Author: Michael Karson, Ph.D.

There is much to admire in multiculturalism. Its theories of power and stigma explain how groups define and enforce normalcy, allowing those with big hearts and open minds to learn how to direct themselves toward a more welcoming and inclusive stance. If conservative intellectuals knew more about it, they would be able to market conservatism without its nearly ubiquitous leitmotif of contempt for others. (And if intellectual liberals were not so worried about looking contemptuous of others, they’d be more open to conservative ideas.)

Multiculturalism also gets it right when it insists on being a lens, rather than a topic, of analysis. We cannot hold our own values and priorities up for scrutiny unless we are aware of other, different values and priorities. Thus, it is an essentially multicultural task to expose our unexamined beliefs, and this can be done only by those who don’t share them. Multiculturalism also provides a useful lens for analysis in situations that do not automatically announce issues of race and sex and asks of them whether race and sex matter. Thus, when I am welcome to sit in the Prague hotel’s garden to write, without producing a room key or other insignia of authorization, it is fair and often illuminating to ask if I would be treated differently if I were black—or whoever it is that Czechs find suspicious.

Multiculturalism also gets right the way we harm ourselves by imposing normalcy and excluding what’s different. Socially, this attitude costs us a lot of good ideas and talent when the insightful and talented lack access to the metaphorical microphone of public speech. Multiculturalism teaches us that we exclude others not just through overt racism, sexism, homophobia, and ethnocentrism, but also unconsciously when we do not take special steps to welcome those who differ from our local norms. The greatest musical talent of the last four centuries was not Mozart or Gershwin or Smokey Robinson. The greatest musical talent of the last four centuries was an Indian girl in Bombay who died hungry and outcast during childbirth at age 17, who never owned a musical instrument, whose quiet humming as she did her chores delighted those around her but otherwise died with her. Or it was a Cambodian boy or Chinese political prisoner or Bolivian man beheaded for harmonizing the national anthem—or whatever sacred cow Bolivians would have been killed for trying to improve. Getting the microphone to those with talent serves us all.

Beyond the social harms of exclusion, there are personal harms as well, when exclusion of parts of the self costs us pleasure and good ideas—you simply cannot have good ideas if you are constantly monitoring your thoughts for their acceptability, whether the monitoring be religious, moral, patriotic, or gendered. If you only allow yourself to have ideas had by a good Lutheran, a good person, a good American, or a real man, you will only have ideas that someone else has already had.

Multiculturalism also gets it right when it describes the validity of multiple perspectives (but I’ll soon write a post on how it tends to pervert this multiplicity). We all know that the rule against wearing white shoes after Labor Day is a socially constructed rule, but we are not always so quick to recognize social construction in other situations. People who speak only one language, for example, may not fully appreciate how arbitrary the assignment is of words to things, and they may fuse the word and the thing, responding to the former as if it were the latter. People who take umbrage at words, surely, are less likely to do so if they deeply appreciate the fact that the words that irk them are just words. A reactionary attitude to words chills free speech and the free exchange of ideas. Social practices that are not seen as socially constructed can become enshrined as the way of the world instead of as a social rule, especially when there is minimal acquaintance with alternatives. How we mourn, how we decline invitations, how we celebrate birthdays—these are all socially constructed, and one approach is not more intrinsically valid than another. Multiculturalism teaches us that our way of doing things is only one way of doing them. This opens the way to finding a different, more satisfying way of doing them. It opens the way for not being so concrete about what’s right and what’s wrong, in turn opening the way to individual liberty.

Multiculturalism is right about the importance of making sure diverse voices are seated at the tables where policies are crafted and norms are established. It made a big difference, for example, for the Supreme Court to seat a woman (O’Connor) and a black man (Marshall), not just for their input, but because the other justices knew they would have to defend their opinions face to face with a woman and a black man. Multiculturalism is wrong about selecting the categories that constitute diversity, and it’s blind to its own power agenda in defining diversity according to race and sex, but it’s right about the need for diversity. O’Connor’s presence made its biggest impact on sex discrimination cases, Marshall’s on race cases. Other forms of diversity are important for other sorts of cases, that is, for other sorts of policy-crafting and norm-setting. Generally, the voice that needs to be included is that of someone who identifies with whatever group of people will feel most disenfranchised or stigmatized by the new policy or the new norms.

Maybe it’s because multiculturalism gets so many things right that it feels entitled to ignore what it gets so wrong.

A good way to think about the problem that diversity theory tries to address is to imagine a big table with lots of food and drink and conversation. Seated at the table are people defined by themselves as invited and therefore as deserving the benefits of being in the room. Erving Goffman calls these people normal, and emphasizes that you can be normal in one situation but not in another. Excluded from the seating arrangement—or included in name only but excluded from the chatter and goodies—are all the less-thans, the wannabes, the disaffected, the uninterested, and the former but now discredited members of the party. All these uninvited people are serving the invited, or peering in through the windows, or seated at the table but otherwise quiet and reserved—like your disaffected colleagues who doodle at meetings or teenagers waiting to be excused. The invited listen only to each other and fail to register discussions among the serving staff, the second-rate group members, the excluded, and passersby. The people at the table are full-fledged members of their society—the others, because of some personal characteristic, something they once did, or some gossip about them, are not.

Now, when you think of the invited, it’s natural to imagine yourself as not being seated among them. This is natural because we are all seated at some tables and unwelcome at others, but we don’t usually notice it when we’ve been seated—we don’t listen to those not authorized to speak, those by the door, and those passing by, so we don’t realize that we are the haves compared to those unheard have-nots. Also, when we have a seat at the table, there are hidden thoughts and past indiscretions which, if known, would disqualify us from full-fledged membership in the group, so even when we are normal, we don’t always feel normal. On the other hand, when we are marginalized, confined to silence or to service or kept out of the dining room, we see very clearly that there is a table at which we are not welcome.

Thus, for example, at the university where I work (as at all universities, I’d guess), faculty members who don’t have tenure are obsessed with getting it. From their vantage point, the tenured faculty members are all Jabba the Hutts, fatcats enjoying their privileges and comforts. They see tenured faculty, in fact, as staff sees them—but they don’t notice the staff’s envy and resentment, only their own. Tenured faculty take their own status as a matter of course. They have forgotten what it’s like not to have tenure, because not having tenure is a stigma (a characteristic that keeps one from being a full-fledged member of a group), and once a stigma is removed, the last thing a full-fledged group member wants to do is to remind the group that he was once less than full-fledged. If it comes up at all, many tenured faculty act as if there was never any question of whether they’d get tenure. Untenured faculty are called assistant professors. With tenure comes a promotion to associate professor. Eventually, one can apply for a second promotion to become a full professor. The typical associate professor is much more aware of not being a full professor than she is of being at the tenured table. God only knows what the full professors worry about—people not reading their blogs, I suppose.

The same thing happens in families. Parents forget what it was like to be a child. Childhood in many situations is a stigma that keeps one from being a full-fledged member of any group that includes even one adult or older child. (In fact, full-fledged means having the feathered wings necessary to fly with the flock.) If you ask a Latina single mother of two when she is at the table and when she is not, will she flash on the fact that she spends eight hours a day as the only person in her home authorized to make decisions? Or will she think of the insult she received from some bus driver who assumed she was not getting off at the university? In other words, her experience of not being a full-fledged student will loom larger for her than her experience of being a full-fledged member of her little family because we’re always more aware of being stigmatized than we are of being normal. Indeed, that’s just what normal means, isn’t it? You don’t notice normal weather, normal driving conditions, or normal television reception. And you don’t notice your membership in a group when you’re normal in it.

“White people have no culture.”

“American is not an ethnicity.”

“Students listen to you because you are a white male.”

“I consider you a white friend.”

(Things said to me by professors)

When white guys for whatever reason find themselves interacting with the concept of diversity, they typically fall into one of two camps. In one camp, they just don’t get it. They think the privileges afforded to them for being white or for being men came to them for being effective, competent, and industrious. As one wag said of a rich kid, they are born on third base and think they hit a triple. These guys react in a variety of ways, from irritation to avoidance, but their reactions reveal their essential indifference to difference. When they hear about a black couple hovered over by the waiter to make sure they don’t dine and dash, they assume the black couple was either oversensitive (it didn’t really happen) or had done something suspicious. If you’re that guy, you need help understanding what multiculturalism is all about—but without insulting you. The white guys in the other camp are clothes-rending, flesh-tearing, guilt-ridden apologizers. They are aware of privileges and think they have to forgo them, like rich kids who give away all their money. They hire the less qualified Latino applicant because it is more important to them to avoid accusations of discrimination than it is to run their business efficiently. They, also, react in many different ways, from excessive caution to self-negation, implicitly accepting the idea that their accomplishments follow from their skin color rather than from hard work. If you’re that guy, you need help integrating your private masculinity with your public role, to restore your pride in yourself even in conversations about race and sex.

If you are not personally a white guy, you may find in these pages some similarities with white guys that will make their situation instructive. Perhaps you have some positions of privilege in certain situations and have been told that these came to you because of your sex or race or other status? Welcome to my world. Perhaps you are in charge of some groups and would like to make everyone feel included but stumble on the fact that there’s no reliable way to tell when you are failing? Welcome to the human race.

It seems like a white guy in a multicultural discussion is supposed to sit quietly like the defendant in a rape trial and act as if he personally enslaved Africans, dominated women, and tripped blind people. But nobody wants to enter a dialogue if the terms of entry require him to be the bad guy—well, almost nobody—some men and quite a few white women seem to jump at the chance to call themselves racist. If you or your work group has ever been sentenced to a multicultural training, either for some infraction or as a developmental workshop, you’ve probably heard some white person confessing their own racism like an alcoholic at an AA meeting. For most white guys, though, spending a day or even an hour having to shut up and swallow our pride makes us tune out, especially when the shutting up is in the service of “dialogue.”

But white guys have nothing to apologize for in a conversation about multiculturalism. They have made huge contributions to the diversity agenda. White guy Charles Darwin proved that all people are related (plus dogs, cabbages, and worms, but still). White guys Gregory Bateson and B.F. Skinner taught us to understand behavior in its context. White guy Immanuel Kant demonstrated that no way of looking at a situation (including white guys’ ways) is fundamentally correct. White Guy Jesus Christ taught us to value those whom society casts out.

Or perhaps you don’t consider Jesus a white guy. In a stunning act of circular logic, the statement that white men have no culture is, with alarming frequency, promulgated by multiculturalists who define any man with even a shred of ethnicity (whatever that could possibly mean without something to contrast it to) as nonwhite. By that reckoning, Jesus was a Jew (or, if not wholly a Jew, Jew-ish), Darwin was English, and Kant German. This way of thinking can only end with the conclusion that the only white guys on earth are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and possibly Bush Sr., although he would seem to qualify as an ethnic Yalie.

And speaking of the contributions of white guys, I think it’s high time we reminded the world that we are after all a minority. Maybe, what, 10% of all humans are white guys? You always hear about how small the Scottish population is and yet how great their contribution was to science, or how small the black population is in the United States compared to their contributions to popular culture. Well, white guys are only 10% of the earth’s population, and just look at the enormity of our contributions to philosophy, literature, science, classical music, and, well, warfare.