Who needs to fit in?
The clash between multiculturalists and integrationists hides the hard issues of injustice
The Guardian, April 12
The punch line goes like this: “Because he worked in the family business, lived at home till he was 30 and thought his mother was a virgin.” When I first heard it, that was the answer to the question: “How do you know Jesus was Jewish?” Since then, I’ve encountered the same joke told by and about a variety of groups. How do you know Jesus was Punjabi, Sicilian, Polish, Bengali … ? Readers can probably add to the list.
Clearly, this is not a joke about Jews, Bengalis, Sicilians or whomever. It’s a joke about families, males, mothers, the tenacious survival of traditional ties in modern societies. Its very adaptability suggests that at least some of the characteristics that people like to think make them ethnically distinctive are in fact shared across ethnic boundaries.
The use of the joke in various cultures also says something about the complexity and elusiveness of ethnic identity – that ostensibly fixed point in an unstable world – and the hopeless inadequacy of the paradigms we use to discuss it.
At the heart of much of the intellectual confusion spiralling out of recent debates on Islam and the west, universal values and cultural difference, is the counter-position of “multiculturalism” to “integrationism”. You wouldn’t know from these debates that this polarity has been explored (and subjected to critique) in great depth over many years by people in other parts of the world, not least by African-Americans and Dalits in India. And there’s rarely an acknowledgment that all of us have multiple identities, some overlapping, some contradictory, and that at any moment these identities are interacting with each other, shaping and being shaped by our environment.
What’s called “multiculturalism” emerged as a concession to the agitation for equality by black and Asian communities and the anti-racist movement. It was never a substitute for equality itself, nor for the necessary democratic battle to drive racism of all kinds out of society. And it leaned heavily on the old white colonial assumption that “the other” was a homogeneous exotic entity, locked out of the historical flow of progress.
The multiculturalism v integrationism paradigm does not reflect the way people actually live. The choices it offers are unreal. We are not entirely classifiable into discrete cultural compartments; nor can we be homogenised into an undifferentiated mass – whose terms and boundaries will be set by the dominant economic and cultural forces. The integrationists championing “universal values” ignore the conflicts of interest, the disparate and evolving views about politics, sexuality, work, family or social responsibility that cut across all cultural groups. They place the onus of integrating on the minority, which is asked to demonstrate a compliance with designated values not required from members of the majority. To prove their compatibility with “our values”, minorities, it seems, must be offended by what we are offended by, and not offended by what we are not offended by.
While cloaking itself in the mantle of universality, integrationism is deeply rooted in its own form of the politics of identity. This politics rarely evinces the ironic self-awareness and easy-going self-mockery one finds in the “How do you know Jesus was …” jokes. Invisible and unacknowledged, it is the politics of majority identity, of whiteness and westernness. You can hear it in Tony Blair’s warning after the July bombings that “staying here carries a duty … to share and support the values that sustain the British way of life”. And also in the jaw-grinding of European and North American pundits (liberal as well as conservative) who’ve exercised themselves about alleged Muslim incompatibility with western values, untroubled by any ironic awareness of what those “values” might mean to people on the wrong end of western policies. Great power over the lives of people belonging to other cultures is simply assumed as a given, a natural fact, and its material and historical basis is left unexamined.
Many of those who decry “cultural relativism” seem extremely reluctant to scrutinise their own cultural presuppositions and contradictions. In practice, like some of their multiculturalist opponents, they camouflage hard issues of social, political and economic justice in the clouds of a culture clash. I’m waiting for a good joke about how our “universal values” are reflected in our reputation as one of the most pathetically monolingual societies on earth, with our polyglots largely confined to those allegedly inward-looking ethnic-minority enclaves.
