If the proverbial anthropologist from Mars were to land in Britain today,
he would probably regard us as schizophrenics when it comes to the question
of race. He would find a population within which there is a general consensus
that racism is morally abhorrent and yet is keen to define itself in terms
of its ethnic or racial background. He would find a Commission for Racial
Equality that stresses the importance of promoting diversity, and also a former
chair of the CRE who blames racial violence on the entrenchment of differences
between different ethnic groups. He would find a government about to embark
on a war against the Taliban and yet which refuses to admit into the country
refugees fleeing from that regime. He would find a prime minister who stresses
diversity, pluralism and respect and yet who wants to lock up foreigners simply
on grounds that they are seeking asylum.
My talk is aimed at the puzzled Martian. For what I want to do is to try and
explain these contradictions not as expressions of a schizophrenia, or even
of official hypocrisy, but rather as expressions of the changing meaning of
race. I want to suggest that much of our attitudes to race appears contradictory
because much of what passes for antiracism today is in fact rooted in the
same philosophies that gave rise to racial thinking in the first place.
The celebration of difference, the promotion of a pluralist society, tolerance
for a variety of cultural identities - these are regarded as the hallmarks
of a progressive, antiracist outlook. As the American academic, and former
critic of pluralism, Nathan Glazer, puts it in the title of a recent book,
We're All Multiculturalists Now. I want to show this to be a naive
and dangerous view. I want to argue, rather, that contemporary pluralism is
a deeply ambiguous outlook. Far from being a bulwark against racism and tyranny,
a plural outlook appropriates many of the themes of racial ideology and reproduces
the very assumptions upon which racism has historically been based. Most critically,
I want to argue that the embrace of 'difference' as a political goal has undermined
our capacity to defend equality - and led to all the contradictions that so
puzzle our Martian friend.
The ambiguities of pluralism can be seen even, or maybe especially, in the
work of its most trenchant proponent - the late philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
Berlin's key idea was that of 'value pluralism'. For Berlin, there was no
such thing as a universal truth, only a variety of conflicting truths. Different
peoples and cultures had different values, beliefs and truths, each of which
may be regarded as valid. Many of these values and truths were incommensurate,
because there was no common language we could use to compare the one with
the other. Hence, argued Berlin, we have to accept that society is irredeemably
plural.
Berlin linked his belief in pluralism to another of his key beliefs: his commitment
to freedom and liberty. Freedom, for Berlin, lay in the acceptance of the
plurality of society and of the incommensurability of cultural values. Pluralism,
he argued, was the best defence against tyranny and against ideologies, such
as racism, which treated some human beings as less equal than others. This
link between freedom and pluralism has become the cornerstone of modern liberalism.
Shortly before he died, Berlin was interviewed by the political philosopher
Steven Lukes. Lukes asked him whether it was ever possible for peoples of
different cultures - such as Arabs and Jews - to live together. 'When you
have two peoples of different origins and cultures', Berlin replied, 'it is
difficult for them to live together in peace'. He added that 'it is quite
natural that each side should think that they cannot lead free lives in an
integrated society if the others are there in quantity'.
Such a view, claimed Berlin, 'is not sheer bigotry'. It is a view, however,
not too different from that of many politicians who most would accept are
bigots. For instance, consider the following: 'Every society, every nation
is unique. It has its own past, its own story, its own memories, its own languages
or ways of speaking, its own - dare I use the word - culture.' That's not
Isaiah Berlin talking but Enoch Powell, one of the most openly racist of postwar
mainstream politicians. Because every culture is distinct, Powell argued,
so immigrants, who belong to different cultures and different traditions,
could never be fully British.
Anyone who saw Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, being
interviewed on BBC's Newsnight in the wake of the violence in Oldham and Bradford
will know how he rang rings around Jeremy Paxman by pursuing the logic of
the pluralist argument. Asians are not inferior to whites, he argued, they
are simply different, with different cultures, values and lifestyles, all
incommensurate with white cultures, values and lifestyles. That's why whites
should live in their own communities, Asians in theirs.
Isaiah Berlin abhorred the claims of the far right. Yet it is difficult to
deny that the logic of his claim that two peoples of different origins cannot
live together in peace, and that it is not bigotry to believe this, leads
inexorably to the arguments of Powell and Griffin.
Indeed, Berlin himself, in his magazine interview, observed that 'the ferment
of the French Canadians, the Flemings in Belgium, Basques in Spain, Corsicans,
Bretons, Tamils, Irishmen, Jews and Arabs, Georgians, Armenians, Indians and
Pakistanis' had made him question the 'nineteenth century [idea] that multicultural
societies were desirable'. Moreover, he questioned whether black immigrants
to the Western nations were 'ready for assimilation'. Black immigration was
'a problem' he said, because 'Cultures which have grown up with no contact
with one another have now collided.'
These views are not an unfortunate aberration, the illiberal thoughts of a
man with otherwise impeccably liberal credentials. They are the inevitable
consequence of a pluralist outlook. What I want to do is to explain why this
is so by looking at three things: first, at the development of the idea of
race to show how the celebration of difference has always been at the heart
of the racist agenda; second, I want to look at the development of the idea
of pluralism, to show how it developed out of a skepticism about progress
and an ambiguous attitude to immigration. Finally, I want to show that in
a world that is profoundly unequal, the pursuit of difference inevitably leads
to the accommodation to, and exacerbation of, such inequalities.
The idea of race has not been ever-present in human history. In historical
terms it is a relatively new concept, and has only become to our thinking
over the past two centuries. Before the modern concept of race could develop,
the modern concepts of equality and humanity had to develop too. Racial difference
and inequality can only have meaning in a world that has accepted the possibility
of social equality and a common humanity. It was through the Enlightenment,
the intellectual transformation of Europe in the eighteenth century, that
such ideas became firmly established in the modern imagination. Most Enlightenment
thinkers held that humans were by nature rational and sociable, and that there
existed a common human nature. Implicit in these beliefs was the idea that
all humans were potentially equal. Through Enlightenment philosophy humanity
had for the first time a concept of universality that could transcend perceived
differences.
What is striking about Enlightenment discourse is the lack of any discussion
of race. Compared to writings both before and after, eighteenth century writings
show a remarkable disdain for racial arguments. When in 1800 the French anthropologist
Joseph-Marie Degerando wrote a methodological text for the Société
des Observateurs de l'Homme, the principal anthropological society of its
time, he did not think it necessary to deal with the question of race.
Of course Enlightenment thinkers clearly held racist views, some very openly
and overtly. It would have been astonishing if it had been otherwise. The
racial comments of the likes of Kant, Hume and Voltaire are well known. But
what was absent at this time was any sustained discourse of race. Michael
Banton, Robert Miles and Anthony Barker, in their various surveys of racial
thinking, have all argued, in Banton's words, that 'though there was a substantial
literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth century about Africans and other
non-European peoples, the word "race" was rarely used either to
describe peoples or in accounts of differences between them.'
The Enlightenment, however, was not simply an intellectual movement. The belief
in equality and a common humanity was the ideological embodiment of a wider
social and political movement through which the pre-modern order crumbled
and a new society - capitalism - emerged. Out of the complex interaction between
the ideology of equality and developing capitalist social relations emerged
the discourse of race.
Most Enlightenment thinkers believed that all humans were potentially equal,
and in principal all could reach the summit of civilisation. Progress would
overcome the divisions within the human family. But it had become clear by
the early decades of the nineteenth century that such optimism was misplaced.
Far from progress healing social divisions, it appeared to exacerbate them.
In an address to the Medico-Psychological Society of Paris in 1857, the leading
French physician Philippe Buchez considered the meaning of social differentiation
in France:
Consider a population like ours, placed in the most favourable circumstances; possessed of a powerful civilisation; amongst the highest ranking nations in science, the arts and industry. Our task now, I maintain, is to find out how it can happen that within a population such as ours, races may form - not merely one but several races - so miserable, inferior and bastardised that they may be classed below the most inferior savage races, for their inferiority is sometimes beyond cure.
The dilemma that a man like Buchez faced was this. He, like most men of his
class and generation, had a deep belief in equality, a belief that had descended
from the Enlightenment philosophes. Like the philosophes, he trusted
in progress and assumed that potentially progress could touch all men. In
practice, however, his society was not like this at all. Social divisions
seemed so deep and unforgiving that they seemed permanent, as if rooted in
the very soil of the nation. France was a highly civilised nation, whose scientists,
engineers, philosophers and novelists were the envy of the world. Yet sections
of French society seemed trapped in their own barbarism, seemingly unwilling
to, or incapable of, progress. How could one rationally explain this?
For many prominent thinkers, the only answer seemed to be that certain types
of people were by nature incapable of progressing beyond barbarism. They were
naturally inferior. Here were the origins of the nineteenth century idea of
race. 'Race' developed as a way of explaining the persistence of social divisions
in a society that had a deep-set belief in equality. From the racial viewpoint,
inequality persisted because society was by nature unequal. The destiny of
different social groups was shaped, at least in part, by their intrinsic properties.
It was the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century which gave birth
to the thought that the whole of humanity may not possess a common, innate
nature. This shift in perception was encouraged by the Romantic view of human
groups, not as static constructions, but as moulded by history. The idea that
different groups had different histories gave rise to the view that every
group had a unique history, and this in turn led to the belief that each had
a unique nature.
Many Romantics believed that the values of different cultures and societies
were incompatible. Each people was unique, the uniqueness given by its particular
culture, language, history and modes of living. For the German philosopher
Herder, for instance, the people or volk was both a contract between
contemporaries and a continuing dialogue between generations. The nature of
the people was expressed through its volksgeist - the unchanging spirit
of a people refined through history expressed through myths, songs and sagas.
Once it was accepted that different peoples were motivated by sentiments unique
to themselves, it was but a short step to view these differences as racial.
Herder's volksgeist became transformed into racial make-up, an unchanging
substance, the foundation of all physical appearance and mental potential
and the basis for division and difference within humankind. Herder had accounted
for cultural variety by imagining that different peoples had unique histories.
Nineteenth century racists explained social inequalities by reasoning that
different group had distinct natures. At the roots of modern racism, therefore,
lie Romantic visions of human differences.
What transformed the Romantic notion of difference into the dominant view
of race was its alliance with positivist philosophy and with science. Positivism
was a philosophical tradition, developed largely from the work of the French
thinker August Comte, who looked to science to legitimise social order. For
positivists, the laws of nature also underpinned social laws. Inequality was
the inevitable consequence of the working out of nature's laws. 'True liberty'
as Comte put it, 'is nothing else than a rational submission to the preponderance
of the laws of nature.'
The reorientation of the scientific outlook towards the positivist vision
of the world transformed the way in which scientists looked at the relationship
between humanity, society and nature and opened the way for racial science.
It catalysed a shift from a view of human beings as primarily social creatures,
governed by social laws, to a view of human beings as primarily biological
entities governed by natural laws. Racial science viewed humanity in terms
of a hierarchy generated outside of society and governed by natural rather
than social laws. As the English naturalist William Smellie put it,Independently
of all political institutions nature herself has formed the human species
into castes and ranks. How many gradations may be traced between a stupid
Hottentot and a profound philosopher! Here the distance is immense but nature
has occupied the whole by almost infinite shades of discrimination.
Racial theories accounted for social inequalities by ascribing them to nature.
Racial thinkers divided humanity into discrete groups, each with particular
properties, and the divisions between which seemingly immutable and unchanging.
I am not suggesting that the concept of race was created or invented to meet
a particular social need. Rather, as social divisions persisted and acquired
the stamp of permanence, so they began to present themselves as if they were
natural, not social, ones. Racial ideology was the inevitable product of the
persistence of differences of rank, class and peoples in a society that had
accepted the concept of equality. People came to understand the world in racial
terms because there seemed to be no other way through which to make sense
of the world around them.
The idea of race helped give a sense of order to the Victorian world. The
issue that taxed so many Victorian brains was the search for a way of reconciling
order and progress. Victorians had a great belief in the inevitability of
progress, but also feared the disruptive consequences of such progress, particularly
through the creation of class conflict and social disorder.
The idea of race helped bind together order and progress. It allowed Victorian
to thinkers to imagine that progress was inevitable, but only in the hands
of certain races. White, middle-class males were destined by nature to progress
to the summit of civilisation. Others - women, the lower orders, non-European
primitives - would travel so far, and so far only, on the road to civilisation.
Progress, therefore, brought about a natural order to society, with every
group finding its ordained place in the scheme of things.
A vignette in the Saturday Review, a popular English Victorian magazine,
is typical of mid-century attitudes to race and working class life:
The Bethnal Green poor... are a caste apart, a race of whom we know nothing, whose lives are of quite different complexion from ours, persons with whom we have no point of contact... The slaves are separated from the whites by more glaring... marks of distinction; but still distinctions and separations, like those of English classes which always endure, which last from the cradle to the grave, which prevent anything like association or companionship, produce a general effect on the life of the extreme poor, and subject them to isolation, which offer a very fair parallel to the separation of the slaves from the whites.
This separation of the classes is important because each had to keep their allotted place in the social ladder: the English poor man or child is always expected to remember the condition in which God has placed him, exactly as the negro is expected to remember the skin which God has given him. The relation is both instances is that of perpetual superior to perpetual inferior, of chief to dependent, and no amount of kindness or goodness is suffered to alter this relation.
We have become so used to thinking of race in terms of skin colour that it
is often difficult to understand the Victorian perception of race. For the
Victorians race was as much a description of class differences within European
societies as it was of ethnic differences between European and non-European
peoples. Class division denoted the relation of 'perpetual superior to perpetual
inferior', a distinction that to the Victorians was every bit as visible as
that between black and white, or slave and master.
Not till the end of the nineteenth century did race become identified with
skin colour in the contemporary sense. Imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth
century, in particular the 'scramble for Africa', exacerbated the sense of
difference between Europeans and non-Europeans. At the same time the development
of democracy modified the application of the language of racial inferiority
to the working class. The belief that the lower orders were inferior did not
disappear but it became less public and increasingly confined to private diaries
and dinner table talk. The public language of race was refocused exclusively
on black and white, the West and Rest, helping to establish the 'colour line'
in its modern form.
Understanding the historical and intellectual roots of the idea of race is
important because Romantic notions of human differences also lie at the heart
of contemporary visions of cultural pluralism. Racial theory and cultural
pluralism both display a hostility to Enlightenment universalism, but in different
ways. Ernest Gellner has pointed out that there are two sets of questions
that arise from the debate between universalism and relativism: 'Is there
but one kind of man, or are there many? Is there but one world, or are there
many?' While the first questions the biological unity of humankind, the second
questions the very idea of a single truth or objective understanding of the
world.
Belief in a single world assumes that common laws and values operate across
all societies but that different people respond in different ways to them,
the nature of the response being determined by the racial make-up of any given
people. Belief in many worlds, on the other hand, denies a common objective
understanding of the world and in its place posits a plurality of ways of
understanding and evaluating the world around us. Since the social world is
constructed by the people who inhabit that society, not given in nature, so
every world is specific to the people who inhabit it and incommensurate with
the social worlds that other people inhabit.
Schematically, one may say that the discourse of race holds that there is
one world but that it is inhabited by different types of humanity, while the
discourse of culture holds that there is one type of humanity, but it inhabits
different cultural or symbolic worlds. Both emerged out of the degradation
of universalism, but they did so in different ways. Given the belief of nineteenth
century racial theorists in inevitable social progress, the growing gulf between
'civilised man' and the 'primitives' that was evident both within and without
European society led many to see such differences in natural, and hence in
racial, terms. Victorian social evolutionists were led to posit a hierarchical
view of humanity, seeing different groups of peoples as arrested at different
point along the evolutionary scale and believing that progress and reason
were the prerogative only of certain races.
The discourse of culture, on the other hand, reflected a disenchantment with
the notion of social evolution, a disbelief in the doctrine of inevitable
social progress and a disillusionment with the values of one's own culture.
It was the emergence of such trends in the early part of this century, and
in particular in the wake of the First World War, that gave rise to relativist
theories of culture. In the context of a general pessimism about social progress,
the idea of difference was transformed from the notion of 'many men in a single
world' to a 'single type of man inhabiting many worlds'. If social development
had not overcome the vast gulfs that separated different peoples, many argued,
then perhaps that was because such differences reflected the fact that different
peoples inhabited different social worlds, each of which was as valid and
as real as the other. Pluralism grew out of despair about progress.
The main force in the shift from a racial to a cultural view of human differences
was the science of anthropology. Anthropology had always been the most particularist
of the human sciences. In the context of Victorian positivism and social evolutionism,
this manifested itself through physical anthropology and theories of biological
differences. As the positivist outlook disintegrated along with the long nineteenth
century, so anthropological particularism re-expressed itself in cultural
terms.
We can see the way in which the new anthropology reframed the meaning of inequality
by looking at the development of pluralism in the colonial context. The concept
of a plural society first emerged through anthropological analyses of colonial
societies in the first decades of this century. In a study of Indonesia and
Burma, the anthropologist JS Furnival wrote that 'the first thing that strikes
the visitor is the medley of peoples - European, Chinese, Indian and native'
that constitute the society. The different groups, Furnival wrote, 'mix but
do not combine'. Each group 'holds by its own religion, its own culture and
language, its ideas and ways'. The result was a 'plural society, with different
sections of the society living side by side but separately within the same
political unit.'
This concept of a plural society proved attractive both to colonial administrators,
grappling with the problem of imposing law and order on the territories, and
to Western liberals keen to protect colonial subjects from the ravages of
imperialism. Pluralism quickly moved from being a description of colonial
society to an explanation for it. The inequalities of colonial society were
rationalised as products of the different cultural outlooks and lifestyles
of the various groups that constituted that society. Through this process
inequality became reframed as difference. The social and economic cleavages
caused by colonial rule, and the limits on social development imposed by colonial
policy, were reread as the fruits of such autonomous cultural development.
Like racial theory, plural theory provided an apology for social inequalities,
portraying them as the inevitable result, not of natural variations, but of
cultural differences. Whereas nineteenth century racial theory was an attempt
to reconcile order and progress, pluralism was an attempt to think about social
order in a world that no longer believed in progress.
Pluralism effectively turned on its side the evolutionary ladder of Victorian
racial theory: pluralists conceived of humanity as horizontally, rather than
vertically, segmented. Humanity was not arranged at different points along
an ever-rising vertical axis, as the social evolutionists had believed, but
at different points along a stationary horizontal axis.
Humanity was composed of a multitude of peoples each inhabiting their own
symbolic and cultural worlds. But whether differences were seen as biological
or cultural, whether they were seen in terms of inferiority and superiority
or not, racial theory and cultural pluralism were characterised by a common
hostility to universalism, and a belief that differences between human groups
mattered more than the commonalities.
The consequence of all this can be seen in the debate about race and difference
in the postwar world. Following the experience of Nazism, the Holocaust and
the Final Solution, biological theories of human differences became discredited.
But if racial science was buried in the postwar world, racial thinking was
not. While the biological arguments for racial superiority were thrown into
disrepute and overt expressions of racism were discredited, many of the assumptions
of racial thinking were maintained intact - in particular the belief that
humanity can be divided into discrete groups, that each groups should be considered
in its own terms, and that differences, not commonalities, shaped human interaction.
These assumptions, however, were cast not in biological terms but in the language
of cultural pluralism.
In the interwar years the concept of plural society was applied almost exclusively
to colonial states. In the years following the Second World War, however,
the concept of a plural society became applied in an increasingly promiscuous
way to Western societies. The impact of mass immigration and the political
context in which this immigration took place combined to engineer this transformation.
Eleven million foreign workers came to Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, encouraged
by the economic boom. The political context in which this mass immigration
occurred was an ambiguous one. On the one hand, immigrants were seen as 'different'
or alien. On the other hand, in the liberal climate of the postwar years,
racial arguments could not be openly expressed. Pluralism provided a language
through which to understand social differences without having to refer to
the discredited discourse of race. It provided both a sense of continuity
with prewar racial discourse and a means of asserting the aversion to racism
that exemplified the postwar years.
Key to such an ambiguous use of pluralism has been the presentation of social
differences in terms neither of culture nor of race but of ethnicity. 'Ethnicity'
is a peculiarly postwar word. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a first
recorded usage in 1953. It was the biologists Julian Huxley and AC Haddon
who first suggested that 'race' should be replaced by 'ethnic group' in their
book We Europeans. We Europeans was immensely influential in
the challenging racial theory in the 30s. But the ambiguous nature of Huxley
and Haddon's arguments are important as they presage the ambiguous nature
of pluralism. They were not so much opposed to the concept of racial differences
as to its political uses, particularly by Nazi Germany. Replacing race with
ethnicity, they suggested, would remove the political connotations of racial
difference, and allow social distinctions to be studied in a neutral, value-free
fashion. In the postwar years ethnicity has indeed come to replace race as
a politically acceptable means of describing social differences.
Like race, ethnicity is a term that is used in a fairly promiscuous way, without
there ever being a consensus as to its meaning. Definitions of ethnicity are
largely tautological: an ethnic group is that which is defined as an ethnic
group. But the very utility of the definition of ethnicity lies in its tautology.
Ethnicity does away with objective, biological distinctions and instead introduces
subjective, cultural differences. Ethnicity is defined through learned or
cultural criteria and boundaries between ethnic groups are fluid. Yet in actual
use, the concept of ethnicity is not so different from that of race. In practice
it is used to define social groups according to old-fashioned criteria of
race or nationality. Ethnicity, in many ways, is race after an attempt to
take the biology out.
Pluralism developed in the postwar years not as a means to establish equality
but as an accommodation to the persistence of inequality. As immigrants remained
ghettoised, excluded from mainstream society, subject to discrimination and
clinging to their old habits and lifestyles as a familiar anchor in a hostile
world, so such differences became rationalised not as the negative product
of racism or discrimination but as the positive result of multiculturalism.
In the nineteenth century, the persistence of inequalities had led to the
emergence of the discourse of race, in which economic, social and technological
differences between groups were attributed to natural distinctions. In the
postwar years the persistence of inequalities in the context of mass immigration
led to the development of a pluralist outlook, in which differences were welcomed
as expressions of cultural diversity.
It may be useful to compare the treatment of postwar immigrants with early
waves of immigration. It is often forgotten that earlier immigrants - east
Europeans or Italians into Britain, Poles, Italians, Portuguese into France,
East and south Europeans into the USA - were often met with the same hostility
and claims of inassimilability as were postwar immigrants. They too were seen
as alien, as mentally defective, as socially immoral and promiscuous, as given
to violence, drugs and drink. This is a useful reminder that the difference
of postwar immigrants had little to do with skin colour or religion.
But the contrast between earlier and postwar immigration lies to a large extent
in wider social trends. There was sufficient dynamic in early twentieth century
society, sufficient self-belief and belief in equality, and sufficient economic
progress to ensure that immigrants, even if they were initially regarded as
alien and inassimilable, eventually lost their marks of difference and become
an integral part of the nation. Despite the hostility to immigrants, this
earlier immigration was not regarded as turning Britain, France or the USA
into multicultural nations. Rather immigrants became part of, and helped transform
the common culture (despite the fact that, in the USA for instance, most of
these immigrants were eventually to become double-barrelled Americans).
Today the picture is very different. At the heart of this has been two major
social changes: First, the very idea of a common culture has weakened as has
a sense of national identity. The break-up of the postwar consensus and the
end of the Cold War has created a fragile and anxious mood, in which the idea
of a coherent national identity has become problematic. Particularly in the
USA, the Cold War provided a common external enemy and a sense of mission
around which to articulate what it meant to be American. The loss of that
has sapped the belief in a common culture to which all belong. The consequence
has been a fragmentation of identity.
While the roots of these changes go back several decades, it is striking that
in America, for instance, the idea of multiculturalism is an almost exclusively
a post-Cold War phenomenon. Nathan Glazer searched a data base of the major
newspapers for the word 'multiculturalism'. There were no reference as late
as 1988; 33 references in 1989, 100 in 1990, 600 in 1991, 900 in 1992 and
1200 in 1993 and 1500 in 1994. The fit between the end of the Cold War and
the emergence of the idea of multiculturalism is almost too good to be true.
Second, the notion of equality itself has transformed. The inability of struggles
such as the civil rights movements in the USA to transform the lives of the
majority of African Americans sapped the morale of antiracists. Campaigning
for equality means challenging accepted practices, being willing to march
against the grain, to believe in the possibility of social transformation.
Conversely, celebrating differences between peoples allows us to accept society
as it is - after all, all it says is 'we live in a diverse world, enjoy it';
it allows us to accept the divisions and inequalities that characterise the
world today. The disintegration of the civil rights movements, and elsewhere
of liberation movements, the demise of the political sphere itself, has gnawed
away at antiracists' self-belief and their willingness to take a stand.
In the America of the 1960s, for instance, most commentators, both black and
white, hoped and expected that African-American migrants to the North would
eventually integrate into US society, as fully as had European immigrants.
The title of a 1966 article by Irving Kristol in the New York Times
captured that hope: 'The Negro Today is like the Immigrant Yesterday'.
Three decades later it has become obvious how misplaced were such claims.
Virtually every social statistic - from housing segregation to rates of intermarriage,
from infant mortality rates to language use - shows that African Americans
live very different lives to the rest of America. The experience even of Hispanic
Americans is far closer to that of American whites than it is to that of African
Americans.
As the possibilities of equality seemed more and more constrained, so there
was an increasing tendency to celebrate 'difference'. The black American critic
bell hooks observes that 'civil rights reform reinforced the idea that black
liberation should be defined by the degree to which black people gained equal
access to material opportunities and privileges to whites - jobs, housing,
schooling etc.'
This strategy could never bring about liberation, argues hooks, because such
'ideas of "freedom" were informed by efforts to imitate the behaviour,
lifestyles and most importantly the values and consciousness of white colonisers.'
The failure of equality has led radical critics like hooks to declare that
equality itself is problematic because African Americans are 'different' from
whites.
Politicians and policy-makers have responded to such arguments by reinventing
America as a 'plural' or 'multicultural' nation. Pluralism is premised on
the idea that America is a nation composed of many different cultural groups
and peoples. But in reality it is the product of the continued exclusion of
one group: African Americans. The promotion of pluralism is a tacit admission
that the barriers that separate blacks and whites cannot be breached and that
equality has been abandoned as a social policy goal.
'Multiculturalism', Nathan Glazer has written, 'is the price America is paying
for the inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African
Americans, in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many
other groups.' The real price, however, is being paid by African Americans
themselves. For in truth America is not plural or multicultural; it is simply
unequal. And the promotion of pluralism is an acknowledgement of the inevitability
of that inequality. Indeed, in his own way, Glazer himself recognises this.
'We must pass through a period in which we recognise difference, we celebrate
difference', he writes, because of 'our failure to integrate blacks.'
The social changes that have swept the world over the past decade have intensified
this sense of pessimism. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the left,
the crumbling of the postwar order and the fragmentation of social movements
have shattered many of the certainties of the past. In particular they have
thrown into doubt our capacity to change the world for the better. In this
context the quest for equality has largely been abandoned in favour of the
claim to a diverse society.
A truly plural society would be one in which citizens have full freedom to
pursue their different values or practices in private, while in the public
sphere all citizens would be treated as political equals whatever their private
beliefs. Today, however, pluralism has come to mean the very opposite. The
right to practice a particular religion, speak a particular language, follow
a particular cultural practice is seen as a public good rather than a private
freedom. Different interest groups demand to have their 'differences' institutionalised
in the public sphere. This has led not to greater equality, but to a greater
racialisation of society, a greater entrenchment of differences, rationalisation
of inequality, and the abandonment of political struggles for equality.
These are the developments that have led to the contradictions that so puzzle
our Martian friend. The question we have to ask ourselves, therefore, is:
do we want an equal society or a plural society? We cannot have both.