What’s the best way to deal with long-standing oppression or political exclusion based on group identity? Republicanism or multiculturalism? Pluralist or particularist multiculturalism? Universality or diversity? Koli Mitra considers various approaches …
Ah, elections! It’s that time in a nation’s political cycle when everyone is – ideally – mulling over the issue of representation in one way or another. Whom will you choose? What are your criteria? How well does your candidate line up with the issues you care about? Which issues are you willing to compromise on and what are you getting in their stead? Does character matter? Is it important for her/him to have demonstrated a general trustworthiness as a human being and a professional, apart from her/his position on the issues, as articulated?
Oh, and – here’s one that serious people, at least serious liberal minded people are not supposed to admit to asking themselves – does a candidate’s ethnicity matter to you? What about gender, religion, caste, sexual orientation? This is an issue on which educated liberals tend to erect a peculiar internal firewall that quarantines our ‘multicultural’ selves from our ‘non-prejudicial’ selves. Our multicultural selves might support electoral quotas for historically disadvantaged groups like Dalits, aborigines, women, religions minorities, etc. Yet, if we happen to belong to one of these groups – but not to the disadvantaged socio-economic class that often goes with it – we are unlikely to entertain that as a factor in our personal exercise of the franchise. Something feels simply unsavoury about it; as if it were no different from wanting to favour a particular group identity that happens to be a dominant or privileged one (like a Brahmin admitting she would only vote for a Brahmin because of the identity factor).
But what exactly is ‘representation’ anyway? Certainly, the fact that someone ‘looks like me’ or ‘speaks the same language’ or – more obviously legitimate – ‘has the same experience of being targeted for hate crime as me’ fit some definitions of ‘representing’ in the sense that they share some characteristic with me; we are ‘representative samples’ of some shared set of circumstances. But how relevant is all of this, really, in the context of political representation? From its inception, the republican form of government was devised precisely to provide a mechanism for people to choose their representatives, based on whatever grounds the chooser determined was important. In other words, it was very specifically rejecting the idea of people presuming to speak for you based on some innate or assumed quality. Back then, the practice was to claim, not so much that the person was similar to you, but rather that he was superior to you, based on divine right or what have you; but the resulting problem remains same: that their ‘representation’ of you rests on some factor other than your explicit consent and choice. With identity politics, we seem to have come full circle.
The American historian C. Van Woodward had famously blamed “the cult of ethnicity and its zealots” for endangering his country’s tradition of “shared commitment to common ideals and its reputation for assimilation, for making a ‘nation’ of nations.” There is good reason to believe (given the body of his scholarship and his well known commitment to the civil rights struggles in the United States) that Woodward’s comments were not more of the usual cynical reactionary newspeak that equates the concerns of the marginalised as ‘divisive’ while ignoring the quiet violence of dominant culture going about the business of maintaining its dominance in perfect tranquillity.
But there is an interesting phrase in that quote, one that was pretty uncontroversial when he wrote it in 1991, but that certainly gives us pause today – it is his mention of America’s “reputation for assimilation” as if it was a good thing. It’s hard to believe, but as recently as just one generation ago, ‘assimilation’ had not become a universally dirty word. There is an interesting point here to consider, despite its tendency to gloss over the fact that the thing one ‘assimilates’ into is something heavily coloured by the pre-existing dominant ethnicity (or other cultural strand), and not some Platonic ideal state of being, emanating from an extra-ethnic source, above all the messiness of our everyday experiences of cultural specificity. Yet, despite this – or worse, despite an underlying assumption of the dominant society’s ‘superiority’ – this fantasy of assimilation, at least when sincere, also stands for a certain brand of unadulterated aspiration to equality that is simply not possible to accommodate in any system of belief based on a particularist multiculturalism informed by identity politics. It is an aspiration to be a society of equals… one of personal freedom and individual choice… one where the ‘groups’ that count are those we choose to belong to, not those allotted to us by accident of birth.
However, while it’s easier – and philosophically more palatable – to argue for prioritising freedom and equality at the individual level over that at the group level, it can mask or sidestep the real problems faced by individuals because of their membership in certain groups.
The truth is, of course, people’s cultural identities are important to them. And, in a more sinister way, such identities, especially the historically disadvantaged identities, continue to be important to others, who benefit from keeping people in those boxes. Refusing to recognise the condition of being in a box doesn’t actually make the box go away, it just lets other people off the hook in terms doing anything about it. Most people who tout noble sentiments of racial, ethnic, or communal ‘blindness’ are really blinded by the fact that their privileged status affords them the luxury of unselfconsciousness with regard to their own ethnicity being the ‘norm’ or their own preoccupations being ‘neutral’ – so much so that they don’t even recognise that they actually have an ethnicity or that their cultural preoccupations are not so much ‘neutral’ as exempt from having to be justified.
Most people who tout noble sentiments of racial, ethnic, or communal ‘blindness’ are really blinded by the fact that their privileged status affords them the luxury of unselfconsciousness with regard to their own ethnicity being the ‘norm’ or their own preoccupations being ‘neutral’ – so much so that they don’t even recognise that they actually have an ethnicity or that their cultural preoccupations are not so much ‘neutral’ as exempt from having to be justified.
Yet, there is another critique to be made of formal multiculturalism, without missing the nuance of ‘culture’ being a de facto measure of power and of the ability to effectively participate in public life, even as an individual. The identity politics of multiculturalism can have enormously damaging consequences for the very people it is purportedly means to help. People who are badly in need of a voice, get spoken for by unelected, self-appointed ‘community leaders’ who tend to be in such positions precisely because they have been able to fashion a mutually advantageous relationship with the state and/or dominant segment of society and are often in an exploitative relationship to the less powerful members of their purported ‘community.’
The Indian born English writer Kenan Malik has questioned the very premise of multiculturalism, not as an apology for any dominant faction of society, but as a progressive social analysis. He has asserted that “the notion of pluralism is both logically flawed and politically dangerous, and that creation of a ‘multicultural’ society has been at the expense of a more progressive one.” He has suggested that formalised political recognition and validation of various cultural groups has been unduly conflated with the respect for a diversity of lived experiences. According to Malik the latter legitimately belongs in the private sphere of human experience, whereas the former is simply an inappropriate and harmful intrusion of private concerns into the public sphere. Malik suggests that, because the same private concerns and experiences may lead different individuals to very different ideas and preferences, it is more effective for the individuals to process those concerns and experiences for themselves and then choose how best to express them politically by making a specific policy judgment, rather than allowing the fact of having a shared experience to be used as a stand-in for that policy judgment.
Political theorist Jacob Levy and author of The Multiculturalism of Fear has invoked Judith Skhlar’s classic formulation (in her famous essay The Liberalism of Fear) to argue that a measure of multiculturalism is useful and necessary to the concerns of a liberal society, not for the sake of the cultural values themselves, but for the pragmatic utility it has for the liberal values of individual freedom and autonomy, in that, some group identity issues must be formally accommodated in order to prevent ethnic violence and other forms of systemic attacks on the members of certain groups and ‘communities’.
Beyond that, it gets rather arbitrary, perhaps. Who is your ‘community’ anyway? Do the ‘leaders’ of your religion respect the members of your sex? Do the members of your sex care about your race? Do any of them care about the problems of your profession, your geographic neighbourhood, or the support group of people who are all fighting the same physical illness as you? Does your tightly-knit ‘community’ have a problem with your venturing out to engage with a variety of ‘outsiders’? Is the whole your community? The whole world?
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