Multiculturalism allocated resources by ethnicity, deepening tribal divisions

Evidence

Noting the eagerness with which local councils in the 1980s took up the politics of difference, Malik insists that multiculturalism, rather than being driven by community pressure from below, was in fact imposed from above in order to defuse antiracist energies. Worse, the rhetorical support and financial largesse that followed multiculturalism meant that it “helped create new divisions and more intractable conflicts which made for a less openly racist but a more insidiously tribal Britain.… Once political power and financial resources became allocated by ethnicity, then people began to identify themselves in terms of their ethnicity, and only their ethnicity.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 157

Categorization

• XREF: Malik’s from-above-versus-from-below argument is directly relevant to how the reader weighs Naqvi’s critique of multicultural accommodation in Home Boy. — connects to: Treating the dominated as homogeneous fuels forced tribal congregation and cultural destruction — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 219; Multiculturalism emerged as minority groups’ demand for public recognition of their identities — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 867