The paradox of American multiculturalism
Living in the U.S. for a while has led me to believe that the struggle for racial justice, as it is currently formulated in that country, does not actually provide any workable solution to the various inequalities of race in America, but has become rather a formula for the intergenerational reproduction of racial conflict. The failure of American liberals to understand this has many perverse effects, one of which has been to drive other minority groups into the arms of the Republican party. My goal here will be to provide an extremely concise summary of the analysis that leads me to this conviction. Elsewhere and in future posts I will provide various arguments in support of the position, for now I would just like to articulate the view, so that people can see how it goes.
The most baffling feature of racial politics in America, and the thing that has left many white Americans so confused, is the fact that there is no coherent or unified set of demands emanating from the Black community. That is because African-Americans are profoundly divided, between an integrationist wing, which mainly just wants to avoid being discriminated against, and a nationalist wing, which is keen to promote and reproduce a distinctive African-American community and culture. Unfortunately, the nationalist wing lacks many of the trappings of a traditional nationalist movement (in particular, it is not demanding secession or regional self-government), and so Americans have largely failed to recognize it for what it is.
Nationalism, for reasons that I do not entirely understand, is like catnip to intellectuals, as a result of which African-American elites are almost uniformly nationalist in their basic political sensibility. Because of this, white Americans who strive to be “allies” to the Black community find themselves acquiescing to the demands of Black elites (with whom they have the most contact), which means accepting nationalist demands that frequently put them off-side with lower and working-class Blacks. This is what generates bizarre situations like the one in Minneapolis in 2021, where white residents were inclined to support measures aimed at reducing or abolishing the police force, despite overwhelming opposition from Black residents of the city.
Meanwhile, the history of Black-white racial conflict takes up so much space in the American political imaginary that Americans inevitably see all other issues of justice involving minority groups of any description through the lens of race. In particular, they think that they can deal with issues of justice involving Hispanics simply by tacking on the phrase “and Hispanics” to any occurrence of the word “Blacks.” Hispanics are everywhere an afterthought or a footnote. Seldom are they considered a group with a distinctive set of claims and interests. For example, they are routinely described as a “race” or a “racial group,” even though this is not how they are defined by the U.S. census, and many have no interest in being treated as such.
Beyond these two groups, Americans tend to treat all other minorities as though they were just somewhat-less-aggrieved African-Americans. This leads them to assume that what all minorities in America want is roughly the same as what Black Americans want. This is an enormous misunderstanding, because most of these minority groups are the product of relatively recent immigration, as a result of which they are (almost) entirely lacking in nationalist sentiment. What they want instead is precisely the sort of color-blind integration that is currently so unpopular with Black elites. And yet because white Americans are used to acceding to the demands of the latter, what other minorities wind up being offered is a set of accommodations that are either irrelevant to them or run largely contrary to their desires.
Underlying this is a second factor, which is that due to the all-consuming psychodrama of Black-white race relations, Americans have very little attention or empathy left over for the trials and tribulations of other minorities. Even quite liberal Americans are profoundly uninterested in the fate of, say, Vietnamese, Sikhs, or Muslims. As an American friend of Chinese heritage once put it to me (paraphrasing roughly): the essentially thing you need to understand about being Asian in America is that, deep down, no one gives a shit about your problems. This affective disinterest in the fate of all-other-minorities (i.e. the POCs) has generated a rather extreme spirit of self-reliance within these groups, which has, in turn, been richly rewarded both by the education system and the labour market. This produces various paradoxical outcomes, such as the U.S. being described as a system of “white supremacy” despite the fact that Asian women in America now earn, on average, more than white men.
This has been a major factor pushing minorities in the direction of the Republican party. Liberals keep emphasizing how special and different they are when what they actually want is the opposite. Most immigrants and their immediate descendants would like nothing better than to blend into the population and benefit from the color-blind application of laws and institutional norms. Furthermore, they have no interest in historical grievances, nor are they particularly keen to cultivate the sort of grievance-based identity that seems to be the only way of getting white liberals to take their concerns seriously.
The net result is that Americans have been relatively successful at integrating the groups that they neglect – by giving them essentially no choice but to play the game as it is constituted – and quite unsuccessful at integrating the one group that they would actually like to see reconciled, and are willing to accommodate in various ways.
(Again, this is a concise summary of the view. For those who are inclined to quibble with any specific claim, feel free to insert the phrase “in general” into each of the sentences above and see if that resolves the issue.)