Debating Multiculturalism by Patti Tamara Lenard

Author:Patti Tamara Lenard
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

In this chapter I have shown how neutral institutions (in terms of both justification and intent) can accommodate minority ways of life, and that nonneutral institutions can, albeit reluctantly, change to make these accommodations. This change can take two basic forms. First, it may involve removing majority privilege, for example, dismantling state religions, overturning bans on head and face coverings, or removing religious symbols from state schools. Second, it might involve directly redressing minority disadvantage while leaving everything else unchanged. Here an institution may grant minority rights—the police, for example, may decide that looking “smart” can involve turbans and headscarves in the same color as standard uniform headwear, and allow these for Sikhs and Muslims. Or a state may decide the history and centrality of its state religion is too important to abolish, and instead extend recognition and privileges to other major religions as well. These are examples of multicultural minority rights as forms of neutrality toward people’s ways of life.

As this discussion shows, and it is worth highlighting, neutralizing action may actually involve minority rights! Favoring the majority is nonneutral, and so adjusting an institution to add favor to the minority is a neutralizing action. In this sense, minority rights are a form of state neutrality. The reason I stress this is that it seems multiculturalists actually endorse neutrality in practice, if not in name. In this sense, we have come full circle—my argument for neutrality (so far) is entirely compatible with an argument for minority rights. Given the argumentative framework set out earlier—where minority rights were directly opposed to liberal neutrality—this point is significant in itself. Liberal neutrality does not fail to accommodate minority ways of life—even if they require minority rights. Nevertheless, in the next chapter, I want to go further and argue for a form of neutrality that does not require minority rights at all, and this further position is opposed to minority rights. Here I will argue that the first way of realizing neutrality—removing majority privilege—is the best way of gaining minority accommodation, as it avoids many of the pitfalls of granting minority rights and has its own unique advantages in the form of more freedom for all of us.

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