Multicultural Blues

Book Reviews

After Multiculturalism
by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
The Foreign Policy Centre, London, 2000;  ISBN:  0-9535598-8-2, 88 + x pages, £9.95

Multiculturalism has never achieved the same currency and salience in Britain as it has in countries of recent settlement such as Canada, Australia and the US, where large shares of the population are descendants of recent immigrants, if not immigrants themselves.  Nevertheless, Britain's ethnic Caribbean and Asian minorities are nowadays officially expected not to assimilate to the dominant culture but are encouraged to maintain their native cultures, and all are encouraged to welcome the consequent "diversity".

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's thesis is that diversity so understood has become a source of social division and is hindering, rather than fostering, any comparative advantage that Britain might enjoy from its combination of established and immigrant communities.  She argues that globalisation is challenging everyone's sense of identity and no-one can expect to have any particular identity fixed and protected indefinitely.  She envisages a world of evolving and overlapping identities that offer opportunities from which everyone can benefit.

The author is particularly well qualified to argue in this way.  A member of the Asian community that was expelled from Uganda 30 years ago and resettled largely in the UK, she was born in Africa into an Indian culture and with a British passport.  Having grown up mainly in Britain, she insists that she is as British as anyone born in the UK.  But she is also acutely aware that the British identity is itself now being challenged by devolution (a response to the rise of Scottish nationalism) and by the British establishment's determination to involve Britain in the European Union's quest for "ever closer union".  These forces have sharpened the sense of "Britishness" among people like herself, who are not members of any of the four nations that make up the United Kingdom but whose identity is largely a product of the British Empire.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes in a very lively, if rather breathless, way, and makes some devastating observations about "traditional multiculturalism".  Some immigrants have successfully invoked cultural relativism to defend brutal patriarchal practices that would not be tolerated in other contexts.  In education inspired by multiculturalism, "home cultures of black and Asian children are revered and those of white children ignored ... It does not focus on the need to extend the appeal of Shakespeare to enable black and Asian children to feel this is part of their heritage and cannot see that white children need to see Benjamin Zefaniah as their poet too" (page 70).  Her interviews with a selection of people aged between 15 and 24 suggest that multiculturalism will fade as the present generation of lobbyists and policy-makers retires.  Asked what the term "multiculturalism" meant to them, a black female aged 17 said, "I really don't use it.  I prefer to say British".  A black man aged 18 said, "I think it is a stupid word used for black people when white people think they want to be polite" (page 24).  A 20-year-old Muslim female said "I am a proud British Muslim ... We are developing a modern, cosmopolitan Islamic network across the world" (page 25).

People do seem to be able to envisage, without anxiety, multiple identities for themselves:  French and European, Australian and Asian, Muslim and British.  As international trade in goods, services and capital increases, and as pressure mounts for more freedom of international migration as well, identities will undoubtedly be challenged and evolve faster than in the past.  But it's not clear that anything needs to be done other than abandoning experiments in social engineering like multiculturalism.  The book's publisher, the Foreign Policy Centre (for which the author works), is a "New Labour" think-tank.  Reflecting this provenance, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes about "projects", "strategies", and "renegotiations":  the self-aggrandising rhetoric of Blairite hyper-activism that likes to think of itself as being in touch with, and shaping, all the emerging trends.  But, of all social phenomena, identities are quintessentially unintended and unforeseeable outcomes of human action, and can't be controlled by human design.  The real message of this book is that multiculturalism, as a set of policies for cultural maintenance, is finished.  Only the rent-seeking apparatus remains.