Multiculturalism as Spiritual Revenge

Abstract

This paper investigates the different roles assigned to - culture‖ in both conservative and left diagnoses of racial and ethnic inequality in the United States. My primary object is to describe the normally unarticulated conceptual scaffolding that informs these debates. Only secondarily is my purpose to refute particular positions. And I am not at all concerned with promoting or opposing particular policy prescriptions. In Part I, I begin by exploring a traditional conservative position and the traditional liberal aversion to it. Next, I examine how multiculturalism upsets the traditional terms of the debate by promoting a notion of racial culture. I analyze the various meanings which can be assigned to this idea, asking why cultural prejudice should be associated with racism, rather than conceived as an independent evil. Next, I argue that for all its apparent theoretical refinement, the idea of cultural racism appeals to some basic intuitions about what makes racism wrong. Having laid out the source of racial culture‘s psychological appeal, I ask whether its normative foundations are sound and conclude that they can be defended on the basis of a particular view of human agency, according to which our consciousness is inescapably structured by a socially and historically produced worldview that will in many instances be associated with race. In Part II, I inquire whether such a position can be justified, and conclude that a sophisticated theory of human nature gives us reason to suspect that the aspirations of multiculturalism often enough represent a dysfunctional power-strategy that must fail to achieve its underlying ends.