Plural Monoculturalism
Is multiculturalism good for anyone?
It depends what you mean by “multiculturalism” and that in turn will make a very
significant difference in what you mean if, like me, your argue that it is not.
Sometimes multiculturalism is understood as genetic diversity: a society is multicultural in this
sense if it comprises citizens of different races and ethnic backgrounds. There is nothing particularly
good about multiculturalism thus understood but there is nothing bad about it either. To reject this
multiculturalism, to hold that nations should to restrict immigration in the interests of maintaining ethnic
purity or exclude citizens from full participation because of ancestry is to embrace racism.
More often we think of multiculturalism as a state of affairs where the customs, cuisines
and artifacts of diverse cultures are available. This is a good thing to the extent that it provides more
variety and so more options for everyone. When it comes to the harmless, superficial features of
culture—food, costume, music and dance, language, entertainment and crafts—the more the better:
there is no reason to believe that the superficial aspects of Anglo culture are inherently superior
and, indeed, compelling reason to believe that some features of the culture,
e.g. cuisine, are inherently inferior. As Susan Okin famously argued however, it is quite another
matter when it comes to some of the deep features of culture, including the role of women and
practices that enforce that role, some cultures are seriously defective. Curries and salsa dancing
enrich culture; female genital mutilation, forced marriages and wife-beating do not. Nevertheless so
long as we restrict ourselves to what Stanley Fish has called “boutique multiculturalism” we can
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probably agree that absorbing features of diverse cultures is a good thing.
Much of the time however when Americans think of multiculturalism they have in mind what
Sen has tagged, “plural monoculturalism,” the doctrine that individuals ought to remain faithful to their
ancestral cultures and that a good society ought to be a “salad bowl,” where diverse groups maintain
their separate identities and interact peacefully without coalescing. On this account the development
and persistence of ethnic communities should be encouraged and individuals, in the interests of
“authenticity,” should maintain, reestablish, or invent, connections to their ancestral cultures, however
remote. This is the doctrine that I shall refer to when I talk about “multiculturalism” without qualification.
I argue that plural monoculturalism is bad for almost everyone because it restricts choice and
so undermines desire satisfaction. It benefits members of the “helping professions” and “community
leaders” who obtain funding and achieve professional recognition by promoting multicultural projects
but sets back the interests of most members of ethnic minorities, particularly visible minorities, insofar
as it locks them into “identities” that are ascribed, immutable, salient and scripted. As a preference
utilitarian, I assume that welfare is to be identified with the satisfaction of individual’s rationally
considered and informed desires. The more options we have, the more likely we are to achieve desire
satisfaction and so the better off we are. Moreover, most people prefer having a wide range of options
as a good in and of itself: even if, given our actual desires, the narrow range of options we have does
not thwart us, ceteris paribus, most of us would still prefer to have the widest possible range of options.
We value positive freedom as such.
1
Fish, S. (1997) “Boutique Multiculturalism, or, Why Liberals are Incapable of Thinking About Hate Speech.”
Critical Inquiry 23:2
Multiculturalism restricts the range of options available to members of ethnic minorities and
so undermines their wellbeing. Consequently, I suggest, we should reject the salad bowl in favor of
the melting pot.
Before continuing with the argument it is worth noting what this thesis does not entail.
First, it does not entail imposing tighter restrictions on immigration. Advocates of such policies
underestimate the ability and even more importantly the desire of immigrants to assimilate. So, for
example, Samuel P. Huntington,worries that Hispanics by and large are less willing and able to
assimilate to the dominant Anglo culture than earlier waves of immigrants. Arguably he does not take
seriously the fact that they are currently doubly disadvantaged in being a visible minority and in being
the latest immigrants. I suggest that he is, as a matter of empirical fact, wrong: my empirical conjecture
is that more generous immigration policies would in fact facilitate assimilation.
Secondly, I do not dogmatically assume that most immigrants and other members of ethnic
minorities want to assimilate: I argue that they do. What is striking in the literature and rhetoric of plural
monoculturalism is the extent to which writers assume, without producing data or argumentation, that
minorities like their ancestral cultures and want to preserve them, that they want to maintain distinctive
communities, and that they only conform, grudgingly to mainstream culture in order to obtain extrinsic
social and economic benefits. I shall suggest that this is a consequence of false empirical assumptions
and, more interestingly, conceptual confusions about the notion of preference.
Finally, I note that promoting assimilation as a goal does not mean adopting “color-blind”
policies that deny the brute fact of pervasive, ongoing discrimination. In the aftermath of the recent
riots in French immigrant suburbs we saw the shortcomings of this policy. While committed to
assimilation as a goal, the French government refused to recognize the fact of discrimination and
dogmatically assumed that official colorblind policies would make French citizens colorblind. Au
contraire. Most of us recognize that only draconian, ongoing state intervention involving strictly
enforced affirmative action regulations, will go any way toward ameliorating gross, ongoing
discrimination against women and members of visible minorities. Formal equality under the law is
virtually worthless because the practices that lock women and minorities out of the mainstream are
informal. Critics of liberal feminism sometimes imagine that adopting assimilation as a goal entails
committing to gender-blindness and color-blindness as means. That is false: it is an empirical question
whether such policies facilitate assimilation—and empirical evidence suggests otherwise.
Because of ongoing discrimination, immigrants and other minorities find it difficult, costly and
or impossible to assimilate and the ideology of plural monoculturalism further reinforces their exclusion
by promoting the doctrine that they do not want to assimilate or, in any case, should not want to.
Multiculturalism imposes “thick” identities on members of minority groups that exclude them from the
mainstream, restrict their options and therefore undermines their wellbeing.
What is white privilege?
At this point critics will ask: “what is so great about the mainstream?” The answer, I
suggest, is simply that it is the mainstream: the majority culture is the culture that imposes the
“thinnest” identity on its members. To be a member of the majority culture is to be generic and that
is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
There are a variety of benefits that attach to being white but the chief privilege of
whiteness is negative: whiteness is, as it were, transparent—to be white, in the US, is to lack a
“thick” racial identity. In this respect white privilege is like male privilege: of all the innumerable
benefits procured to men in virtue of being male, the most important perhaps is that of being
socially generic. In most social contexts we do not expect men to exhibit a characteristically
masculine point of view or explain their behavior by reference to gender. We rarely talk about “male
faculty,” “male politicians” or even “male writers” but we still talk about female faculty, female
politicians and female writers. We only characterize individuals’ occupations or preoccupations as
“male” where the activities in question are strongly identified as female: there are male nurses and
male feminists.
This is symptomatic of the fact that being female is a “thicker” identity than being male: it is
more salient and more tightly scripted. Minority racial and ethnic identities are like this too: we talk
about “black faculty,” “Hispanic politicians” and even occasionally “Jewish writers” though the last
category seems to be defined more by authors’ literary preoccupations rather than their ancestry
alone. In any case, I suggest, being stuck with a “thick” identity is a bad thing.
The operative word here is “stuck.” The circumstances of our lives are both, as Anthony
Appiah notes, parameters and limits. Most of us do not want to be naked transcendental unities of
apperception: we seek out group loyalties and cling to empirical characteristics that define us. I am
proud to be a Johns Hopkins alumna: I kick in $40 to the alumni association every year and go to the
annual crab feasts with my husband, also a Hopkins PhD, where we commiserate with other Hopkins
alums about how miserable it was. Our oldest son is at Hopkins too and when he gets his degree I will
loan him my flashy gold regalia. JHU is our family thing.
That is a (mildly) thick identity—but it is an identity that I chose and one whose “thickness”
I choose. I decided to go to Hopkins—probably unwisely. In addition, I choose to make it a big
deal in my life, that is, to make it thicker than it had to be: I go to the crab feasts, support the
lacrosse team and display the logo merchandise on my car, in my office and, occasionally, on my
person.
Ethnic identity, by contrast, is both ascribed and salient. It is ascribed insofar as it is
unchosen and immutable. Under the multicultural regime, you are born Italian or Jewish, Irish, Black
or Puerto Rican and cannot get out of it. Moreover if you are a member of a visible minority group in
all likelihood you cannot even “pass.” Being black or brown is like being female: you are not only
stuck with it—and you are stuck with being identified with it.
Ethnic identity is, in addition, socially salient: under the multiculturalist regime ethnic
identity is thick, and individuals for the most part cannot determine how thick it will be for them.
A property is socially salient within a community to the extent that members of the
community take it to predict or explain beliefs, character traits, tastes or other socially
significant psychological characteristics. Social salience is a matter of degree: it depends
upon how many other characteristics it is thought to predict or explain, how important they
are, how many members of the community believe it has this explanatory or predictive power
and the degree of conviction with which they hold this belief…
The salience of a property does not arise from its visibility or noticability. Freckles are
highly visible but wholly non-salient. In many communities, by contrast, some invisible ethnic
origins, occupations and avocations are salient: people have notions of what Germans and
Italians, lawyers, librarians and academics, stamp-collectors and soccer fans are like.
Finally, for some properties, which are salient to a given degree, the absence of
these properties, or possession of other properties of the same category may be less salient
or non-salient. People have notions about what used car salesmen are like; they don’t
generally have preconceived ideas about what veterinarians, geologists or copy-editors are
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like.
Even where our characteristics are chosen and our affiliations are voluntary, and indeed
even where they are highly valued, we rarely want them to be socially salient: no one wants to be a
“typical lawyer” or a “typical middle class suburbanite,” and no one wants others to make assumptions
about his character, tastes, interests, abilities, commitments and beliefs, or to explain his behavior, on
the basis of such socially salient characteristics.
Where socially salient characteristics are ascribed, immutable and visible, so much the worse:
no one, but no one, wants to hear “just like a women” or to deal with remarks about his “natural sense
of rhythm.” This is how clichés about the importance of “treating people as individuals” and “not putting
them in boxes” cash out: we do not want our personal characteristics, particularly ascribed and
immutable characteristics, to be socially salient. We do not want to have to fight our way out of boxes.
Almost everyone has known, at some time or other, what it is like to fight their way out of a
box. If you are identified with any socially salient group, whether as a member of a racial or ethnic
minority, a political liberal amongst conservatives, a woman in most social settings, a Christian in
Academia or an atheist anywhere else, if you are old or very young, disabled or just physically
unprepossessing, you confront a swarm of tacit assumptions about your intelligence and abilities,
your beliefs, moral commitments and interests, your lifestyle and character, that you have to fight your
way through in order to be seen for who you. And sometimes no amount of effort will get you through.
Multiculturalism, when it is more than a fiction or entertainment, puts people whose racial or
ethnic characteristics are socially salient into boxes and imposes on them the burden of fighting their
way out to establish their individuality. Multiculturalism thus restricts choice: most people have fairly
strong preferences about how they want others to view them. They want to be seen for who they are.
The salience of ascribed ethnic identities makes this difficult for members of ethnic minorities.
Finally, in addition to being ascribed and salient, ethnic identity is scripted. Multiculturalism
not only promulgates doctrines about what members of ethnic minorities are like: it promotes
normative claims about what they ought to be like. As Anthony Appiah notes, even where ethnic
scripts are self-affirming they impose constraints on individual choice:
An African-American after the Black Power movement takes the old script of selfhatred, the script in which he or she is a nigger, and works, in community, to construct a
series of positive black life scripts…What demanding respect for people as blacks or as gays
requires is that there be some scripts that go with being an African-American or having samesex desires: there will be expectations to be met; demands will be made. It is at this point that
someone who takes autonomy seriously will want to ask whether we have not replaced one
kind of tyranny with another. If I had to choose between Uncle Tom and Black Power, I would,
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of course, choose the latter. But I would like not to have to choose.
2
Baber (2001). “Gender Conscious.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 18(1)
3
Appiah, K. A. (1996) “Race, Culture, Identity” in Color Conscious K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutman, eds.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 98-99.
Legal scholar Richard Thompson Ford notes that the “difference discourse” of
multiculturalism is especially problematic for minorities who are unwilling, or unable, to play their
assigned roles:
Because difference discourse often establishes lists and canonical accounts of group
identity, it tends to favor traditional behavior over behavior that is novel or transgressive within
the group…In this respect, rights-to-difference include proscriptions and mandates, not only
for those who would assert them and their contemporaries but also for future
generations…Every racial group (with the telling exception of whites) has a derogatory term
for people who fail to exhibit their assigned racial culture: there are African American ‘Oreos,’
Latino ‘Coconuts,’ Asian-American ‘Bananas’ and Native-American (you guessed it) ‘Apples.’
Decades ago sociologist David Riesman noted the plight of individuals who were
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“marginally marginal”—middle class blacks who “talked proper,” “mannish” career women and
others who were doubly disadvantaged by being saddled with membership in socially salient
disadvantaged groups and either unwilling or unable to play the “scripts” associated with group
membership.
Even in the 1950s when Riesman was writing, before multiculturalism, marginally marginal
individuals faced social opprobrium and were regularly trapped in double binds. During that period,
women were, in Riesman’s terminology, “marginalized” to the extent that they were de facto excluded
from public life and the professions, and locked into suburban domesticity or, if unmarried, into a
narrow range of women’s occupations. Marginally marginal females who could not or would not play
their prescribed “feminine role” were trashed. As Betty Friedan noted, the behavior and aspirations of
such women were construed in the categories of psychological pathology, as maladjustment, neurosis,
self-hatred or penis envy.
In the wake of Friedan’s expose of the feminine mystique, the second wave of feminism
effectively dismantled the pop-psychological theories that defined marginally marginal women as
deviants. But, remarkably, these psychological theories were refurbished and recycled by
multiculturalists to beat up on marginally marginal Oreos, Coconuts, Bananas and Apples, individuals
who were said to be black, brown, yellow or red on the outside but white on the inside and who were
therefore held to be held to be self-hating and inauthentic.
Like women, damned if they were suitably feminine but doubly damned if they weren’t,
minorities under the multicultural regime were caught in double binds because the scripts for members
of racial and ethnic minorities quite often rehearsed racist stereotypes and prescribed behavior that
was, in the larger social context, unacceptable. Naïve members of racial and ethnic minorities regularly
fell into traps by innocently following advice that they were not supposed to take seriously. At “diversity
workshops” minorities were encouraged to wear “ethnic” costume and supervisors were urged to be
“sensitive” to their non-Western conceptions of time. Black employees who showed up late the next
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day wearing dashikis were reprimanded and sent home to change.
Under the multiculturalist regime, minority ethnic identities are ascribed, immutable, salient
and scripted and so impose serious constraints on individual choice. Assuming that welfare is desire
satisfaction, all other things being equal the wider the scope of our choices the
4
Ford (2005), pp. 78-79, 87.
5
This actually occurred at my husband’s place of work.
better off we are. Since multiculturalism restricts the choices of minorities by ascribing salient
identities to them and imposing scripts on them there is prima facie reason to believe that it
impedes their desire satisfaction and therefore undermines their wellbeing.
Do people want to preserve their ancestral cultures?
Nevertheless, ceteris are not always paribus: having the widest possibly range of options may
not always be conducive to desire satisfaction. Individuals become confused when they face a range
of options that is too extensive for rational choice and in some cases may wish that options were
unavailable in order to prevent themselves from being led into temptation. People join the army, enter
monasteries and sign themselves into fat farms in the spirit of Ulysses who, as Elster notes, bound
himself to the mast in order to satisfy his standing desire not to have his ephemeral, self-destructive
desire to jump overboard satisfied. Even if there is prima facie reason to believe that multiculturalism,
insofar as it imposes salient, scripted identities on minorities, restricts their options it may be that there
are overriding considerations.
It may be that most individuals are so enamoured of their ancestral cultures that they willingly
trade off options for cultural preservation. The burden of proof is however on the multiculturalist to
show that this is the case and there is little reason to believe that it is. Most people do not give a
second thought to their cultures: they accept them in the way that we accept our phone numbers, as a
fact of life that we can’t change and rarely think about. Many individuals voluntarily live in ethnic
enclaves but it seems likely that this does not reflect their ceteris paribus preferences so much as the
difficulty and costs of exit. Responding to Will Kymlicka, Janet Halley for example notes, that it is not
that easy to get off the reservation: where land is owned by the tribe, it is difficult for individuals,
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lacking equity in property, to sell out and move out. And it is not so easy, if you are an immigrant, to
become fluent in the language of your host country, learn the social ropes or acquire the support
network it takes to negotiate the cultural landscape.
The multiculturalist can certainly note that some individuals cling to their ancestral cultures
and voluntarily remain within ethnic enclaves but it does not follow that these choices represent their
rationally considered, informed, ceteris paribus preferences. A rational and informed individual in
circumstances may voluntarily adopt a policy intended to achieve a state S but it does not follow that
S is the outcome she would most prefer all other things being equal. She may prefer S’ but believe,
rightly or wrongly, that, given the circumstances of her life it is out of reach or she may calculate that
the risks of trying for S’ are too great to make pursuing it worthwhile even though she might ardently
wish that the circumstances of her life, which she is powerless to change, were different.
Rational choice is not the same thing as ceteris paribus preference: we choose what is best
from amongst our available options which in most cases is not what we would most prefer prescinding
from costs and constraints. This is a home truth which, remarkably, many writers overlook—perhaps
because, as members of a privileged elite, they do not understand how limited most people’s options
are. So consider Martha Nussbaum writing on “adaptive preference” women in Women and Human
Development and elsewhere. Telling the stories of impoverished, illiterate Indian women who choose
to stay in bad marriages, put up with domestic violence and poor working conditions she suggests that
these choices show that their preferences have been “deformed,” lack self-esteem and are in need of
consciousness-raising. Nussbaum doesn’t get it. The women whose stories she tells operate in
circumstances where they have few options and cannot afford to assume risk. As I have argued
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elsewhere they are doing the best they can as rational choosers given their circumstances. None of
the anecdotal evidence Nussbaum
6
Halley, J. “Culture Constrains” in Susan Okin, ed. Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?
7
See my “Adaptive Preference” forthcoming in Social Theory and Practice.
produces provides any reason to believe that they would make these choices if they had other
options—and indeed as Nussbaum notes, when other options are available, e.g. participation in
women’s coops and micro-credit schemes they jump at them.
Llike Nussbaum, conservative anti-feminist Christina Sommers assumes that women’s
choices represent their ceteris paribus preferences but draws the opposite conclusion: if women
voluntarily choose to “live traditional lives,” she argues then that is what they prefer and feminists who
suggest that this state of affairs should be remedied must assume that they are brainwashed or lacking
in self-esteem. Such feminists, she announces, “do not like women.” Sommers doesn’t get it either—or
more likely pretends not to get it. The brute fact is that for the majority of women, including the 76% of
adult women in the US who do not have college degrees, most desirable jobs are simply out of reach
and they are making the best of a raw deal. It is an empirical question whether given a real opportunity
to get traditionally male jobs they would choose them over housewifing or the pink-collar positions that
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most occupy—and there is substantial empirical evidence to suggest that they would.
As highly privileged white women who have beaten the system neither Nussbaum nor
Sommers seems to understand that when most people make decisions about their lives or careers,
they do not contemplate a staggering range of possibilities and agonize about how to choose from
the abundance of riches—in the way that many of our privileged student advisees do. Rather they
look at an almost negligible range of options and pick the least worst. As members of an affluent
elite, privileged to have a fairly wide range of choices neither Nussbaum nor Sommers nor, I
suggest, most advocates of plural monoculturalism recognize that most people have very few
options, that most of these options are low on their overall preference rankings, and that most of the
choices they make do not represent their ceteris paribus preferences.
Many immigrants and members of ethnic minorities live in ethnic neighborhoods and
enclaves, fraternize primarily with members of their ethnic groups, and maintain some degree of
separateness from the larger community. It does not however follow that this state of affairs reflects
their ceteris paribus preferences. It is an empirical question whether members of ethnic minorities
prefer to maintain their cultural distinctiveness: there is no compelling reason to believe that they do
and some empirical evidence to suggest that they do not.
One way we to get empirical evidence about what they want is by asking, and the responses
from asking suggest that they do not. In the aftermath of the French riots, none of the individuals of
Arab decent interviewed in the media expressed an interest in restoring the Caliphate or worried that
French assimilationist policies were undermining their traditional culture. They complained that even
after 2 or 3 generations they were not regarded as fully French and that they faced serious, ongoing
discrimination in all areas of life. This is typical:
Some groups do advocate cultural separation for Muslims -but they do not speak for
many. Far more common is the attitude of Nour-eddine Skiker, a youth worker near Paris: "I
feel completely French. I will do everything for this country, which is mine." Mr Skiker's
Moroccan origins mean a lot to him. But, like many youths in the suburbs, he sees no
contradiction between being French and having foreign roots. The main problem is that many
French people do, says writer Nadir Dendoune.
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See, e.g. Maureen Honey, The Making of Rosie the Riveter. Honey notes that when traditionally male factory jobs
were opened to women during World War II women flocked to these jobs and, cites data from the Women’s
Bureau indicating that after the war was over more than 80% said that they would have preferred to keep these
jobs if that were possible. Of course, it wasn’t: after the war women were booted out to make room for returning
GIs.
"How am I supposed to feel French when people always describe me as a
Frenchman of Algerian origin? I was born here. I am French. How many generations does
it take to stop mentioning my origin?" And crucially, the suburbs are full of people
desperate to integrate into the wider society. "I do not know a single youth in my estate
who does not want to leave," Mr Dendoune says.
Immigrants have been housed in estates around French cities. France's Muslim
ghettos, in short, are not hotbeds of separatism. Neither do they represent a clear challenge
to secularism -a doctrine all national Muslim groups profess to support. "We have no problem
with secularism," says Lhaj Thami Breze, president of the Union of Islamic Organisations of
France (UOIF). He argues that by establishing state neutrality in religious matters, the
doctrine allows all religions to blossom. Islam has adapted to local laws -from Indonesia to
Senegal -and is adapting to France, says Azzedine Gaci, who heads the regional Muslim
council in Lyon.
This is not just the leaders' view. A 2004 poll suggested that 68% of French
Muslims regarded the separation of religion and state as "important", and 93% felt the
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same about republican values.
We can always cite anecdotal evidence selectively to support whatever thesis we choose.
However, an extensive survey of the available anecdotal evidence suggests that this account is
characteristic rather than anomalous. We cannot dismiss opposition to multiculturalism as a
preoccupation of white jingoists on the right: currently people of color who are “public intellectuals” of
stature, including Richard Thompson Ford and Anthony Appiah cited above, as well as Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
Salmon Rushdie and Amartya Sen have argued against plural monoculturalism for precisely the
reasons that I have suggested. And the preponderance of anecdotal evidence suggests that members
of ethnic minorities, when they are not bullied, bribed or indoctrinated agree.
Moreover, even in the absence of any compelling evidence to suggest that most immigrants
and members of minorities have any serious, overriding interest in maintaining cultural distinctiveness,
there would be reason to believe that multiculturalism on the salad bowl model is contrary to their
interests. Multiculturalism restricts the options of members of ethnic minorities by enhancing the
salience of their ethnic identities and imposing ethnic scripts on them. That is something people do not
want. The preference utilitarian case against multiculturalism is therefore breathtakingly simple:
multiculturalism is bad for most people because most people don’t want it.
Comments greatly appreciated! Please send to me at baber@sandiego.edu!
9
“Ghettos shackle French Muslims” in BBC News, Monday, October 31, 2005.