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Text 1 Multiculturalism

Multiculturalismo , suella braverman

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Valeria Dugarte
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15 views2 pages

Text 1 Multiculturalism

Multiculturalismo , suella braverman

Uploaded by

Valeria Dugarte
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Suella Braverman’s bigoted attack on multiculturalism

shouldn’t blind us to its problems

by Kenan Malik

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/01/diverity-has-worked-in-britain-trouble-starts-when-
we-try-to-manage-it

Last week home secretary Suella Braverman gave a speech to the American Enterprise Institute
in Washington DC and argued that “multiculturalism has failed because it allowed people to
come to our society and live parallel lives in it”. Her real audience, as many commentators
observed, were not the people sitting in the room but the Conservative party back home.
5 Braverman did not engage seriously with any of the issues she raised, from asylum to
multiculturalism, but sought rather to position herself as the right’s flagbearer in any upcoming
Tory leadership battle. Nevertheless, Braverman’s speech, and the debate it unleashed,
provides an opportunity to think again about multiculturalism. Has multiculturalism really
failed?
10
Part of the difficulty in making sense of this debate is that the term is used in two distinct ways:
a description both of the lived experience of diversity and of the policies necessary to manage
such a society. The experience of living in a society that is less homogenous and insular, more
open and cosmopolitan, is something to welcome and cherish. As a political process, however,
15 multiculturalism means something very different: a set of policies and practices, the aim of
which is to manage diversity by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxes, and using those
boxes to define people’s needs and obligations.

The conflation of lived experience and political policy has proved highly invidious. It has
allowed many on the right to blame mass immigration for the failures of social policy and to
20 turn minorities into the problem. It has also led many liberals and radicals to become more
detached from classical notions of liberty, such as free speech, in the name of defending
diversity.

Britain has become more welcoming of diversity – 72% of Britons think that “having a wide
variety of backgrounds and cultures is part of British culture”; three quarters are comfortable
25 with mixed-race relationships. From the labour market to policing, racism still disfigures many
lives. Nevertheless, minorities flourish in a way that would have been unimaginable half a
century ago. From this perspective, diversity in Britain has worked, and worked better than in
most European nations.

1
30 At the same time, barriers between communities have solidified as policies have encouraged
people to view themselves through an identitarian lens. Too often, minority communities are
viewed as homogenous wholes, and certain individuals are given the role of gatekeepers
defining what is acceptable to say to, or about, that community. It is a process that frequently
silences the voices of those with less power – women, gay people, young people, non-believers.
35
At the same time, the ambiguity in the meaning of multiculturalism has been exploited by the
right. The problems of racialisation and division created by policies that seek to manage
diversity have been translated into hostility to immigration and to diversity itself. In her
Washington speech, Braverman included France as a nation revealing the harms of
40 “multiculturalism”. Given that France is hostile to the very idea of multiculturalism, insisting
instead on assimilationist policies, Braverman was signaling here that by “multiculturalism”
she was referring not to particular policies, but simply to the fact of a diverse nation.

Many right-wing critics excoriate the “tribalism” of multiculturalism and of identity politics.
Few, though, are more invested in such politics. From the bemoaning of Europeans “losing their
45 homeland” to the charge that white Britons are “surrendering [their] territory” to alarm about
London becoming a “minority white” city, right-wing critics of immigration and
multiculturalism often revel in the very kinds of social division they claim to despise.

We should have no truck with such critiques that seek to rebrand racism. That should not stop
50 us, though, from being critical of multicultural policies that entrap diversity and create
communal frictions.

When we talk of diversity, what we mean is that the world is a messy place, full of difference
and disagreement. That messiness is the stuff of political and cultural engagement, allowing us
to expand our horizons, engage with different values, beliefs and lifestyles, and through such
55 engagement to work our way to a richer understanding of the world, and to a more universal
language of belonging.

In seeking to put people into ethnic, cultural and faith boxes, and to police the boundaries of
those boxes, multiculturalism as a political process undermines much of what is valuable about
diversity as lived experience. The fact that right-wing critiques of multiculturalism are often
60 laced with bigotry should not obscure the problems with multicultural policies themselves.

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