Tiffany Jenkins: I've really got one question for
the panel before I go out to you, so if they could keep their comments brief.
I was very interested in what you said, Adam - and perhaps Kenan can begin
- when you said anti-racism shares the same basis as racism. Obviously we
like to think that we live in a very anti-racist society now, so can we have
a few more thoughts on that, can we expend it a little bit?
Kenan Malik: I agree very much with what Adam said
on this. I think both racism and anti-racism - or rather contemporary
anti-racism - are rooted in a romantic notion of human differences in the
way Adam described, of human beings as being composed of incommensurate groups,
each with particular essences, each with particular lifestyles, values, beliefs
and so on, with the difference being that 19th century racial scientists considered
these groups to be established on a racial hierarchy, on an evolutionary hierarchy
with some higher than others, while the contemporary multi-culturalists regard
different groups on a horizontal basis if you like, none better than the other,
equally valid. That to me is the primary difference, not very important in
the kind of underlying message it sends out.
If you look at Britain, if you look at how anti-racism has changed in Britain
over the past 50 years, it's interesting that you can have three generations,
if you like. The first generation who came here in the 1950s were those who
largely accepted racism and lived with it. The second generation, my generation,
were those who fought it, but fought it on the basis that what we wanted was
equality with everybody else, we wanted to be treated as Britons, with the
same rights as everybody else. What you now have is a third generation of
anti-racists, who have given up on the fight for equality, or rather refashioned
the notion of equality to mean not the right to be the same, not the right
to have the same rights as everyone else, but the right to be different. So
they have gone back to a notion of difference which underlies racism, which
was what we fought against when we were fighting for equality. So to me it
seems contemporary anti-racism is in many ways very regressive.
Tiffany Jenkins: Adam, do you want to say a few things
about that? In particular in relation to Bonnie's point about how identities
are much more fluid than we allow for - is that perhaps the solution, to go
towards a more fluid identity?
Adam Kuper: Well, I agree with everybody.
Tiffany Jenkins: Very politically correct
Adam Kuper: This question of identity is an interesting
one in relation to this; it's a new kind of question. People out in the world
there are looking for their identities. I don't know if any of you have this
problem, you wake up in the night, 'Who am I?' It's a sort of adolescent problem
that many people have evidently carried on into adult life. It hasn't bothered
me for a long time but people have this problem, 'Who am I?' - and the answer
is, the answer we're supposed to find, is that I find my identity when I find
what group I belong to. And there can only be one group. So I discover I am
gay. Or I discover that I am Muslim. I make this discovery, and then I search
out my group, and I adopt the ways of thinking, the prejudices, the views,
the manner of speaking and so on of this group, and then I have found my identity,
I've found my place in the world and from then on I can be happy and fulfilled
as a human being.
The reality, as Bonnie said of course, is that we all contain multitudes.
We are all sorts of different people all the time, we're in different contexts,
we have different notions, we contradict ourselves, we play with one idea
rather than another. What we don't want is for someone to look at us and say
'I know who you are, I can tell who you are by your accent, by your colour
or by your hairstyle, I know who you are and so I know a whole range of things
about you, I can put you in your box.' That, of course, is very dangerous
and a degenerate way of dealing with other human beings. So I am a liberal,
I take the liberal point of view that what matters is allowing the greatest
possible freedom for individual choice and individual self-expression, and
also the freedom to change, so I am very much against all collective attributions
of identity, and I'm against all sorts of movements that demand from an individual
solidarity with a group with which they have some kind of imaginery identity.
Bonnie Greer: I agree absolutely, and I think that
if we can take for a moment take a sort of long view, and if we can look at
ourselves from the vantage point of people 50 years from now, I think one
of the things that they're going to be saying was that the beginning of this
millenium there was a crisis of identity. The reason there is a crisis of
identity, one of the reasons, is that the base known as Europe, the cultural
entity known as Europe, this entity known as Western Europe, this peninsular
off Asia, is changing, and it has pressures against it from its knew populations,
who are claiming it as their home, but also from a great power, the United
States, which is actually encroaching more and more on the identity of the
peoples of Europe. So at the beginning of this century the peoples of Britain
and Europe were actually asking the question 'Who am I?' in relation to these
things. I would say again that I'd urge us to think fluidly, not so much in
rigid compartments. I think it is extremely important.
If you look at what's happening in music, for instance, music is and has always
been a melange of things, a mixture of things. You can look at the French
hip-hop scene, the French rap scene, you can look at what's happening here
in the music scene, so these things are on the ground. We would be retrograde
if we didn't actually take up what culture is doing, take up some of the issues
that culture is dealing with, take up some of the moral models that culture
has made and move those models into other realms: the social realm, the political
realm, and so on. The fact that there are right now 45% of under 5 year olds
in this town with one non-white parent tells us something about the future
which we're not even discussing today. There is a reality that is very different.
Farhad Khosrokhavar: I think there is a kind of consensus,
mutual agreement on one of those topics, that most of the time, multiculturalism
arises within societies where social justice is being put into question directly
or indirectly. That means it might be looked at as the noble side of hyper-liberalism
in the continental sense of the word. That means a society where social justice
are economic justice are less and less relevant is where this kind of situation,
partially at least, is legitimised through the respect of the others. But
respect of the others might mean as well indifference towards this situation
within the framework of the economy. So again, what bothers me about multiculturalism
is that it separates in an artificial way economics, politics and cultural
aspects of social life which are integrated - I mean, integrated with each
other within our real lives.
Tiffany Jenkins: I think the key question is can we
take on a fluid identity where we choose effectively who we are - is that
the solution?
Audience Member 1: My name's Cliff Codona, I'm a Romany
gypsy, and I come from one of the most persecuted peoples there are on the
planet today, and I'm really interested in what the gentleman there said about
our identity as something that we do not want to lose, as something we fight
so strongly for.
Audience Member 2: The question about difference does
exist. What we're trying to put across is how those differences can work within
society so that people can live together as well as possible. So how do you
deal with the fact that people do feel persecuted, they do feel different,
yet want to develop a society where there is tolerance, understanding and
equality, as was mentioned earlier.
Audience Member 3: Celia Palacios at UK New Citizen.
I am very interested on your point of view because our organisation promotes
equality and recognition for new citizens, who are for different reasons already
settled in the country. My question is, in your analysis of multiculturalism,
apparently you haven't considered the problem of political representation
of ethnic minorities that at the moment is in real danger because community
leaders acting as the most important person in ethnic organisations have a
great deal of power representing their communities but actually the people
that they say they are representing are in fact citizens; they should be better
represented by democratic organisations and institutions such as councillors,
MPs etc. If you analyse multiculturalism, it is not only important to consider
the ideological aspect, which is of course very important, and the historical
aspect, but also the practical effect on democratic society because at the
moment our opinion in UK New Citizen is that ethnic minorities are being offered
a second class democracy for second class citizens.
Audience Member 4: (Simon Thompson) This question
specifically to Kenan Malik. It's an attempt to answer his question which
I found fascinating, namely 'Why should I respect Christians?' I have the
same problem, as I find many of their beliefs bizarre and mystical, and some
practices carried out in their name barbaric. My answer would start by saying
that my own moral beliefs are partly the descendent of Christian beliefs,
that my humanism is partly a set of post-Christian values, and so I have a
debt to a certain form of Christianity, that would be the first strand of
my argument.
The second would be that to respect them as Christian doesn't mean I have
to believe all that strange stuff about trans-substantiation and so on. I
respect their Christianity because I know their religious beliefs are important
to them as a person. So I can separate out my respect for them as Christians
from any kind of belief that Christianity is as good as Satanism or anything
else. I don't have to reach a judgment about their values - and, developing
that point a little bit, I believe that Christians should not suffer excessive
costs for their Christianity. In other words, they shouldn't find it harder
to live a decent life than I do because of the way in which the political
institutions of my society are set up. In that sense again, it makes sense
to act against forms of discrimination without being involved in any way with
any kind of judgement about the value of the cultures in question.
Audience Member 5: Helene Guldberg from spiked.
I’m not sure whether all the panellists agree on rejecting all group
identities and all group solidarities and the embrace of fluid identity, but
is there not a danger of excessive atomisation, individualisation and isolation,
if you are rejecting all group identities and solidarities, as you pointed
out Adam?
Audience Member 6: Hi, I'm Jill Simpson from the BBC.
Just a quick question: to what extent do you think that the far right could
usurp notions of cultural respect to make cultures more separate? One of the
things that concerns me is that the language used by the Far Right now is
far more sophisticated; it takes on the mantle of respect for other people's
cultures and so maybe we should have separate faith schools, maybe we shouldn't
live together, maybe we should have walls like we have in Northern Ireland.
One of the things that worries me is how you get beyond that; they're kind
of talking the talk of respecting other people's cultures, but they're not
actually, because we know they're not.
I was looking at the BNP's website recently and it's salutary reading to have
a look at the recommended reading list: Norse mythology, King Arthur, histories
of England. So my two questions: to what extend is this assuming the mantle
of cultural respect as a vehicle of actual cultural separation is going to
be the way the far right argues not just here but abroad, and secondly to
what extent by resuscitating King Arthur and the Vikings are they creating
a Northern European mythology, trying to create an identity, a false one that
you can buy off the shelf? It's salutary to read it, its really worrying what
they think we should know about how to be white and northern European.
Audience Member 7: I'd just like to take up Kenan
Malik and Adam Kuper. How can you argue that today the chief problem in relation
to multiculturalism is that they're trying to make culture based on race and
genetic determinism? That's something that's much criticised today by the
multiculturalists as fascistic, of the fascist aesthetic. Today multiculturalism
is based on not making race or biology the basis for culture but art and fantasy.
Now what I want to ask you two is whether a multiculturalism of art and
fantasy and fluidity, as you put it, an ok way of organising and regulating
society? That is what multiculturalism is today, where art and fantasy is
used as a way to politically regulate society, not this notion of culture
based on biology.
Audience Member 8: My question is, there was a comment
that some cultures are better, and some of your said that culture is natural
or inherited, and in this aspect, who doesn't have a culture to be entrusted
with the mandate to decide which culture is better and which culture is a
sub-culture. I look at multiculturalism and recognition as a political multiculturalism,
where the one who wants to be recognised is the one who is setting up this
arena, in a stereotyped sort of setting, to make him in position to govern
his ethnic group and then be recognised in the event of what is expected in
time. I would just ask for a comment from any of the speakers that this multiculturalism
is not a social but a political phenomenon.
Audience Member 9: I’ve got a question that
relates to a point put forward by Kenan Malik, and it relates to the point
made by the gentleman earlier who classified himself as having a Roma-gypsy
background. The question I would like to put to the panel is in relation to
the right of people who have a nomadic, travelling culture. The idea I'd like
to put forward is in relation to the post war developments that Kenan Malik
outlined about people fighting for the right to equality and the right to
difference. It seems to me what would shed an interesting light on this debate
is if we look at the plight of gypsies and travellers. For instance, their
nomadic culture does not seem to be tolerated in Europe. There seems to be
a consensus that a settled way of life is a monocultural norm, and travelling
people represent a challenge to this. Now the way forward to them seems to
be merging individual and group identities and putting forward mixture of
those, and saying, for instance, that the traveller culture or the Romany
culture could be accepted on a cultural level. In the criminal justice act
travellers are not given the right to have sites, and the education system
doesn't allow for their nomadic lifestyle so that their children can still
get an education if they're travelling, the way that could be enshrined by
a system that acknowledges equality and difference and in some way celebrate
multiculturalism.
Audience Member 10: Well, I wanted to come back to
Kenan Malik's point about multiculturalism being a form of social control,
and a way of policing people's thoughts - and I'd like to introduce a little
bit more conflict here as there seems to be a lot of consensus and I'm not
sure if there is. My question is how can multiculturalism be replaced with
the idea of respecting everybody's individual identity? It's not just a matter
of groups, it's not just a matter of individuals - and how far can one go
with that? I mean, if a street beggar says his is an identity as a street
beggar, therefore I have to respect him as a street beggar, is that what I'm
supposed to do? I feel increasingly that you cannot says things like street
beggars should be kicked off the streets. I think it's important to explore
this idea of multiculturalism or even the support of identity, the idea that
we should respect everybody's identity, as being a way of controlling thought.
Audience Member 11: Kerry Dingle from WorldWrite.
We’re an international NGO actively opposed to multiculturalism because
of the way in which it justifies material inequality locally and globally.
I want to ask whether in the light of what multiculturalism is now responsible
for, especially in terms of justifying inequality, whether we should be promoting
an aculturalism, or is it that we simply want cultural forms, or the fluidity
that you talk about, as Kenan suggests, to be something completely separate
from political ideas, in order to reclaim universalism?
Audience Member 12: Carlton Brick, University of Surrey.
I'll try to be brief. I'd like to address this question of fluidity and especially
this point that Bonnie and Adam raised, if I understood them correctly, that
fluid identity is a response or a resistance to multiculturalism. I think
they have turned it on its head, in that actually I think multiculturalism
is about fluid identities in the sense that it's not about putting gays or
Muslims in boxes but about saying you can be gay and you can be a Muslim.
I think the notion of fluidity as a response or a resistant point to multiculturalism
is problematic, as it extenuates the divisions that multiculturalism is all
about. It's about breaking down boxes. So my polemical question is that surely
the resistant point to multiculturalism is for us to get back into our boxes,
not to get out of them?
Audience Member 13: I had to fight against multiculturalism
in my society. I worked in a factory in which there were Bangladeshis, Indian,
Pakistanis and White workers, and women workers, and I saw the point as was
made in the debate to try to unite us, as there are classes in society, there
are sections in society: there were the employers, and one of their slogans
that had been passed down from their childhood was 'divide and rule'. Multiculturalism
is one of the ways in which they divide us and rule us. We had a slogan. If
you called someone a bastard that's fair enough. He may be, he may not. But
if you called someone a white bastard, you're attacking all of us. Or a Bangladeshi
or a Pakistani bastard - you're attacking all of us, because you're saying
we're different, and we're not, we're all the same. In the factory, we're
the workers and the management, and unless you organise as workers, you're
under the sway of the management all the time. And it's the same internationally.
The Americans, all this about globalisation, you know, everything's blamed
upon Americans now. Well there's Americans and there's Americans. And it's
the American working class that we're looking to to help us free the world.
Tiffany Jenkins: The panel should come back on what
they want, but what I'm particularly interested in is that a few people raised
the problem from the floor that this notion of fluid identities is just a
further breaking down and individualisation rather than a bringing together.
Bonnie Greer: Especially to the Romany gentleman,
I hear everything that you're saying. For example, one of the things that's
interesting for me is that I've lived in this country for 17 years, but I've
refused to get rid of my accent, which is the voice of my mother and father.
I could've done it, but I didn't do it, for that very reason. Yet at the same
time I know people who are British who know more about America than I do;
they live there, they're there now. I have a British passport but I'm still
considered American.
So what I'm saying is that on the ground, in reality, we negotiate our identities
every moment of our lives. We know exactly who we are, we know exactly what
we want to be. These other notions, or other ideas, or intellectual constructs,
the unspoken ones that I hear on this floor - and maybe this is because I
was born and raised in America - what I hear are all of us bumping up against
a notion. There is a notion of a French identity, the French have worked a
long time at creating that. This country is a constitutional monarchy, there's
a very ancient culture, there's a notion of what being British or English
is, and we are all in reality pushing up against that notion and the conversations
that I'm hearing are basically about coming from that as a given. These two
entities, these two monoliths. And I'm saying - why does it have to be that?
Why - because it isn't that way on the ground? I think we need to change the
system that we're working under to reflect the way we actually live in the
world. And that's what it is to be fluid.
Farhad Khosrokhavar: I think multicultural life is
part of our daily problem, and each of us, you know, have to deal with it
in an almost daily or hourly way. But what multiculturalism induces is a sort
of cold tolerance. I would like to replace it with a sort of warm tolerance,
that means something which should not exclude the concern for others in terms
of cultural justice. In Europe, independently of the governments, the gap
between the haves and the have nots has increased; in the United States, of
course, even more so. So in a way, we are in societies which are more and
more unjust, and I think we have to take into account this fact, otherwise
in the name of tolerance we might just ignore them, saying, you have your
own sub-culture, live the way you can, and middle and upper class people will
have their own lives, justifying the ignorance of those who are left over
- you know, the working poor, or those who have no job at all - in the name
of this cultural difference.
Adam Kuper: Let me just first tell you a little story,
as it sums up a lot of my problems with this notion. I regard the notion of
culture as so completely incoherent that I think we should all stop using
it. Let me give you an example. In New Zealand at the moment, the government
is concerned that there is an apparently disproportionate representation of
those with so-called Maori decent in the prisons. It used to be said that
this was the case because of discrimination, unemployment, slum living and
so on. Now, the official view is that the Maori people are over-represented
in the prisons because of a cultural problem. Not that Maori culture makes
them criminals - on the contrary, it is because they have lost their culture.
They are seeking an identity, they have no roots, they have no values, and
then they drift into smoking marijuana, then beating up their wives, raiding
banks and so on. So how are you going to rehabilitate them? Rehabilitate them
by teaching them culture - their culture. So you now have these New Zealand
prison guards forming these study groups teaching Maori prisoners dancing,
etc. Now if some poor Maori prisoner says 'Well look I'm Christian, I don't
want to go back to...' - No! 'Well, rugby's my game, I want to play rugby,
I don't want to...' - No! You have to go back to your roots. So this is now
the policy of one of the most liberal governments in the world.
This seems to me to absolutely beautifully exemplify my point, that so-called
cultural thinking is actually racial thinking, and the idea behind it is that
each of us has this inherited identity, and if you drift away from it you
have lost something, and therefore you are a rootless drifting creature, and
you can only regain it by becoming what you are. Now, somebody asked this
question about political representation in multi-ethnic groups. It's a very
good point, and I agree with you entirely, it's an artificial government policy.
So there was this comic business about a year ago before his disgrace, where
Keith Vaz used to be treated by Tony Blair as the spokesman for the so-called
Asian community. It is absurd. This is a colonial policy of indirect rule
imported into Britain. It makes no sense at all. You're Asian, I can see from
your colour that you're Asian, your parents were born there etc, so you are
going to be represented by Mr Vaz, not by somebody who represents you political
views, not by somebody who stands for your particular interests.
The lady over there made a point about the Far Right. This is absolutely true,
it's a very fascinating development, particularly fascinating at the moment
in the Scandinavian countries. You also have in Austria a more classic form
of racism, and in Holland with Pim Fortuyn. In the Scandinavian countries,
people were developing this new racism, which uses this language of culturalism
and cultural difference, because, of course, as soon as you adopt that language
of culture it is very difficult for people who are asserting the ethnic politics
of the last generation to find a way of opposing it. Because they are making
the same kind of claims and the same kind of assertions, but from a minority
view. If we make these assertions from a majority view it is very hard to
object to it.
It also becomes very difficult - and this is the other side of it - for ethnic
minority politicians in a country like Britain to criticise racists back home.
So it's a great problem for some African political representatives in London
at the moment to denounce Mugabe, for example, for racism, because what he
is asserting is the right of the indigenous peoples to land and so on. This
language, this whole ideology which is essentially a racist colonial ideology,
gives support to the Far Right and racist groups, and very much undermines
democratic debate.
Kenan Malik: Let me return to this question about
multiculturalism as fixed identities and multiculturalism as multiple identities.
It seems to me that the celebration of difference as a melange is as problematic
as the celebration of difference as a set of fixed identities. Both arguments
are present today in the way people think about multiculturalism. And quite
often, to a certain extent, people like Bonnie take on multiculturalism as
a set of fixed identities by positing instead this kind of multiculturalism
as a kind of melange whereby we can take on a multiple set of identities.
It seems to me that this is highly problematic. I go back to the question
of why should we value diversity. It seems to me there is no use, no good,
in diversity in and of itself. All it's saying is you live in a world with
lots of difference in it. So what? In many cases this is seen as difference
for the worse not better, and in many cases it's difference we want to get
rid of, not to save. So there is nothing good in and of itself about diversity.
What can be good about diversity is when it forces us into political conflict,
into political dialogue, political debate, to make judgements upon those differences,
to decide which are better and which are worse, and, through the process of
political dialogue and debate, to decide which political systems, which cultural
forms, etc, are better and which are worse. The problem with the notion of
multiculturalism as a melange, or a celebration of differences as a melange,
is that it tries to undercut that process by which we are actually creating
more universal forms of political and moral thought. I don't think there's
any point in celebrating diversity as such, but more in using diversity as
a way of creating more universal political and moral forms, to give us a more
common ground on which we can agree.
The important distinction, I think, is between the private and the public
spheres. In the private sphere there are all sorts of differences, all sorts
of collectivities we can or cannot belong to, and to me that's immaterial.
In the private sphere one can say I am gay, I am black, I am Maori, or whatever.
The problem arises when you bring those notions of difference of identity
into the public sphere, and organise public life according to those differences,
whether in terms of single or multiple identities. It seems to me that we
need to make a distinction between the public and the private sphere. In the
private sphere, one should be able to pursue one's differences unconstrained
in terms of habits, lifestyle, values, beliefs and so on. In the public sphere,
we should use our differences to create a more universal, a more common set
of value to which we can all adhere and belong to.
This is why I disagree with the idea that we should get rid of all collectivities,
I think collectivities are important. But collectivities in the private sphere
are different from those in the public sphere, I think. Part of the problem
is a sort of a conflation of the two. Collectivities in the public sphere,
it seems to me, should be based on politics, on political differences, on
the kind of society we want to see. Those sorts of collectivities are crucially
important. They should not be based on those kinds of private differences
that commonly exist in private life. I think we should separate the kind of
collectivities that exist in private life, and the collectivities that are
very important for political progress and for the political process that exist
in public life.
In public life I think we do not want to exist as individuals with multiple
identities, but as collectivities fighting for particular political goals
that are crucially important. I think the problem with seeing diversity as
a melange is that it undercuts the idea that you can have public collectivities
fighting for public political goals and instead it assumes that what we do
in the public sphere is a representation of the kind of collectivities and
identities we have in the private sphere, and that it why I think the two
should be kept separate. Without a distinction between the private and the
public, and a distinction between the collectivities in the private and the
public, I don't think any kind of equality is possible, or any kind of political
progress is possible.
Bonnie Greer: I agree with most of what you said,
but I think I didn't make myself clear about fluididty, and I'd like to tell
my own little story. When I came here in 1986 the first place I went was Brixton.
I went to a party in Brixton and walked in straight from New York going 'Hey
brothers and sisters' and everybody turned and looked at me. Everybody was
black in that room, and basically the face was 'Hey, we're the same colour,
we have the same racial background, but I am not your brother or sister'.
I learned a lot from people, and what I learned was that there is diversity
within diversity, which is far more subtle than what these labels and blockages
tell us.
My point is not to have some happy clappy 'We are the world let's just forget
what colour, we are let's just forget where we come from, let's get together'
- that's not the way it is, that's not the way humans function. We need our
home ground, we need our mothers and fathers and our religion, this is what
makes us human beings. But I am interested in understanding and dealing with
how we as human beings function for real, how then can we translate that into
power. It's power that we're really talking about. The only reason that we're
talking about being a black person is not because you wake up in the morning,
look in the mirror and say 'oh God I'm a black person, it's another hard day'.
No, we don't do that, nobody does that.
What we're talking about is power: how do we make the changes and the kind
of world that we want to be in for the sake of ourselves and our children.
That does mean coming together, but also coming together in a fluid sense
and respecting my sister who has an Afro-Caribbean background, my brother
who has a Ghanaian background, that we do have the same colour, we may have
some of the same goals, we may not. In some way we can come together to effect
the kinds of changes that we need to make without being in a box called multiculturalism.