[lbo-talk] multiculturalism? really?

Bhaskar Sunkara bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com
Sat Feb 5 12:37:51 PST 2011


Also, "multiculturalism" means something different in the British context... see Kenan Malik's "From Fatwa to Jihad" for a decent left-wing critique.


>From Turley's review of that book:

The early 80s, despite seeing a dramatic drop in the paper membership of the NF, did not produce any significant calming of racial tensions. In 1981, a large-scale riot took place in Brixton, which had an overwhelmingly black population; similar riots followed in Toxteth in Liverpool, Bristol and elsewhere. The response of the Greater London Council and other municipal governments was to give multiculturalism - already coined as a vague approach by Labour governments of the 60s and 70s - a very specific organised form: cash handouts to particular institutions that supposedly stood for the interests of the particular minority ‘community’ as a whole. This money, of course, came ultimately from Thatcher, who - despite a Tory press foaming at the mouth at ‘loony left’ councils, and statements along the lines of Norman Tebbit’s infamous ‘cricket test’ - considered these policies to be a perfectly pragmatic response to social unrest (pp56-57).

Malik derides this, using the example of Birmingham council’s response to a 1985 riot: outreach with such groups as the Bangladeshi Islamic Projects Consultative Committee, the Birmingham Chinese Society and the Council of Black-led Churches. “Why should the Council for Black-led Churches presume to speak for the needs and aspirations of all African Caribbeans in Birmingham? ... Cosmologists believe that the physical universe in its infancy was homogenous and uniform. Multiculturalists seem to think the same about the social universe of minority groups” (p66). The municipal money, however, tended to turn this into a ‘fact on the ground’ - by doling out cash to religious and patriarchal organisations, it became the case that ethnic minorities were more reliant on these structures - a logic brought out very well by Malik (pp68-69)

On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 2:38 PM, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:


> On 2/5/2011 2:13 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> So, uh, Cameron blames British multicultural tolerance for racial/ethnic
>> segregation in Britain... which, he says, facilitates the radicalization
>> of
>> young Muslims... apparently Merkel and Sarkozy have made similar claims...
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/world/europe/06britain.html
>>
>> Is it just me or is Britain hardly any different from the US where
>> structural racism trumps the multicultural embrace of difference every day
>> of every week of every month of every year.
>>
>
> I don't think the US has the problem Cameron claims to be addressing -
> i.e., radicalization/non-integration of Muslims.
>
> SA
>
>
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