Critical Race Consciousness by Gary Peller

Author:Gary Peller [Peller, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317261834
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Laissez-Faire Multiculturalism

The image of cultural self-determination implicit in the reigning anxiety over “cultural imperialism” presents a false picture of distinct cultures existing outside the discourses in which they might be recognized. However, there is no doubt that, if there is coherence to the idea of an “African American” community, it must certainly be at least partly an effect of racial ideologies. The issue is whether the dichotomy I have just described—between a belief in an objectivist, neutral, moral imperative like colorblind integrationism linked with the will to intervene on one hand, and a belief in relativistic, multicultural assumptions about differences in mores and an accompanying deference to other identified cultural groups on the other—exhausts the realistic possibilities for a coherent understanding of race on the part of whites.37 Is it plausible to believe simultaneously in the “relativist” norms of multiculturalism and nevertheless be willing to intervene across cultural boundaries to influence and even coerce other cultural groups? Is the Brown intervention into Southern culture defensible only from now-discredited universalist premises about the possibilities for cultural neutrality on the part of schools and other institutions?

I approach this issue in a negative fashion: rather than provide an affirmative defense of cultural intervention in specific contexts, I want first to consider the possibility that the opposition between deference and intervention is a false way of framing issues of interracial and intercultural dynamics. Mutual respect and cultural self-determination are too indeterminate to themselves provide a justificatory compass. The respectful, deferential aspect of multicultural sensibility depends on there being some transcultural basis upon which to identify the cultural boundaries of the other group, and to distinguish between authentic and fraudulent representations of that group’s mores. To carry out the deference injunction, in short, some way of identifying what is being deferred to is necessary. The more formalist, essentialist, ahistoric, and traditionalist the definition of the other culture’s mores, the more compelling the case for deference will seem to be, in that intervention would be posed against a clearly delineated, fixed practice. At the same time, the more formalist, essentialist, ahistoric, and traditional the definition of the other culture’s mores, the more it will appear that the practice in question is a contested one within the other group, and that the practice’s survival depends on the continued domination of a segment of the community, rather than the reflection of the culture as a whole.

The background analytic that informs this approach to cultural issues is an analogy to similar images of deference and self-determination in liberal market ideology. That is, the progressive commitment to the importance of cultural self-determination embodied in the contemporary multicultural sensibility closely tracks, in both substantive motivation and analytic structure, the political and economic theory of the “invisible hand” in laissez-faire market ideology.

In free-market ideology, the norm of government neutrality vis-à-vis the private market was based on the notion that, if the government stayed out of the private sphere, individual actors would freely choose the terms and conditions of their relationships. Through the

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