Liberal inclusion requires minority groups to approximate dominant cultural sameness

Evidence

Laura Levitt argues that “tolerance works to both regulate and maintain a deep ambivalence.” She states that acceptable Jewish difference has been defined as religious difference—that is, they simply go to a different “church” in order to be accepted as Jews in U.S. culture. As a result Jews have had to remake their Jewishness into a bastardized but comprehensible version of Christianity. Levitt claims that the remaking of Jewishness into an acceptable form demonstrates the failed promise of liberal inclusion. A similar process is taking place in these CAIR advertisements, which reveal (albeit unintentionally) the particular form in which Islam must be represented in order to fall under the umbrella of liberal multicultural inclusion and tolerance. Islam cannot be included in liberal multicultural society in just any form: it must take the form articulated in the PSAs—emphasizing likeness to and compatibility with a dominant, and conservative, American culture. Both versions of diversity patriotism—ambiguous assimilative patriotism and approximating sameness through the figure of the “good Muslim”—rely on diminishing difference in order to sell inclusion. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1244

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Levitt work on Jewish tolerance and to broader scholarship on the ‘price’ of assimilation (e.g. the Hmong experience in The Spirit Catches You). — connects to: Labor movement inclusion requires internal caucuses for underrepresented groups. — Silke Roth, Intersectionality and coalitions in…, 257
• SEED: Article angle: the ‘good Muslim’ / ‘good immigrant’ figure as a recurring trope across US history, from Irish Catholics to Jews to Arabs, each paying a different price for inclusion.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘good Muslim’ / patriotic sameness dynamic parallels the logic in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ where dress reform was framed through class and assimilation rather than real acceptance.