Abstract
We have seen the limits of multiculturalism in coming to terms with the incorporation of racialized groups into the dominant culture. One of the reasons for such a limitation is that multiculturalism is situated within a monocultural state. A monocultural state is antithetical to racial and cultural differences—even though race, for the most part, as I have already indicated, is a marker for determining cultural differences. In this respect, there is a need to move beyond multiculturalism as a function of normalizing cultural practice and to take on new cultural practices that would profoundly transform America’s cultural homogeneity (cultural oneness) into cultural heterogeneity (cultural manyness). However, to move beyond multiculturalism toward postmulticulturalism, America needs to transform itself from a monocultural state into a multicultural state. Only a multicultural state can embrace the new cultural forms that are created. Postmulticularism would work against American cultural oneness and promote cultural manyness as Americanness.
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Notes
See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s (1994). In addition, countries including France, Germany, England, and Sweden that were once “white countries” have increasing numbers of racial minorities.
Recent work conducted by Tyrone A. Forman, “Color-blind Racism and Racial Indifference: The Role of Racial Apathy in Facilitating Enduring Inequalities,” shows that, concerning numerous matters of race, whites who confess they are indifferent to racial issues express traditional racist attitudes toward nonwhites (2006, 23–66).
Also, see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Victor Ray, “When Whites Love a Black Leader: Race Matter in Obamerica” (2009)
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Color-Blind Racism” (2007)
Karyn D. McKinney, “‘I feel “Whiteness” When I Hear People Blaming Whites’: White as Cultural Victimization” (2003)
David R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (2002).
Ibid., 549. Also see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2006).
See Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000b), and Between Camps: Nations, Culture and the Allure of Race (2000a).
See Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004a)
Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (1998)
Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991b).
See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (1995)
Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (1994)
Iris M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990).
See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993)
Rebecca Aanerud, “Fictions of Whiteness: Speaking the Names of Whiteness in U.S. Literature” (1997)
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Interrogating ‘Whiteness’, Complicating ‘Blackness’: Remapping American Culture” (1995)
David Roediger, Black on White: Black Writers and What It Means to Be White (1998)
Crispin Sartwell, Act Like You Know: African American Autobiography and White Identity (1998).
See David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991)
Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (1997)
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1995)
Matthew F. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998).
Bonnett 1996, 146. See Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993)
Richard Dyer, White (1997)
Charles A. Gallagher, “White Reconstruction in the University” (2003).
See Alastair Bonnett, “From the Crisis of Whiteness to Western Supremacy” (2005)
Robyn Wiegman, “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity” (1999)
Frank Towers, “Projecting Whiteness: Race, and the State of Labor History” (1998)
Eric Arnesen, “Scholarly Controversy: Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination” (2001)
Sara Ahmed, “Declaration of Whiteness: The Non-performativity of Antiracism” (2004).
See, for example, David R. Roediger, Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White, The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (2005)
Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (1999)
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998)
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1995). Also, in Texas, in the early twentieth century, Mexicans were seen as “almost white.”
See James Baldwin, “White Man’s Guilt” (1985)
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981)
Norman Podhoretz, “My Negro Problem—and Ours” (1997).
For further discussion on the abolition of whiteness, see Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, Race Traitor (1996)
David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (1994).
See Michael Omi, “Racialization in the Post-Civil Rights Era” (1996)
Charles A. Gallagher “White Racial Formation: Into the Twenty-first Century” (1997).
In terms of speaking as the “other” the opposite occurs. The tendency, most of the time, implies a distance from oneself since one’s subjectivity is never fully steeped in the modality of the speaking position one inhabits at a particular moment. When one is speaking as the “other,” there is an expectation of the “other” to speak as the “other.” There is a kind of homogenization of otherness operating from authentic and fixed categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, location, religion, and so on. See Gayatri C. Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic, Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990a, 60).
See Derrick A Bell, Tracy Higgins, and Sung-Hee Suh, “Racial Reflections: Dialogues in the Direction of Liberation” (1997, 107–8).
See David R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (2002)
Matthew F. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998)
Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, Race Traitor (1996)
Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993).
Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2006)
McKinney, “‘I feel “Whiteness” When I Hear People Blaming Whites’: White as Cultural Victimization” (2003)
Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993).
Recently, scholars have explored the construction of white racial identity as an unexamined racial formation and the normativity of a particular set of cultural practices. See Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993)
Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991)
Dyer, White (1997)
Ignatiev and Garvey, Race Traitor (1996).
See Spivak, The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990a).
Many scholars have dismissed the biological and essentialist explanations for race, gender, and sexuality. They have pointed to the historical and cultural facts of race, sexuality, and gender as socially constituted and the ways theoretical and empirical analyses have shifted to demonstrate that race, gender, and sexual formations are context specific and change overtime. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1999)
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s (1994)
Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993). Black feminists especially have drawn our attention to the intersectionality of identities.
See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989)
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990). Other feminists who are working on intersectionality include Randi Gressgård, “Mind the Gap: Intersectionality, Complexity and ‘the Event’,” 2008
Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix, “Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality” (2004).
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© 2010 Sherrow O. Pinder
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Pinder, S.O. (2010). Postmulticulturalism. In: The Politics of Race and Ethnicity in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106697_6
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