Malik: Suella Braverman’s bigoted attack on multiculturalism shouldn’t blind us to its problems

Britain has become more welcoming of diversity – 72% of Britons think that “having a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures is part of British culture”; three-quarters are comfortable with mixed-race relationships. From the labour market to policing, racism still disfigures many lives. Nevertheless, minorities flourish in a way that would have been unimaginable half a century ago. From this perspective, diversity in Britain has worked, and worked better than in most European nations.

At the same time, barriers between communities have solidified as policies have encouraged people to view themselves through an identitarian lens. From the clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester to the Peckham shop incident, which were turned into a racial conflict between black people and Asians, the conception of Britain as a “community of communities”, in the words of the influential Parekh report on multiculturalism published in 2000, has helped entrench communal divisions and racialise social tensions.

And then there are cases such as the Batley school row, in which a teacher was suspended after protests for showing pupils an image of Muhammad from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo during a religious studies class. He was cleared by an independent panel, but three years on is apparently still in hiding because of death threats. Or incidents such as Muslim parents protesting against the inclusion of gay relationships in school sex and relationship education lessons.

Such controversies show how social frictions can become transformed into communal conflicts within a “community of communities” setting and how the policing of “offence” has become a means of strengthening community boundaries. They also reveal the way multicultural policies shape relations not just between communities but within them, too. Too often, minority communities are viewed as homogenous wholes, and certain individuals or institutions are given, or appropriate for themselves, the role of “gatekeepers”, defining what is acceptable to say to, or about, that community. It is a process that frequently silences the voices of those with less power – women, gay people, young people, non-believers. It is one of the reasons that so many flashpoints over “offence” have featured the work of minority writers and artists, from Salman Rushdie to Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, from Monica Ali to MF Husain.

At the same time, the ambiguity in the meaning of multiculturalism has been exploited by the right. The problems of racialisation and division created by policies that seek to manage diversity have been translated into hostility to immigration and to diversity itself. In her Washington speech, Braverman included France as a nation revealing the harms of “multiculturalism”. Given that France is hostile to the very idea of multiculturalism, insisting instead on assimilationist policies, Braverman was signallinghere that by “multiculturalism” she was referring not to particular policies, but simply to the fact of a diverse nation.

Many rightwing critics excoriate the “tribalism” of multiculturalism and of identity politics. Few, though, are more invested in such politics. From the bemoaning of Europeans “losing their homeland” to the charge that white Britons are “surrendering [their] territory” to alarm about London becoming a “minority white” city, rightwing critics of immigration and multiculturalism often revel in the very kinds of social division they claim to despise.

We should have no truck with such critiques that seek to rebrand racism. That should not stop us, though, from being critical of multicultural policies that entrap diversity and create communal frictions.

When we talk of diversity, what we mean is that the world is a messy place, full of difference and disagreement. That messiness is the stuff of political and cultural engagement, allowing us to expand our horizons, engage with different values, beliefs and lifestyles, and through such engagement to work our way to a richer understanding of the world, and to a more universal language of belonging.

In seeking to put people into ethnic, cultural and faith boxes, and to police the boundaries of those boxes, multiculturalism as a political process undermines much of what is valuable about diversity as lived experience. The fact that rightwing critiques of multiculturalism are often laced with bigotry should not obscure the problems with multicultural policies themselves.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist