Multicultural tolerance ends where its object stops being market friendly

Evidence

Christian Joppke remarks, multiculturalism’s “focus on culture takes attention away from other, perhaps more important sources of minority discrimination, most notably socio-economic inequalities,” then the assertion of its compatibility with neoliberalism has been accompanied in recent years by a more forthright advocacy of a secular social liberalism that marks the boundary between acceptable “integrated” practices and values, on the one hand, and self-segregating fundamentalist ones, on the other. The recent repudiation of multiculturalism marks at one and the same time the limits of multicultural tolerance when its object ceases to be “market friendly” and an attempt to ring-fence European values by defining them against their opposite—the radicalized Muslim. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 165

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s hinge question — this is the analytic distinction between contesting and reinforcing Islamophobia applied at the level of social policy, transferable to reading Hamid and Naqvi.
• DEFINE: Provides the critical vocabulary: ‘market-friendly’ as the criterion marking the limit of tolerated difference.