As you all know, I'm never speechless but I sure am astonished. This throws just about everything seriously out of focus for me. I can see why people are sick of multiculturalism if this is what it amounts to in theory. But I'm even more mystified than I was before. Let me elaboratte a bit; I hope some of you can explain what's going on here.ChrisA wrote:Actually, the idea that minorities are incapable of persecuting is -exactly- what I was taught in my college's diversity appreciation class or whatever it was actually called. The theory is that because only the majority has the power, only the majority can -persecute- or -oppress-. It is also part of the theory that it is natural for minorities to be angry at the majority, to want to have nothing to do with the majority (hence race-exclusive dorms; well, black-exclusive dorm. I was not aware of a latino dorm or an asian dorm.) This anger and self-segregation we needed to accept as a natural part of the 'healing process'.Wombat wrote: That members of once persecuted minorities are themselves capable of persecuting? Surely not. Did anybody seriously doubt this? If they did, they must hold those minority groups to be vastly morally superior to mainstream America which has a record of hundreds of years of persecution. So why did this superiority go unrecognised for so long? Get real. After hundreds of years of systemic injustice, of course there is going to be some payback.
In other words, we were taught that they cannot oppress or persecute, and what may -look- like reverse-racism is actually a part of the healing process. We were not taught that minorities were superior, so much as we were taught that it's owed to the minorities to defer to them in myriad ways as part of their healing process.
I felt then, and still feel, that if college is not the time when people of every background mix together equally, cooperating and competing academically and in sports, and as a result, learning from and about each other, than when is such a thing ever going to happen?
In particular, it seems to me a disservice to the minorities to let them self-segregate, even if they think they want it. If they don't learn to live and work alongside their white fellow students in college, they will find it very hard to get decent employment in the clearly white-dominated corporate world.
What discipline would have been appealed to to justify this theory? Sociology? Political Theory? Communication Studies? The only theory I know of which seems to go with these views is that embraced by the lunatic fringe of the Post-Colonial studies push. The view that only white Europeans can persecute seems to be based on a misreading of Edward Said's book Orientalism. I won't go into it here but Said despaired of radically different cultures ever being able to represent each other fairly. His targets were European scholars because the Orientalist field was in fact developed and populated by Europeans. Nothing in his book licensed the view that they alone are capable of wilfully misunderstanding other cultures to further colonial ambitions.
The post-colonialists I'm thinking of are not liberals. They tend to be the embittered renegades from the hard-line marxist corner of academia looking for a temperamentally attractive ideology to pursue that might further their careers after the fall of the societ union. They are as far from liberals, temperamentally and ideologically, as it is possible to get—in the most extreme cases, every bit as far as neo-nazis. Now my question. Since multiculturalism is obviously a liberal idea, how did American liberals allow their social agenda to be highjacked by the lunatic fringe of the far left? It just doesn't compute as far as I can see.
I said earlier that their is no route from systemic injustice to justice that doesn't involve some degree of reverse discrimination. (If I thought there were I'd welcome it, but nobody has come up with a practical proposal here.) I didn't say, although I believe, that I think that only very mild forms of RD are justified but I did hint that it had to be a strictly transitional feature of a program. I certainly don't think that voluntary isolation of members of minority groups has any role to play in this at all. Furthermore, the aim would always be the breaking down of barriers and never the erection of new ones. That is how multiculturalism is understood in Australia. Parties and festivals where people get together and celebrate diversity are welcomed. Riots at soccer matches between Serbian and Croatian backed teams are regarded as quite unacceptable. Migrants to Australia are expected and encouraged to bring their cuisine, music and literature but to check their ethnic hatreds at the airport.
