words, the differences considered between individuals and people essentially are products of social inequalities. Thus, Boas perceived ‘equality’ as the acceptance of actual societal inequalities but regards these inequalities as different manifestations of the humankind. The above literature shows how the new anthropology reframed the definition of inequality. The concept of a plural society emerged first in the anthropological analysis in the early decades on the twentieth century, consequently attracting both western liberals anxious to protect colonial subjects from imperialism and colonial administrators faced with the problem of imposing order in territories. As such, pluralism rapidly became an explanation rather than a description of the colonial society. Thus, the colonial society rationalized the inequalities as products of different cultural lifestyles and outlooks of different groups in the society (Cole, 2002:105). Ultimately, inequality changed to ‘difference’. Similar to racial theory, plural theory also provided apology for social inequalities, terming them as inevitable results from cultural differences. Then, the concept of pluralism effectively bridged the evolutionary ladder of racial theory, as pluralists perceived humankind as horizontally segmented, rather than vertically. From this perception, it thus follows that humankind is not arranged differently along the vertical axis, but at different stationary points in a stationary horizontal axis. Humankind comprises of multitude of people, with each individual inhibiting their own cultural and symbolic worlds (Wight, 2003: 714). Despite the perception of problems as cultural or biological, the scholars saw them in terms of superiority and inferiority, with cultural pluralism and racial theory characterized by common universalism hostility, epistemological and philosophical relativism, and disdain for humanism. Pluralism The results of this are evident in the debate about difference and race in the postwar society. After the experience of Nazism, the Final Solution, and the Holocaust, scholars discredited the biological theories concerning human difference. Thus, racial science died, though racial thinking was still rife. As discrediting biological arguments on racial superiority as well as overt and disrepute of racism expression, assumptions of racial thinking remained intact, particularly the belief in division of humankind into different groups, with each group having its own terms, and that differences define human interactions, not commonalities. These assumptions were however cast into cultural pluralism language, not biological terms. Thus, pluralism provided a vocabulary for articulation of social differences without necessarily referring to racial discourse (Noble, 2005:110). It provided some continuity sense with racial discourse, as well as a means of asserting racism aversion as exemplified in postwar periods. From the above discussion, we gain an understanding on the development of plural society in the years after war. Afterwards, however, the concept changed in response to mass immigration into western countries. The immigrants found themselves on margins of their new society, subject to discrimination and racism, and locked out of chances to access levers of power. The idea o pluralism developed to accommodate the persistence of inequalities despite the equality, assimilation, and integration (Markus, 2001:208). Thus, immigrants remained limited in ghettos, excluded from the mainstream society, discriminated, and clinging to old lifestyles and habits familiar in the hostile world, thus such differences became rationalized as positive products of plural societies rather than racism. Particularly in the nineteenth century, the persistence of inequalities led to the emergence of racial discourse, where economic, technological, and social differences between distinct groups took the direction of natural distinctions. After the wars, the persistence of inequalities with reference to the immigrations gave rise to development of pluralistic outlook, where scholars perceived differences as expression of cultural diversity (Hawkins, 2000:79). Let us consider the example of America past mid-twentieth century. Most commentators, from both the black and white community, expected African American migrants to integrate eventually into the American society in similar style as European immigrants. After 30 years however, the misplacement of such claims became apparent. Literary all social statistics, from infant mortality rates to language use, from housing segregation to intermarriage, it was evident that the ‘blacks’ had very different lives from the other ‘Americans.’ Thus, the possibility of equality became more constrained, subsequently increasing the tendency to celebrate differences (Wight, 2003: 724). According to commentators, the reforms on civil rights reinforced the ideology that minority immigrant groups be defined in accordance with how the minorities gained equal access to privileges and material opportunities to the ‘whites.’ They argue that such a strategy will not bring forth liberation, as the ideas of freedom had bias from efforts to imitate lifestyle and behaviors, as well as consciousness and values of eth colonizers. The eminent failure of equality has led to declaration of equality as problematic by a portion of scholars because minority groups are ‘different’ from the ‘west.’ Consequently, policymakers and politicians respond to such arguments by reinventing societies as multicultural or plural nations (Ladson-Billings and Gillborn, 2004:161). Pluralism focuses on the fact that a nation, like Britain, incorporates many different people and cultural groups. Conclusion The promotion of pluralism is essentially an admission that the barriers that differentiate the immigrants and the west cannot disappear and that equality is merely an abandoned social policy objective. According to scholars, multiculturalism is the price that western nations are paying for their unwillingness or inability to integrate minority societies. However, the minority groups pay the real price, for Britain and other western societies are not multicultural or plural, but unequal. In addition, the promotion of pluralism clearly acknowledges the inevitability of inequality. As one commentator argues, the British society has to pass through an era where we tend to celebrate and recognize difference, because of eth failure to integrate minority groups (Yack, 2002:109). Despite the fact that the minority gap in Britain is not extreme as in America, pluralism too has become a way of avoiding debate concerning failure of equality. For instance, majority of the young people in East London or other parts of Britain may claim to be Muslims, less due to their cultural habits and beliefs, than because of the hostile, anti-Muslim society. Young Muslims are seldom religious, as they have outlooks, habits, and mores slightly different from those of their white age mates. However, racism imposes difference on them, forcing them to adapt to these difference (Cole, 2002:135). It is important to note that this paper is not objecting pluralism in the sense of a society that exercises open and free politics, religious and cultural expression. Rather, the paper expresses the fear of a one-sided embrace of denigration and difference of universalistic concepts. Ironically, the uninformed pursuit of pluralism essentially undermines the capacity to defend equality. In a society observing equality, universal capacity can take many forms, and thus become a basis of real and true difference. Indeed, difference can have meaning in only a society with equality, as such permits the free choice of difference (Brace, 2005:75). However, in unequal societies, the pursuit of difference necessarily translates to the entrenchment of inequalities, as the inequalities occur in inequality discourses. Bibliography Anthias, F,. 2002. Diasporic hybridity and transcending racisms. Problems and potential. In In Floya Anthias and Cathie Lloyd (eds.) Rethinking Anti-racisms. 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An Overview of Research and Examples of Good Practice in the EU Member States, 1995-2000. Vienna: EUMC/ERCOMER. Wight, C., 2003. The Agent-Structure Problem and Institutional Racism. Political Studies. Volume 51: 706-721. Yack, B., 2002. Multicultralism and the Political Theorists. European Journal of Political Theory. 1(1) 107-119. Read More