Multicultural Identity Quotes

Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.

We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.

Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences, like love and weeping and laughter, common to all human beings.

The increasing tendency towards seeing people in terms of one dominant ‘identity’ (‘this is your duty as an American’, ‘you must commit these acts as a Muslim’, or ‘as a Chinese you should give priority to this national engagement’) is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups (to all of which he or she belongs).

[M]y discovering my own identity doesn't mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.

We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.

It's a success story," said Chanu, exercising his shoulders. "But behind every story of immigration success there lies a deeper tragedy." Kindly explain this tragedy." I'm talking about the clash between Western values and our own. I'm talking about the struggle to assimilate and the need to preserve one's identity and heritage. I'm talking about children who don't know what their identity is. I'm talking about the feelings of alienation engendered by a society where racism is prevalent. I'm talking about the terrific struggle to preserve one's own sanity while striving to achieve the best for one's family. I'm talking--" p. 88

Bitter struggles deform their participants in subtle, complicated ways. The idea that one should speak one's cultural allegiance first and the truth second (and that this is a sign of authenticity) is precisely such a deformation.

Every individual is multicultural; cultures are not monolithic islands but criss-crossed alluvial plains. Individual identity stems from the encounter of multiple collective identities within one and the same person; each of our various affiliations contributes to the formation of the unique creature that we are. Human beings are not all similar, or entirely different; they are all plural within themselves, and share their constitutive traits with very varied groups, combining them in an individual way. The cohabitation of different types of belonging within each one of us does not in general cause any problems- and this ought , in turn, to arouse admiration: like a juggler, we keep all the balls of our identity in the air at once, with the greatest ease! Individual identity results from the interweaving of several collective identities; it is not alone in this respect. What is the origin of the culture of a human group? The reply- paradoxically- is that it comes from previous cultures. A new culture arises from the encounter between several smaller cultures, or from the decomposition of a bigger culture, or from interaction with neighboring culture. There is never a human life prior to the advent of culture.

The state does not oppose the freedom of people to express their particular cultural attachments, but nor does it nurture such expression—rather [...] it responds with 'benign neglect' [....] The members of ethnic and national groups are protected against discrimination and prejudice, and they are free to maintain whatever part of their ethnic heritage or identity they wish, consistent with the rights of others. But their efforts are purely private, and it is not the place of public agencies to attach legal identities or disabilities to cultural membership or ethnic identity. This separation of state and ethnicity precludes any legal or governmental recognition of ethnic groups, or any use of ethnic criteria in the distribution of rights, resources, and duties.

The political left, which has long embraced identity politics, encourages racial and ethnic loyalty. It is manifest in liberal support for multiculturalism, hate-crime laws, racially gerrymandered voting districts, affirmative-action quotas, and other policies. “Stick together, black people,” says popular black radio host Tom Joyner, an Obama booster.

Here is an old phrase I like: “The only way to the universal good is that we all become strangers to ourselves.” You imagine looking at yourself with a foreign gaze, through foreign eyes. I think this is something that could be the greatest thing in humanity. You are never really limited just to your own perspective. I don’t like the false identity politics of multiculturalism which says that “you are enclosed in your culture.” No, we have all this amazing capacity to be surprised, not by others, but by ourselves seeing how what we are doing is strange.

Samuel Huntington, wrote in his last book, ‘Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilisation. It is basically an anti-Western ideology’.8

multicultural education that has a strong antiracist orientation is of utmost importance in helping children to develop a nonracist identity.

While classical liberalism sought to protect the autonomy of equal individuals, the new ideology of multiculturalism promoted equal respect for cultures, even if those cultures abridged the autonomy of the individuals who participated in them.

The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.

What's better- supply side economics a la John Keynes, or libertarian free markets a la Milton Friedman? Safety nets or bootstraps to build a just society? Big sticks or carrots to preserve international order? Federal or states' rights to guide the governed? Investing in education or employment to empower a citizenry? Seperation or integration of church and state? Multicultural melting pot or national identity? Revolution or evolution? The only honest answer is "it depends." and we're not entirely sure.

In 1970, Women's Lib preached universal sisterhood and resistance to "patriarchy" anywhere and in any form; today, Women's Studies, like contemporary establishment feminism generally, is meekly multicultural, treating non-Western social practices with deference even when they involve the brutal subjection of females.

Progressive thought is blind when it suggests that there can be no anti-white racism or an anti-semitism among the formerly oppressed or the young people in the projects because they themselves have suffered from this evil. They are the victims; they are exempt from the prejudices that affect the majority of the population. But the reverse is true: racism is multiplying at exponential rates among groups and communities, taboos are collapsing, and everything is explained in terms of physical characteristics, identity, purity, and difference. and this is a racism that is all the more certain that it is right because it is regarded as a legitimate reaction on the part of the persecuted. now we see the obsession with the pedigree and the old distinctions derived from slavery being revived, and prejudices accumulating in the name of racism. This is the end of the concept of humanity as union in diversity and the triumph of human species incompatible with each other.

When everybody was, you know, pushing for multiculturalism in lead institutions, it really meant filtering a few people of color or women into university departments or newsrooms, while carrying out this savage economic assault against the working poor and, in particular, poor people of color in deindustrialized pockets of the United States. Very few of these multiculturalists even noticed. I am all for diversity, but not when it is devoid of economic justice. Cornel West has been one of the great champions, not only of the black prophetic tradition, the most important intellectual tradition in our history, but the clarion call for justice in all its forms. There is no racial justice without economic justice. And while these elite institutions sprinkled a few token faces into their hierarchy, they savaged the working class and the poor, especially poor people of color. Much of the left was fooled by the identity politics trick. It was a boutique activism. It kept the corporate system, the one we must destroy, intact. It gave it a friendly face.

United States should not admit immigrants from Syria or Iraq, and the European Union should renounce its multicultural fallacy in favor of an unabashed Western identity. In the long run, only one civilization can survive the unforgiving tests of natural selection, and if the bureaucrats in Brussels refuse to save the West from the Islamic peril, then Britain, Denmark, or France had

They argue that all nations today face the same enemies. The bogeymen of globalism, multiculturalism, and immigration are threatening to destroy the traditions and identities of all nations, therefore nationalists across the world should make common cause in opposing these global forces. Hungarians, Italians, Turks, and Israelis should build walls, destroy bridges, and slow down the

Decadence in modern mass multicultural societies begins at a moment when there is not longer any discernible meaning within society. Meaning is destroyed by raising individualism above all other values because rampant individualism encourages the anarchical proliferation of egotism at the expense of the values that were once part of the national heritage, values that give form to the concept of nationhood and the nation state, to a state which is more than just a political entity, and which corresponds to a particular people who are conscious of sharing a common heritage for the survival of which they are prepared to make personal sacrifices. Man evolved in cooperating groups united by common cultural and genetic ties, and it is only in such a setting that the individual can feel truly free, and truly protected. Men cannot live happily alone and without values or any sense of identity: such a situation leads to nihilism, drug abuse, criminality, and worse. With the spread of purely egotistic goals at the expense of the altruistic regard for family and nation, the individual begins to talk of his rights rather than his duties, for he no longer feels any sense of destiny, of belonging to and being a part of a greater and more enduring entity. He no longer rejoices in the secure belief that he shares in a heritage which it is part of his common duty to protect - he no longer feels that he has anything in common with those around him. In short, he feels lonely and oppressed. Since all values have become personal, everything is now equal to everything; e.g., nothing equals nothing.

The mixing of cultures and the abolition of ethnic identities are not on the schedule of the Twenty-first century. India, China, Black Africa, the Muslim world, whether Arab or Turkish, and so on, are affirming their identities and do not tolerate either a colonising immigration or cultural mixing on their own soil. Only the European pseudo-elites are defending the dogma of a ‘multicultural world’, which is a chimera.

They argue that all nations today face the same enemies. The bogeymen of globalism, multiculturalism, and immigration are threatening to destroy the traditions and identities of all nations, therefore nationalists across the world should make common cause in opposing these global forces. Hungarians, Italians, Turks, and Israelis should build walls, destroy bridges, and slow down the movement of people, goods, money, and ideas.

nationalism and religion still divide our human civilization into different and often hostile camps. This collision between global problems and local identities manifests itself in the crisis that now besets the greatest multicultural experiment in the world—the European Union. Built on the promise of universal liberal values, the EU is teetering on the verge of disintegration due to the difficulties of integration and immigration.

Julian and his team of copy-writers had noted that the phrase ‘Lest we forget’ had so far been reserved for fallen soldiers. In minutes they had created a viral post accusing ‘crazed trans multi-cultural zealots’ of claiming that a dead transsexual was as much an English hero as the fighter pilots who had died during the Battle of Britain. Malika’s algorithms then swiftly sent the message to the people most likely to be annoyed by it.

It was not "ironic" that the most liberal country in western Europe should be so eager to descend into a revoltingly illiberal servitude. It was entirely foreseeable. Justifying extraordinary levels of mass immigration first as narrowly defined economic self-interest and then as moral vanity, Europe made its principal source of new Europeans a population whose primal identity derived from a belief system that claimed total jurisdiction over every aspect of their lives. They were then amazed to discover that that same population of new "Europeans" assumed that all European social, cultural, and political life should realign itself with that belief system. Perhaps they should have considered that possibility earlier...the European establishment unwittingly eased the transition from "multicultural tolerance" to the more explicitly unicultural and intolerant regimes that followed.

Many pundits, politicians and ordinary citizens believe that the Syrian civil war, the rise of the Islamic State, the Brexit mayhem and the instability of the European Union all result from a clash between ‘Western Civilisation’ and ‘Islamic Civilisation’. Western attempts to impose democracy and human rights on Muslim nations resulted in a violent Islamic backlash, and a wave of Muslim immigration coupled with Islamic terrorist attacks caused European voters to abandon multicultural dreams in favour of xenophobic local identities.

The recognition that modern societies are no longer monolithic, that the imaginary social space has mushroomed into a multitude of identities has propelled us into a realization that we are in an era where interculturality, transculturalism and the eventual prospect of identifying a cosmopolitan citizenship can become a reality. However we still remain circumscribed by our Little Italies, our China Towns etc., which beyond the pleasures of experiencing culinary delights, nevertheless create a self illusion that we have attained a level of cultural awareness of the other.

Roman numerals offer more opportunities for errors, since the same digit may be either added or subtracted, depending on its place in the sequence. More fundamentally, Roman numerals have no zero or negative numbers to indicate either debits or declining mathematical functions. Like other cultural features, numbers do not exist simply as badges of cultural identity, but to get a particular job done—and some cultural features get the job done better than others, which is why virtually every culture discards some of its own features and replaces them with features borrowed from other cultures.

The militants of ethnicity contend that a main objective of public education should be the protection, strengthening, celebration, and perpetuation of ethnic origins and identities. Separatism, however, nourishes prejudices, magnifies differences, and stirs antagonisms. The consequent increase in ethnic and racial conflict lies behind the hullabaloo over "multiculturalism" and "political correctness", over the inequities of the "Eurocentric" curriculum, and over the notion that history and literature should be taught not as intellectual disciplines but as therapies whose function is to raise minority self-esteem.

The images of communal survival and flourishing our culture feeds us all to easily blur our vision of God‘s new creation – for instance, we think America is a Christian nation, and democracy the only truly Christian political arrangement. Unaware that our culture has subverted our faith, we lose a place from which to judge our own culture. In order to keep our allegiance to Jesus Christ pure, we need to nurture commitment to the multicultural community of Christian churches. We need to see ourselves and our own understanding of God’s future with the eyes of Christians from other cultures, listen to voices of Christians from other cultures so as to make sure that the voice of our culture has not drowned out the voice of Jesus Christ.

Some Americans have promoted multiculturalism at home; some have promoted universalism abroad; and some have done both. Multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West; universalism abroad threatens the West and the world. Both deny the uniqueness of Western culture. The global monoculturalists want to make the world like America. The domestic mulitculturalists want to make America like the world. A multicultural America is impossible because a non-Western America is not American. A multicultural world is unavoidable because global empire is impossible. The preservation of the United States and the West requires the renewal of Western identity. The security of the world requires acceptance of global multiculturality.

Every four years, the Republican Party pines for another Reagan. But Ronald Reagan, Governor of California for eight years, couldn't get elected in today's not-so-Golden State. Jerry Brown, Governor Moonbeam back in the Seventies, now presides as Governor Twilight, lead vampire of a malign alliance of unionized bureaucrats and a swollen dependency class that maintains them in office at the expense of a remorselessly shrinking productive class. As the nation's demographic profile trends ever more Californian perhaps Norquist's predictions of naturally conservative Hispanics pining for a new Coolidge will come to fruition. Or perhaps Bob Beckel's more crudely determinative analysis will prove correct--that, in a multicultural society, jostling identity groups will stick with the party of ethnocultural spoils.

Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitrary barriers (such as those based on race, and more recently on sexual orientation). But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital. For example, the urge to help the inner-city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families.72 The urge to empower students by giving them the right to sue their teachers and schools in the 1970s has eroded authority and moral capital in schools, creating disorderly environments that harm the poor above all.73 The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.

Pierre Eliot Trudeau's gift of an official policy of multiculturalism appeared in our midst in a period of rapid influx of third world immigrants into Canada, as well as in a moment of growing intensity of the old English-French rivalry....In this context the proclamation of multiculturalism could be seen as a diffusing or muting device for francophone national aspirations, as much as a way of coping with the non-European immigrants' arrival. It also sidelined the claims of Canada's aboriginal population, which had displayed a propensity toward armed struggles for land claims, as exemplified by the American Indian Movement (AIM). The reduction of these groups' demands into cultural demands was obviously helpful to the nationhood of Canada with its hegemonic anglo-Canadian national culture....It is not an accident that Bissoondath, who confuses between antiracism and multiculturalism, should fall for a political discourse of assimilation which keeps the so-called immigrants in place through a constantly deferred promise....As the focus shifts from processes of exclusion and marginalization to ethnic identities and their lack of adaptiveness, it is forgotten that these officially multicultural ethnicities, so embraced or rejected, are themselves the constructs of colonial - orientalist and racist - discourses.

Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitrary barriers (such as those based on race, and more recently on sexual orientation). But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital. For example, the urge to help the inner-city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families.72 The urge to empower students by giving them the right to sue their teachers and schools in the 1970s has eroded authority and moral capital in schools, creating disorderly environments that harm the poor above all.73 The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.74 On issue after issue, it’s as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive. Such “reforms” may lower the overall welfare of a society, and sometimes they even hurt the very victims liberals were trying to help.

If we consider this official or elite multiculturalism as an ideological state apparatus we can see it as a device for constructing and ascribing political subjectivities and agencies for those who are seen as legitimate and full citizens and others who are peripheral to this in many senses. There is in this process an element of racialized ethnicization, which whitens North Americans of European origins and blackens or darkens their 'others' by the same stroke. This is integral to Canadian class and cultural formation and distribution of political entitlement. The old and established colonial/racist discourses of tradition and modernity, civilization and savagery, are the conceptual devices of the construction and ascription of these racialized ethnicities. It is through these 'conceptual practices of power' (Smith, 1990) that South Asians living in Canada, for example, can be reified as hindu or muslim, in short as religious identities.....We need to repeat that there is nothing natural or primordial about cultural identities - religious or otherwise - and their projection as political agencies. In this multiculturalism serves as a collection of cultural categories for ruling or administering, claiming their representational status as direct emanations of social ontologies. This allows multiculturalism to serve as an ideology, both in the sense of a body of content, claiming that 'we' or 'they' are this or that kind of cultural identities, as well as an epistemological device for occluding the organization of the social....an interpellating device which segments the nation's cultural and political space as well as its labour market into ethnic communities....Defined thus, third world or non-white peoples living in Canada become organized into competitive entities with respect to each other. They are perceived to have no commonality, except that they are seen as, or self-appellate as, being essentially religious, traditional or pre-modern, and thus civilizationally backward. This type of conceptualization of political and social subjectivity or agency allows for no cross-border affiliation or formation, as for example does the concept of class.

No student should be denied the educational opportunities offered her peers because of where she was born or the economic condition of her family or, for that matter, her family’s home language or racial identity or any other condition beyond her control.

Apparently many professionals do not truly believe that the need to honor our connections is an essential part of family life, as this belief is not reflected in the way that they work with families in stress who are dealing with complex issues of foster care, guardianship, kinship, and adoption. Whether it was a closed or open adoption, an adopted child must learn to integrate at least two distinctly different families—the birth family and the adoptive family. The biracial or other-culture child must also integrate two distinctly different cultures. The challenge to adoptive parents, and to others connected to this child, is to help the child to develop his/her own identity within the framework of both cultures. The challenge to professionals is to help the whole family to see itself as a multicultural family, and to develop its identity while integrating—not ignoring—the distinctively different cultures. How can that happen if the professionals don’t see the importance of respect for culture? How can that happen if the professionals don’t see any difference in culture because the race is the same? The psycho-education and modeling done by the professionals who are initially involved in building these complex families can set a tone, and begin a process of respect and integration. Without this education and modeling, the parents might be so busy with other essential psychological and emotional issues, and with possible trauma management for this child, that they might ignore the very important issues of culture and development of identity. Without that awareness, how will the parents be prepared to model and teach the larger community—the schools, courts, religious institutions, and neighborhoods—thereby creating a holding environment for that child that both honors and respects all of who he/she is?

Islamism demanded no less of a root-and-branch overhaul of society. But because it was cloaked in religious garb, no one quite knew what to do with it, and people were desperate not to offend. There was confusion over whether to define our activism as a cultural identity, an ideology or a faith. To top it off, Islamism went through a decade of being embraced by both the left and right wings. The default left-leaning liberal position was to embrace the movement as part of multicultural sensitivity: to tell people to stop practising their faith was imperialism in nineties clothing, a colonial hangover bordering on racism. Instead, we were embraced as a new generation of anti-colonial politicised youth. Curiously, the default position on the right was to embrace us too, because it had been the Afghan Mujahideen, backed by the CIA, who fought the Soviet Union. Lest we forget, this was when Hollywood films such as Stallone’s Rambo 3 portrayed the Afghan Mujahideen as heroes.

The loss of white ethno-cultural confidence manifests itself in other ways. Among the most important is a growing unwillingness to indulge the anti-white ideology of the cultural left. When whites were an overwhelming majority, empirically unsupported generalizations about whites could be brushed off as amusing and mischievous but ultimately harmless. As whites decline, fewer are willing to abide such attacks. At the same time, white decline emboldens the cultural left, with its dream of radical social transformation. ... From a modern perspective, the most important figure to emerge from this milieu is Randolph Bourne. Viewed as a spokesman for the new youth culture in upper-middle-class New York, Bourne burst onto the intellectual scene with an influential essay in the respected Atlantic Monthly in July 1916 entitled ‘Trans-National America’. Here Bourne was influenced by Jewish-American philosopher Horace Kallen. Kallen was both a Zionist and a multiculturalist. Yet he criticized the Liberal Progressive worldview whose cosmopolitan zeal sought to consign ethnicity to the dustbin of history. Instead, Kallen argued that ‘men cannot change their grandfathers’. Rather than all groups giving and receiving cultural influence, as in Dewey’s vision, or fusing together, as mooted by fellow Zionist Israel Zangwill in his play The Melting Pot (1910), Kallen spoke of America as a ‘federation for international colonies’ in which each group, including the Anglo-Saxons, could maintain their corporate existence. There are many problems with Kallen’s model, but there can be no doubt that he treated all groups consistently. Bourne, on the other hand, infused Kallen’s structure with WASP self-loathing. As a rebel against his own group, Bourne combined the Liberal Progressives’ desire to transcend ‘New Englandism’ and Protestantism with Kallen’s call for minority groups to maintain their ethnic boundaries. The end product was what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism, whereby minorities identify with their groups while Anglo-Protestants morph into cosmopolites. Thus Bourne at once congratulates the Jew ‘who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his’, while encouraging his fellow Anglo-Saxons to: "Breathe a larger air . . . [for] in his [young Anglo-Saxon’s] new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself a citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide." Bourne, not Kallen, is the founding father of today’s multiculturalist left because he combines rebellion against his own culture and Liberal Progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement – for minorities only – of Kallen’s ethnic conservatism. In other words, ethnic minorities should preserve themselves while the majority should dissolve itself.

Capitalism needs an enemy. If a real one doesn’t exist, it simply creates one … “Marxism.” Since there is no political and economic Marxism in America, the American right have invented cultural Marxism to perform the role of ultimate “other”, the thing to be hated, feared and resisted. What they call cultural Marxism is in fact what sane people call liberal cultural capitalism, i.e. the culture associated with liberal capitalists rather than conservative capitalists. Of course, in the demented minds of the far right, liberalism is Marxism, which is why Barack Obama was routinely branded a Marxist by the far right, despite never espousing a Marxist sentiment in his entire life. Liberal views, multiculturalism, and political correctness are not Marxist. They are liberal. Why would anyone call them Marxist except to demonize them? No honest person would ever refer to them as anything other than liberal, but since when have the American far right ever been honest? Their game is always the same: to generate maximum hatred of anything that is not conservative, libertarian, Confederate, racist, white Supremacist, and Nazi. Marxism is quintessentially about class struggle, about the workers versus the owners, and the aim of producing a classless society where the people are fully in charge of their own lives, and are never the slaves of the masters. Liberalism, by contrast, does not focus on class struggle but on values, identities and “rights”, especially of minorities. Right wingers have confused liberal capitalism with Marxism. Of course, they have done this deliberately to demonize liberal capitalism in order to convert all capitalists to conservative capitalism. They only want to see conservative (right wing) capitalism, or libertarian (far right) capitalism. Everything else is to be routinely denounced as “Marxist.” It’s just the good old McCarthyite tactic – tried and tested over the decades – that right wingers love so much.

I did not understand that I was 'championing' multiculturalism simply by depicting it, or by describing it as anything other than incipient tragedy. At the same time I don't think I ever was quite naive enough to believe, even at twenty-one, that racially homogeneous societies were necessarily happier or more peaceful than ours simply by virtue of their homogeneity. After all, even a kid half my age knew what the ancient Greeks did to each other, and the Romans, and the seventeenth-century British, and the nineteenth-century Americans. My best friend during my youth--now my husband--is himself from Northern Ireland, an area where people who look absolutely identical to each other, eat the same food, pray to the same God, read the same holy book, wear the same clothes and celebrate the same holidays have yet spent four hundred years at war over a relatively minor doctrinal difference they later allowed to morph into an all-encompassing argument over land, government and national identity. Racial homogeneity is no guarantor of peace, any more than racial heterogeneity is fated to fail.

Multiculturalism attacks individualism by defining people as mere manifestations of groups (racial, ethnic, sexual) rather than as self-defining participants in a free society. And one way to make racial, ethnic, or sexual identity primary is to destroy alternative sources of individuality and social cohesion, such as a shared history, a common culture, and unifying values and virtues.

The US government sponsors a publication called Managing Diversity, which is supposed to help federal employees work better in an increasingly mixed-race workplace. One of its 1997 issues published a front-page story called “What are the Values of White People?” The author, Harris Sussman, explained that merely to speak of whites is “to invoke [a] history and experience of injustice and cruelty. When we say ‘white people,’ we mean the people of greed who value things over people, who value money over people.” Noel Ignatiev, formerly of Harvard, endorsed such sentiments in a publication called Race Traitor, which promoted the slogan, “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” The lead article of the first issue of Race Traitor was called “Abolish the White Race—by any Means Necessary.” By this Prof. Ignatiev did not mean that whites should be physically eliminated, only that they should “dissolve the club” of white privilege whose alleged purpose is to exploit non-whites. Christine Sleeter, President of the National Association for Multicultural Education, explains what whiteness means: “ravenous materialism, competitive individualism, and a way of living characterized by putting acquisition of possessions above humanity.” In 2000, there were bomb threats and anti-black e-mail at the University of Iowa that turned out to be a fake hate crime staged by a black woman. Ann Rhodes, a white woman who was vice president for university relations was surprised: “I figured it was going to be a white guy between 25 and 55 because they’re the root of most evil.

Different groups have different priorities. Because Hispanics tend to have low incomes, they support increases in government services, even at the cost of more taxes for others. Most Hispanics supported all five spending initiatives on the May, 2005 California ballot; most whites opposed all five. Prof. Nikolai Roussanov of the Wharton School has found that both blacks and Hispanics spend 50 percent less on medical care than do whites with similar incomes, and that blacks and Hispanics spend 16 percent and 30 percent less, respectively, on education than do whites with similar incomes. Many studies have also found that blacks and Hispanics save less than whites for future goals like retirement. How do they spend their money? Blacks are more likely than whites to buy lottery tickets and to spend disproportionately more money doing so. Prof Roussanov says the biggest difference, however, is that blacks and Hispanics spend 30 percent more than whites with the same income on what he calls “visible goods” meant to convey status, such as clothing, cars, and jewelry. Different groups have different buying patterns. In 2004, Sears decided to turn 97 of its 870 locations into “multicultural stores,” in which clothing, signs, décor, and displays were geared to Hispanics and blacks, who do not have the same tastes and body sizes as whites. Hispanics want “stylish,” form-fitting clothing in bright, loud colors, and the highest heels available. Blacks need more “plus” sizes. In the multicultural stores, Sears displays the loud clothing prominently, near entrances. Clothing white women are likely to buy, such as the more traditional Land’s End line, is in the back. For years there was a Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum in Victorville, California, filled with Roy Rogers memorabilia and even his horse Trigger—stuffed, of course. That part of California is now heavily Hispanic, and no one is interested in Roy Rogers. The museum moved to Branson, Missouri, which has become a resort catering to bluegrass and country music fans, who are overwhelmingly white. Victorville immigrant Rosalina Sondoval-Marin did not miss the museum. “Roy Rogers? He doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “There’s a revolution going on, and it don’t include no Roy Rogers.

Prosperous non-white nations such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea would be very desirable destinations for Third-World immigrants, and if those countries opened their borders, they would quickly be filled with foreigners. They keep their borders closed because they know they cannot have the same Japan or Taiwan with different people. Israel, likewise, is determined to remain a Jewish state because Israelis know they cannot have the same Israel with different people. In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved tough measures to deport illegal immigrants, calling them a “threat to the character of the country.” Linguistically, culturally, and racially, Japan is homogeneous. This means Japanese never even think about a host of problems that torment Americans. Since Japan has only one race, no one worries about racism. There was no civil rights movement, no integration struggle, and no court-ordered busing. There is no bilingual education, and no affirmative action. There is no tyranny of “political correctness,” and no one is clamoring for a “multi-cultural curriculum.” When a company needs to hire someone, it doesn’t give a thought to “ethnic balance;” it just hires the best person. No Japanese are sent to reeducation seminars because of “insensitivity.” Japan has no Civil Rights Commission or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It has no Equal Housing Act or Voting Rights Act. No one worries about drawing up voting districts to make sure minorities are elected. There are no noisy ethnic groups trying to influence foreign policy. Japanese do not know what a “hate crime” would be. And they know that an American-style immigration policy would change everything. They want Japan to remain Japanese. This is a universal view among non-whites. Those countries that send the largest numbers of emigrants to the United States—Mexico, India, China—permit essentially no immigration at all. For them, their nations are exclusive homelands for their own people. Most people refuse to share their homelands. Robert Pape, a leading expert on suicide bombing, explains that its motive is almost always nationalism, not religious fanaticism. Whether in Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Chechnya, Kashmir, the West Bank, Iraq, or Afghanistan, its main objective is to drive out occupying aliens. It is only Western nations—and only within the last few decades—that have ever voluntarily accepted large-scale immigration that could reduce the inhabitants to a racial minority. What the United States and other European-derived nations are doing is without historical precedent.

Under the current rules of American society, whites have no moral grounds to preserve racial majorities in any context, whether in a club, neighborhood, school, region, the nation as a whole, or even in their own families. Somewhere, deep in their bones, whites yearn for the comfort, the ease, the joy of living among their own people in societies that reflect the values of their ancestors. They answer this yearning whenever they move from Southern California to the North, from the city to the suburbs, from diversity to homogeneity. But according to today’s racial dogma, this yearning is evil. There will always be “white Meccas,” enclaves for wealthy whites who can afford them, but with no moral, legal, or practical way to preserve majorities, most whites will eventually come to the end of the road. They will find that the America for which they yearn has disappeared. At what point would it be legitimate for whites to act in their own group interests? When they become a minority? When they are no more than 30 percent of the population? Ten percent? Or must they never be allowed to take any action to ensure that the land in which they live reflects their values, their culture, their manners, their traditions, and honors the achievements of their ancestors? If whites do not cherish and defend these things, no one else will do it for them. If whites do not rekindle some sense of their collective interests they will be pushed aside by people who have a very clear sense of their interests. Eventually, whites will come to understand that to dismantle and even demonize white racial consciousness while other races cultivate racial consciousness is a fatal form of unilateral disarmament. For their very survival as a distinct people with a distinct culture, whites must recognize something all others take for granted: that race is a fundamental part of individual and group identity. Any society based on the assumption that race can be wished or legislated away ensures for itself an endless agony of pretense, conflict, and failure. For 60 years, we have wished and legislated in vain. In so doing, by opening the United States to peoples from every corner of the world, we have created agonizing problems for future generations. As surely as the Communists were mistaken in their hopes of remaking human nature, so have been the proponents of diversity and multi-culturalism. What goals might whites pursue if they had a racial identity like that of other groups? Clearly, they would end immigration; it is not in the interests of whites to be displaced by others. They would also recognize that when whites prefer to live, work, and go to school with people of their own race, that is no different from anyone else wanting to do these things. Whites—and others—should have legal means to preserve local majorities if that is their preference. That preference should not be imposed on anyone who wishes to live in a more Bohemian manner, but it is wrong to condemn whites—and only whites—for instincts science suggests are part of human nature. Another goal of whites would be to end the current propaganda about the advantages of diversity, for it only justifies their dispossession. Whites should also be free—again, like all other groups—to express pride in the accomplishments of their people.

Identity can’t be compartmentalized. You can’t divide it up into halves or thirds or any other separate segments. I haven’t got several identities: I’ve got just one, made up of many components in a mixture that is unique to me, just as other people’s identity is unique to them as individuals. —Amin Maaloof, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, 2012, p.

My earliest perceptions about Iran under the Pahlavis, as a young student of Middle Eastern history and social sciences in the 1990s, were absorbed in these contradictory (and often confusing) evaluations on the backdrop of overwhelming paradigm shifts and critical theories, especially those provided by subaltern studies, and the legitimation of the academic study of popular culture genres by feminist scholarship. Calls for a necessary de-westernization of Orientalist frameworks coupled with the introduction of multi(s) and posts- in contemporary literature gave way to rethinking about identity and multi-culturalism, feminisms, and post-feminism instead of feminism, gender as a replacement for sexual differences, modernity in terms of “multiple-modernities,” post-modernity or late modernity, and the conceptualization of the world’s nations as “imagined communities.

The collapse of solidarity and security for many western European working people after the 1970s was compounded by the postwar flood of Third World immigrants into western Europe. When times were good, the immigrants were welcome to do the dirty jobs that the national labor force now spurned. When Europeans began to face long-term structural unemployment for the first time since the Great Depression, however, immigrants became unwelcome. Moreover, European immigration had changed. Whereas earlier immigrants had come from southern or eastern Europe and differed only slightly from their new hosts (with the notable and significant exception of Jews from eastern Europe in the 1880s and the 1930s), the new immigrants came from former colonial territories: North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, and Turkey. And whereas earlier immigrants (some Jews again excepted) had tended to assimilate quickly and disappear, the new immigrants often clung to visibly different customs and religions. Europeans had to learn to coexist with permanent African, Indian, and Islamic communities that flaunted their separate identities. The immigrant threat was not only economic and social. The immigrants were seen increasingly as undermining national identity with their alien customs, languages, and religions. A global youth culture, mostly marketed by Americans and often associated with black performers, did to local cultural traditions what the global economy had done to local smokestack industry. Anti-immigrant resentment was pay dirt for radical Right movements in western Europe after the 1970s. It was the main force behind the British National Front. The most successful of them—Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France and Jörg Haider’s Freiheitspartei in Austria—were almost entirely devoted to exploiting anti-immigrant fears, fighting multiculturalism and an alleged immigrant criminal propensity, and proposing the expulsion of the alien poor.

Similarly, the hopes of earlier critiques of progress also survive in multicultural forms. Rousseau’s vision of primitive collective virtue is transformed into a vision of a socialistic community with guaranteed equality for all members, regardless of race, color, or gender. Romantic vitalism and Nietzsche’s Overman reemerge as the energy and vitality that a “whole” and healthy racial identity provides for the individual. Indeed, one of the key issues in multiculturalism’s critique of the modern West, that of identity, is part of that Romantic vitalist legacy.

An antiracist educator refuses to represent minority groups only in terms of their culture and ethnicity, a key risk in what we often call “multicultural” education. We must do more than recognize and celebrate cultural diversity, as if minorities are no more than their racial-ethnic identity.

For those who cling to the days of monochromatic American identity, the sweep of change strikes a fundamental fear of not being a part of an America that is multicultural and multicolored. In their minds, the way of life that has sustained them faces an existential crisis, and the response has been vicious, calculated, and effective.

Early in 2014, I read On Genetic Interests, Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration, by Frank Salter. Reading this book, in combination with books and articles on the history of Canadian multiculturalism, I realised that multiculturalism was an asymmetrical system in which Europeans, and only Europeans, were expected to celebrate other cultures, feel guilty about their own ethnic identity, and behave as universal altruists; while at the same time non-Europeans inside the European homelands were being encouraged to practice their in-group ethnic interests. It became obvious that multiculturalism was not simply about ‘understanding’ different cultures but about accepting mass immigration into European lands. The dissemination of multiculturalism in academia was an effort, as Salter saw it, ‘to break down or neutralise ethnocentric responses to diversity’ among Europeans through ‘diversity education’ and ‘by breaking down the correspondence between national and ethnic identity.’[1] The more this correspondence was diluted, both through the ideology of cultural Marxism and the actual effectuation of racial interbreeding in the West, the more difficult it would be to identify Western civilisation.

How many people in this country had felt it necessary to hide their true identities as both of my grandmothers had done? How many people, like my brother, were terrified that their history of “tainted blood” might be discovered? How much better it might have been if we’d all been allowed to be who we are, if we’d been free to build a multiethnic, multicultural society. We’d been so imprisoned by the nationalist myth promulgated by those who felt that in order to create a nation they had to create a national identity. Yet the myth was so fragile that those who felt their existence depended on it had to resort to violence and intimidation to protect it.

From bell hooks: When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully. I believe this. the ancestors taught me it was so. as a child, I loved playing in dirt, in that rick Kentucky soil, that was a source of life. before I understood anything about the pain and exploitation of the southern system of sharecropping, I understood that grown-up black folks loved the land… from the moment of their first meeting, Native American and African people shared with one another a respect for the life-giving forces of nature, of the earth. African settlers in Florida taught the Seminoles methods for rice cultivation. Native people taught recently arrived black folks about the many uses of corn. Sharing the reverence for the earth, they helped one another remember that, despite the white man’s ways, the land belonged to everyone. Estrangement from nature and engagement in mind/body splits made it all the more possible for black people to internalize white-supremacist assumptions about black identity…if we can think of urban life as a location where black folks learned to accept the mind/body split that made it possible to abuse the body, we can better understand the growth of nihilism and despair in the black psyche.

An anti-racist person is on a life-long journey that includes forming new understanding of and ways to live her or his racial identity and then increasing commitment to and engagement in anti-racism actions

The civil rights revolution provoked new declarations of ethnic identity by the now long-resident "new migration" from southern and eastern Europe--Italians, Greeks, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians. Claiming to speak for white minorities aggrieved by the idea of the melting pot, Michael Novak, an early and influential theorist of multiculturalism, wrote The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. "Growing up in America", Novak said, "has been an assault upon my sense of worthiness", and to improve his self-esteem he affirmed the need for a politics of identity. Against the conception of America as a nation of individuals, Novak hailed what he called "the new ethnic politics", which, he said, "asserts that groups can structure the rules and goals and procedures of American life". The passion for "roots" was reinforced by the "third-generation" effect formulated in Hansen's Law, named after Marcus Lee Hansen, the great pioneer in immigration history: "What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember". It was reinforced, too, and powerfully, by the waning American optimism about the nation's prospects. For two centuries Americans had been confident that life would be better for their children than it was for them. In their exuberant youth, Americans had disdained the past and, as John Quincy Adams urged, looked forward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors. Amid forebodings of national decline, Americans now began to look forward less and backward more. The rising cult of ethnicity was a symptom of decreasing confidence in the American future.

The pressure for the new cult of ethnicity came less from the minorities en masse than from their often self-appointed spokesmen, Most ethnics, white and non-white, saw themselves primarily as Americans. "The cravings for 'historical identity'", Gunnar Myrdal said at the height of the ethnic rage, "is not in any sense a people's movement. Those cravings have been raised by a few well-established intellectuals, professors, writers--mostly, I gather, of a third generation". Few of them, Myrdal thought, made much effort to talk to their own ethnic groups. This movement, Myrdal added with a certain contempt, was only "upper-class intellectual romanticism".

In 1974, after testimony from ethnic spokesmen denouncing the melting pot as a conspiracy to homogenize America, Congress passed the Ethnic Heritage Studies Program Act--a statute that, by applying the ethnic ideology to all Americans, compromised the historic right of Americans to decide their ethnic identities for themselves. The act ignored those millions of Americans--surely a majority--who refused identification with any particular ethnic group. The ethnic upsurge (it can hardly be called a revival because it was unprecedented) began as a gesture of protest against the Anglocentric culture. It became a cult, and today it threatens to become a counter-revolution against the original theory of America as "one people", a common culture, a single nation.

The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.74

What they were claiming to criticise was ‘multiculturalism’ as a state-sponsored policy: the idea of the state encouraging people to live parallel lives in the same country and particularly in living under customs and laws that stood in opposition to those of the country they were living in. Rather than leading to a unified identity it led to a fracturing of identities, where instead of making society colour- or identity-blind, it suddenly made identity into everything.

The case of Switzerland promises to provide a unique example of how ‘constitutional patriotism’ leads to the establishment of an identity with post-national elements for a multicultural society; by way of analogical reasoning, the Swiss paradigm can arguably be inferred to the EU case.

By their very nature, returnees seek a reconnection to a past life, a former identity marked more often than not by a single language or a single cultural frame of reference. We go back to what we know, including our native tongues. This process of reclaiming a homogenous existence runs counter to multi-culturalism on a societal level and hybridity on an individual level. Aren't we supposed to be complex, hybrid creatures containing multitudes? What about the concept of multiple belongings promoted by such internationally successful authors as Elif Shafak and Zadie Smith? On paper, where it mostly lives, this concept sounds ideal. "Multiple belongings are nurtured by cultural encounters but they are not only the preserve of people who travel", writes Shafak. "It is an attitude, a way of thinking, rather than the number of stamps on your passport. It is about thinking of yourself, and your fellow human beings, in more fluid terms than solid categories". I wouldn't go as far as to suggest that returns imply a repudiation of a complex view of identity or of globalization - it's globalization that has allowed the many people you'll meet in this book, me included, to come and go, to cross borders and cultures - but they force us to think of movement in multi-directional ways. Some returnees find that the life they thoughts they would have back home is a fantasy, so they make their way back to the host country. Homeland returns remain unpredictable, in part because despite their historical contexts, they don't have the clear road maps and narratives that outward migrations enjoy.

A researcher said, “A diverse nation is a more divided nation.” Who knew? Duh! Multicultural nations are always divided, and, as Abraham Lincoln told us, a House divided against itself cannot stand. Multiculturalism must be smashed to smithereens. What we need is a diverse monoculture, as prevailed in ancient Greece, with its countless city-states, all following a common religion, language and general culture. We need competitive diversity, but an overall level of cooperation and common identity. Football teams compete with each other in a league. They all obey the rules and framework of the league, and don’t go off and do their own thing. The league is a diverse monoculture. In a multicultural system, different cultures would reject the league, and create their own leagues, or even reject football entirely, and play alien sports imported from their originating cultures. It’s time people got real. Multicultural division is a disaster. Monocultural division is competitive and enjoyable.

Although diversity brings division, once it exists we should do our best to mitigate it and bring people together; and yet by doing so we encourage politicians to promote multiculturalism as a good in itself, so allowing interested parties both to lobby for more immigration and actively promote identity politics, so increasing the future likelihood of conflict.

Revolution for Gramsci did not come from above but from below. It was organic. And the failure, in his eyes, of revolutionary elites is that they were often as dictatorial and disconnected from workers as capitalist elites. The masses had to be integrated into the structures of power to create a new form of mass politics—hence his insistence that all people are intellectuals capable of autonomous and independent thought. A democracy is possible only when all of its citizens understand the machinery of power and have a role in the exercising of power. Gramsci would have despaired of the divide in the United States between our anemic left and the working class. The ridiculing of Trump supporters, the failure to listen to and heed the legitimate suffering of the working poor, including the white working poor, ensures that any revolt will be stillborn. Those of us who seek to overthrow the corporate state will have to begin locally. This means advocating issues such as raising the minimum wage, fighting for clean water, universal health care, and good public education, including free university education, that speak directly to the improvement of the lives of the working class. It does not mean lecturing the working class, and especially the white working class, about multiculturalism and identity politics. We cannot battle racism, bigotry, and hate crimes, often stoked by the ruling elites, without first battling for economic justice. When we speak in the language of justice first, and the language of inclusiveness second, we will begin to blunt the proto-fascism embraced by many Trump supporters. Revolt without an alternative political vision, Gramsci knew, was doomed. Workers are as easily mobilized around antidemocratic ideologies such as hyper-nationalism, fascism, and racism. If they lack consciousness, they can become a dark force in the body politic, as history has shown and as we see at Trump rallies and with the proliferation of hate crimes.

Revolution for Gramsci did not come from above but from below. It was organic. And the failure, in his eyes, of revolutionary elites is that they were often as dictatorial and disconnected from workers as capitalist elites. The masses had to be integrated into the structures of power to create a new form of mass politics—hence his insistence that all people are intellectuals capable of autonomous and independent thought. A democracy is possible only when all of its citizens understand the machinery of power and have a role in the exercising of power. Gramsci would have despaired of the divide in the United States between our anemic left and the working class. The ridiculing of Trump supporters, the failure to listen to and heed the legitimate suffering of the working poor, including the white working poor, ensures that any revolt will be stillborn. Those of us who seek to overthrow the corporate state will have to begin locally. This means advocating issues such as raising the minimum wage, fighting for clean water, universal health care, and good public education, including free university education, that speak directly to the improvement of the lives of the working class. It does not mean lecturing the working class, and especially the white working class, about multiculturalism and identity politics. We cannot battle racism, bigotry, and hate crimes, often stoked by the ruling elites, without first battling for economic justice. When we speak in the language of justice first, and the language of inclusiveness second, we will begin to blunt the proto-fascism embraced by many Trump supporters.

Before Trump, conservatives seeking to appeal to Latinos typically embraced the politics of conservative multiculturalism. Politicians such as George W. Bush reached out to Latino voters by showing a familiarity with their language and history, emphasizing the values of diversity and inclusion. Depicting Latinos as a distinct and valuable part of America’s democratic mosaic, conservative multiculturalism connected Latino culture to Republican values, emphasizing conservative approaches to faith, patriotism and the traditional family. Trump, by contrast, knows nothing of the history of Latinos in the United States and rarely even pretends to find value in Latinos’ distinct identities. Rather than offering his non-White voters recognition, Trump has offered them multiracial whiteness.

Over recent decades, the European left had come to support a form of multiculturalism that downplayed the importance of integrating immigrants into the national culture. Under the banner of antiracism it looked the other way from evidence that assimilation wasn’t working. The new populist right, for its part, looks back nostalgically at a fading national culture that was based on ethnicity or religion, a culture that was largely free of immigrants or significant diversities.

These stories relieve me of the pain of belonging nowhere and give me the key to everywhere. As I once longed for a singular place, a singular ethnicity or plot of land over generations, I now long for its opposite, for a space beyond belonging. I have travelled to many places in order to scope a sense of ownership or repatriation, but as I try to square my politics with my privilege, it seems that my only true inheritance is that I am always running somewhere else.

Race and religion have been deliberately conflated. All the intolerant have to do is say that it’s racist, or politically incorrect, or antisemitic, to challenge them, and the cowed liberals immediately all fall into line like the craven little poodles they are. The one thing the fascists can bank on is that if they play the race card, or any other minority card, they gain instant and total immunity. All the useful idiots of liberalism will rally around them and support them. But all intelligent Westerners should see through the scam. Islam is not, and never will be, a race. It has nothing to do with race. It’s a totalitarian system trying to take over the world, and everyone has the right and indeed duty to oppose it.

I thought about the slippery dream of nationalism. We’ve always been clannish, but nationalism is surprisingly modern, growing from the Romanticism of the eighteenth century when an idea emerged that there was a national soul, akin here to ‘The Myanmar Spirit’. The spirit of a nation is tied to its art, literature and traditions, and to the mishmash of things we call culture. Nationalism helped mould identities and was crucial in spelling the end of colonialism and in reinforcing the right to self-governance. But it is, of course, a lie. Everywhere is, and always has been, multicultural.

Number of Ingroups If only one ingroup is present, it dominates social life. It provides the only source of norms, identity, and social support. Collectivists may have relatively few ingroups, but they identify very strongly with them. The ingroups of collectivists provide social insurance, protection, and a relaxing atmosphere. The presence of many ingroups encourages individualism. For example, the separation of church and state in the United States automatically creates more than one ingroup and is a premise upon which multiculturalism and democracy are based. It is also the foundation for social movements because each ingroup can potentially become a social movement. Multiple ingroups are especially important in large urban centers, where the social controls of small ingroups are often weak. The social structures of these communities are loose, and several of the factors we have discussed converge to put more emphasis on personal responsibility and less on norms. With more ingroups and looseness there is an increase in social diversity, tolerance for deviance, and multiculturalism. Thus the factors that make cultures loose and allow many choices favor individualism. Conversely, collectivism is maximal in tight cultures, where there are few choices.

Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization.

But against proponents of identity politics and multiculturalism, Žižek argues that there is a kind of universality that is negative. The universal is not an ideal as some positive content that is always implicit to any “system” of thought. On the contrary the universal is a kind of traumatic antagonism around which ever-changing, thoroughly contingent, historical constellations of thought circle and revolve. Along these lines, according to Žižek’s reading of Hegel, the dialectic is a process without a subject, a process which revolves around a void or negativity. No agent (no God, humanity, or class as a collective subject) controls and directs the dialectical process.

The Ticklish Subject shows how today, in spite of the decline of the paternal metaphor and the inefficacy of ethical-political principles, global capitalist relations of production actually structure an ever more prohibitive and homogenized social reality: The true horror lies not in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital but, rather, in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course; that there is in fact no particular Secret Agent animating it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism (the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds) which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as global world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of today’s world. (Ticklish, p. 218) Multiculturalism – as well as postmodern efforts to reduce truth to “narratives” or “solidarity of belief” – simply further the interests of global capital. Žižek notes wryly that liberal pseudo-leftists really know all of this, but the problem is that they want to maintain their relatively comfortable lifestyles (bought at the expense of suffering in the Third World), and meanwhile to maintain the pose of revolutionary “beautiful souls.” Postmodern “post-politics” replaces the recognition of global ideological divisions with an emphasis on the collaboration of enlightened experts, technocrats, and specialists who negotiate to reach compromises. Such pragmatic “administration of social matters” accepts in advance the very global capitalist framework that determines the profitability of the compromise (Ticklish, p. 199). This suspension of the space for authentic politics leads to what Žižek calls “postmodern racism,” which ignores the universal rights of the political subject, proliferates divisions along cultural lines, and prevents the working class from politicizing its predicament. Even more seriously, according to Žižek, post-politics no longer merely represses the political, but forecloses it. Thus instead of violence as the neurotic “return of the repressed,” we see signs of a new kind of irrational and excessive violence. This new manifestation of violence results from the (psychotic) foreclosure of the Name of the Father that leads to a “return in the Real.” This violence is thus akin to the psychotic passage a l’acte: “a cruelty whose manifestations range from ‘fundamentalist’ racist and/or religious slaughter to the ‘senseless’ outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reason” (Ticklish, p. 198). Where then, is the power to combat such foreclosure? The Ticklish Subject shows that the subversive power of subjectivity arises only when the subject annuls himself as subject: the acknowledgment of the integral division or gap in subjectivity allows the move from subjection to subjective destitution. Insofar as the subject concedes to the inherent failure of symbolic practices, he no longer presupposes himself as a unified subject. He acknowledges the nonexistence of the symbolic big Other and the monstrosity of the Real. Such acceptance involves the full assertion – rather than the effacement – of the gap between the Real and its symbolization. In contrast to the artificial object character of the imaginary capitalist ego, The Ticklish Subject discloses the “empty place” of the subject as a purely structural function, and shows that this functioning emerges only as the withdrawal from one’s substantial identity, as the disintegration of the “self” that is situated and defined within a communal universe of meaning.

Americans can be proud of this very substantive identity; it is based on belief in the common political principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law, democratic accountability, and the principle that “all men are created equal” (now interpreted to include all women). These political ideas come directly out of the Enlightenment and are the only possible basis for unifying a modern liberal democracy that has become de facto multicultural

Years of officially promoted European idealism and denigration of national sentiment added to a growing sense of unease. What was it, in a world of multinational business and pan-European bureaucracy, to be Dutch, or French, or German?

The tendency of multiculturalism and identity politics to ignore the strengthened nationalist consciousness of Palestinian citizens of Israel and their challenge to the Jewish Zionist state is consistent with avoiding the fact that Israel is the vehicle implementing the Zionist colonial project, and not just another Western nation.

Part of this struggle involves an unrelenting critique of liberal multicultural “tolerance” (in the West as much as the rest), which despite all pretenses, prioritizes dominant white European culture (or in such countries as India, dominant Hindu culture), while patronizingly “tolerating” others (see Iqtidar and Sarkar 2018). Here, Muslim culture is fixed and stereotyped, most often reduced to a religious category, thereby ignoring the dynamic, diverse, and indeed secular mix that makes up the “Muslim world” (both outside and inside the “West”). What is most often missing is a properly politicized view of Muslim culture (or indeed culture writ large), in which political-economic antagonisms play a key role: thus, violence against women is not the result of some pathological religious practice, but most often imbricated with unequal state property/inheritance laws (and their lack of enforcement) and/or male domination in the advancing cash economy (Visweswaran 1994, 510; Salhi 2013). A universal politics worthy of its name cannot, as a result, engage in a purely “cultural politics” that avoids the key question of the politicization of the economy; this would merely play into the hands of postpolitical global capitalism, which, as underlined already, seeks to keep culture and economy apart. Linking the two spheres is precisely what enables universality: seeing the antagonisms of culture/identity (struggles of representation, violence against women, queer rights, racialization) as intimately linked to the antagonisms of global capitalism (socioeconomic and spatial inequality, environmental catastrophe) is what opens the door to shared struggle. It helps establish bonds of solidarity between those who struggle for justice in the West and those who participate in the same struggle in the “Muslim world” (and elsewhere). Perhaps those of us Westerners engaging in universalizing struggles can learn from the political vitality and truculence of the “Muslim world”: at a time when engagement, energy, and commitment to change the system are often so fickle in the West, the Islamic resurgence, despite often being misdirected, can teach us something about a refusal to be so easily co-opted and seduced by Western hegemony. The challenge, though, is to channel such “rage” to the right target, that is, to make it anti-systemic rather than anti-symptomatic.

The challenge for the part of no-part, as for all of us for that matter, is not to fall into the trap of approaching the violations of (colonial) power as a victim—which only empowers the violator to either ignore or further repress you or benevolently “right” the wrongs done to you in the form of minority rights protection or identity recognition—but to use the violation as an occasion to confront your own alienation. Violations disrupt one’s “organic” unity with one’s social context or community, and while violent and disorienting, they provide one with the opportunity to extract oneself from such a context, to come to terms with one’s non-coincidence with oneself. So rather than resorting to victimhood, ressentiment, or a search for authenticity and pride (which only strengthen the hand of multicultural/identity politics, as we have seen), the point is to use the violation to become a political agent of universality—by facing one’s own antagonisms, joining forces with those who are moved to do the same, and struggling to reconfigure together the system that made the violation possible in the first place.

All the arguments for multiculturalism — that people feel safer, more comfortable among people of the same group, and that they need their own cultural identity — are arguments against immigration, since English people must also feel the same. If people categorised as “white Britons” are not afforded that indulgence because they are a majority, do they attain it when they become a minority?

We’re not just going to win this thing. We’re going to win it in a landslide!” Watching this exceptional group of young people — we called them “the twenty-sevens” because no more than a couple were over thirty — shouting, yelling, laughing, screaming, celebrating, talking about their victory, about what they had accomplished, I have to admit I got a little emotional. My eyes started to well up. I snuck out the back door, into the same alley where a few hours earlier I’d received the news that my political career was finished. Quite the contrary. An entirely new chapter was just beginning. In the end, the Liberals had been right to fear us for all those years, because not only did we win in Outremont by a margin of 4,441 votes over the Liberal candidate, but two-thirds of self-identified Bloc supporters voted for us. These were people who might have voted Yes in the last referendum because they wanted Québec to be respected in the Canadian federation, or else they were progressives for whom voting Conservative was not an option but who refused to vote for the scandal-ridden Liberals. Although very multicultural, Outremont is a majority francophone riding. French-speaking Québecers, including many passionate federalists, are rightly preoccupied with preserving their language, culture, and identity.

Practically every radical cause in America today shows the influence of this postmodernist assault. From radical feminism to racial and sexual politics, postmodern leftists blend their unique brand of cultural criticism with the political objectives of these movements. In their intellectual laboratories -- the cultural studies and humanities programs at American universities -- they apply theories of structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstructualism to achieving the political objectives of the New Left. The results are a cornucopia of identity theories promising perfect diversity. They include radical multiculturalism, critical race theory, African-American criticism, feminist theory, gender and transgender theories, gay and "queer" theories, Latino studies, media "criticism", postcolonial studies, and indigenous cultural studies, to mention only a few. The latest identity cause to add to the list is the "neurodiversity" movement in which, as its supporters put it, autism, "ought to be treated not as a scourge to be eradicated but rather as a difference to be understood and accepted". All adversity, even that which is biologically inherited, can be wiped away by simply adjusting one's attitudes.

Schools have tried just about anything to try to calm racial tensions: professional mediation, multi-cultural training, diversity celebrations, anger-management classes, and a host of other interventions. In 2004, the Murrieta Valley Unified School District, in Riverside County, California, even considered a rule that would have forbidden any student to “form or openly participate in groups that tend to exclude, or create the impression of the exclusion of, other students.” The school board narrowly rejected the proposal when it was pointed out that the ban would have prohibited membership in the Hispanic group, La Raza, and could have been read to forbid playing rap music around white students. Absurd measures like this show how desperate schools are to solve the race problem. A 2003 survey found that 5.4 percent of high-school students had stayed home at least once during the previous month because they were physically afraid. This was an increase over 4.4 percent ten years earlier. Racial violence was undoubtedly an important factor. The circumstances under which some of our least advantaged citizens must try to get an education are nothing short of scandalous. Is it a wonder their test scores are low, that many drop out, that they fail to see the value of an education? How many times must school race riots be put down by SWAT teams before school authorities realize that this may be a problem that will not be cured with sensitivity training? The purpose of schools is to educate, not to force on children integration of a kind their parents do not even practice.