Reading Purpose: This article describes how the study of multiculturalism started and some of the differing viewpoints.

While you read do the following:

• Identify words that you don’t understand and try to identify their meaning/importance
• Identify important words/ideas and explain what they mean to you
• Summarize the big idea of the paragraph
• Give your opinion about the speaker’s argument. Do you agree/disagree? Why?

5. Is identity political?

One problem with certain strands of multiculturalism is their reliance on "identity politics." "Identity politics" refers to the tendency to define one's political and social identity and interests purely in terms of some group category: race, ethnicity, class, gender, nationality, religion, etc. Identity politics became more popular after the 1960s for many of the same reasons that multiculturalism did. The critique of America's "common culture" led many people to identify with a particular group, rather than with the nation --- a nation, after all, whose policies they believed had excluded or oppressed them. People increasingly called themselves by hybrid names: Native-Americans, African-Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, Gay-Americans, etc., in an explosion of hyphenation.

This movement for group solidarity did in many cases provide individuals with the resources to defend their interests and express their values, resources that as disparate individuals they could not possibly attain. As the American economy began to decline in the late 20th century, the scramble for a piece of the shrinking pie increased the tendency of people to band together in groups that together might have enough power to defend or extend their interests. American society is now often seen as a battleground of special-interest groups, many of them defined by the racial, ethnic, or cultural identity of their members. Hostility between these groups as they compete for scarce resources is inevitable. In defense of identity politics, others point out that these divisions between cultural groups are less the voluntary decisions of individuals than the product of discrimination and bigotry in the operation of the economy and the social institutions. It is these injustices that divide people up by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, etc., privileging the dominant group and subordinating the rest, they claim.

6. Breaking up is hard to do.

Still, most analysts admit that in practice individuals belong to numerous different groups and have complex socio-cultural identities. The theoretical word for analyzing people in terms of their group affiliations is "subject position." Each person occupies a variety of subject positions -- is positioned socially, economically, and politically -- by virtue of how his or her subjectivity is shaped by group identifications. When we analyze our identities, we can break them up into numerous facets of ourselves, until it seems that we might never be able to put them back together again.

A person may think of herself or be treated at one moment as a woman, at another moment as Asian, at another moment as upper-class, at another moment as elderly, at another moment as Christian, at another moment as a lesbian--each time being either helped or hindered by the identification, depending on the circumstances. The various parts of our cultural identities may not add up to a neat and predictable whole.

Multiculturalism, then, insofar as it groups individuals into categories, may overlook the practical reality that no one lives in just one box. Recent proponents of multiculturalism, indeed, have emphasized the multiculturalism within each individual, as each of us can map our multiplicity through the many points on the “diversity wheel.