Like most terms, there is a certain plasticity in how they are used.

Multiculturalism can either be integrative, as is largely the case in Canada, or more separate or segregationist, as in some of the examples cited here.

The Deeper Risk of Radical Multiculturalism

There is something deeply clarifying about recent events at Williams College, because they reveal the logical endpoint, to my mind, of critical race, gender, and queer theory. The push for social justice there has now led to demands for racially segregated housing. (I was alerted to this by Jerry Coyne, who’s been on the case for a while.) Here’s the rationale as expressed by the student newspaper:

We at the Record wholeheartedly support establishing affinity housing at the College. As a community, we must recognize that the College is a predominantly white institution in which students of color often feel tokenized, both in their residences and more broadly on campus … Some say affinity housing reinforces division, arguing that having minoritized students cluster in one space would be harmful to the broader campus community. We believe, however, that allowing for a space where students can express their identities without fear of tokenization or marginalization will encourage students to exist more freely in the broader campus community, rather than recede from it.

Segregation as the pathway to integration seems to be the argument, a point with some uncomfortable precedents dating back to before Brown v. Board of Education. The student group demanding this recently announced on its Instagram page that “the administration expressed general support for affinity housing and together we came up with a pilot program for affinity housing that was feasible given the avenues of change at the college.” If you want to see how this kind of transformation happens, check out this video of a student council meeting on April 9 discussing whether there should be funding for racially segregated events at “Previews,” when prospective students visit the campus to check it out. At around the 45-minute mark, two students enter the room, ranting and swearing as they insist that their demands for the programs be met. They were, of course.

Reading about this, I was reminded by a recent study on the effects of social-justice “multicultural” ideology compared with the “color-blind” liberal alternative. The study, which was published in the Journal of Social Psychology and Personality Science, found that exposure to multiculturalism can paradoxically deepen race essentialism, by which the authors mean the idea that “racial group differences are valid, biologically based, and immutable.” Money quote:

Study 1 (N = 165) shows that participants exposed to multiculturalism expressed greater race essentialist beliefs compared to those exposed to color blindness. Study 2 (N = 150) replicates this effect and also finds that exposure to multiculturalism, compared to color blindness, decreased participants’ belief that racial equality is a problem. These findings raise the ironic possibility that well-intentioned efforts to portray the value of differences may reinforce the belief that fixed, biological characteristics underpin them.

The study is not dispositive. (Another recent review of the literature on how women and minorities are affected by multiculturalism, found that it helped minority students but not women, where gender-blindness worked better.) But the mechanism the first study describes among students is a fascinating one. It’s simply that the more focus you put on race, the more conscious people are of it as a valid and meaningful distinction between people, and the more likely they are to reify it. At today’s diversity-driven campus or corporation, often your first instinct when seeing someone is to quickly assess their identity — black, white, gay, Latino, male, trans, etc. You are required to do this all the time because you constantly need to check your privilege. And so college students — and those who hire and fire in business — are trained to judge a person instantly by where they fit into a racial and gender hierarchy, before they even engage them. Of course they’re going to end up judging people instantly by the color of their skin. Social justice has a strict hierarchy of identity, with white straight males at the bottom. It is, in fact, a mirror image of the far right’s racial hierarchy, which puts white straight men at the top.

Another study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found:

[I]n three experiments, White American college students received a message advocating either a color-blind or a multicultural ideological approach to improving interethnic relations and then made judgments about various ethnic groups and individuals. Relative to a color-blind perspective, the multicultural perspective led to stronger stereotypes, greater accuracy in these stereotypes, and greater use of category information in judgments of individuals … [P]rimed with multiculturalism, participants liked racial minorities who displayed stereotypical preferences (i.e., liking basketball and hip-hop) more than racial minorities who displayed non-stereotypical preferences (i.e., surfing and country dancing).

In other words, teaching people to see other races as completely different from one’s own may encourage us to define others by stereotypes.

When the deep tribal forces in the human psyche are constantly on alert for racial difference, we run the risk of exacerbating racism. So we face the prospect that anti-racism could facilitate what it is attempting to destroy. It wouldn’t be the first time that a well-intentioned experiment has backfired.

Source: Andrew Sullivan: Why Biden May Be the Best Bet to Beat Trump