Multiculturalism - Sources Select Resources

Against multiculturalism
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2002
Multiculturalism is an authoritarian, anti-human outlook. True political progress requires not recognition but action, not respect but questioning, not the invocation of the Thought Police but the forging of common bonds and collective struggles.
All cultures are not equal
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2002
A common thread binds contemporary Western radicalism and fundamentalist Islam. On the surface the two seem poles apart: fundamentalists loathe Western decadence, Western radicals fear Islamic presumptions of certainty. But what unites the two is that both are rooted in contemporary nihilistic multiculturalism; both express, at best, ambivalence about, at worst outright rejection of, the ideas of modernity, universality, and progress; and both see no real alternative to Western power.
Connexions Archive seeks a new home
Sources News Release
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2009
The Connexions Archive, a Toronto-based library dedicated to preserving the history of grassroots movements for social change, needs a new home.
The dirty d-word
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Diversity has become more than simply a way of describing the expansion of our experiences. It has also become a dogma about how we should live that has become as stultifying as old-fashioned racism - and often as divisive.
How 'diversity' breeds division
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2004
Diversity training is supposed to help 'promote good relations' between different ethnic groups and capitalise on workforce diversity. However, there is warranted scepticism about whether such training alleviates tensions or exacerbates them. Much of the content of this training is overreliant on pop sociology and pseudo-therapeutic techniques. Participants are expected to talk about stereotypes they harbour deep in their subconscious, and disclose feelings of harassment and victimisation. Trainers claim to eliminate stereotypes in the workplace, yet in talking about 'different cultural perspectives' they end up generating new and more insidious stereotypes in their stead.
Identity is that which is given
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2008
In this age of globalisation many people fret about Western culture taking over the world. But the greatest Western export is not Disney or McDonalds or Tom Cruise. It is the very idea of culture.
Inclusion or exclusion
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2008
People who advocate a vision of distinct communities that speak different languages, keep apart from each other, and communicate with the structures of the larger society only through interpreters, are doing more harm than good. What they are advocating is not diversity but entrenched division.
Law and the wives of others
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2008
How does a modern, plural democratic society deal with the desire of some minority groups to observe cultural norms at odds with the law of the land?
Malik, Kenan
Connexipedia Article
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Writer, lecturer and broadcaster. (Born 1962).
Mistaken Identity
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2008
Historically, antiracists challenged both the practice of racism and the process of racialisation; that is, both the practice of discriminating against people by virtue of their race and the insistence that an individual can be defined by the group to which he or she belongs. Today's multiculturalists argue that to fight racism one must celebrate group identity. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities. Racial theorists and multiculturalists, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observes, have 'conflicting credos but the same vision of the world'. Both fetishise difference. Both seek to 'confine individuals to their group of origin'. Both undermine 'any possibility of natural or cultural community among peoples'. Challenging such a politics of difference has become as important today as challenging racism.
Multiculturalism or World Culture?
On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2000
Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
The new language of diversity
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2009
Racial talk today is as likely to come out of the mouths of liberal anti-racists as of reactionary racial scientists.
One-state solution
Sources Select Resources Encyclopedia
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
The Real Value of Diversity
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2002
The real failure of multiculturalism is its failure to understand what is valuable about cultural diversity. There is nothing good in itself about diversity. It is important because it allows us to compare and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, make judgements upon them, and decide which are better and which worse. It is important, in other words, because it allows us to engage in political dialogue and debate that can help create more universal values and beliefs. But it is precisely such dialogue and debate, and the making of such judgements, that multiculturalism attempts to suppress in the name of 'tolerance' and 'respect'.
Shadow Boxing
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2009
Multiculturalists and clash of civilization warriors both start with the question: #Can Europe be the same with different people in it?#. They give different answers. But the question itself is the problem. It assumes that minority communities are homogenous wholes whose members will forever be attached to the cultures, faiths, beliefs and values of their forebears.
Why make a fuss about the murder of a brown-skinned Muslim girl?
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2008
History gives us numerous examples of social movements which come, over time, to adopt positions directly opposed to the principles on which they were founded. It appears this has happened to the 'feminists' who seek to silence those who speak out about violence against Muslim women.