Multiculturalism was imposed from above and atomized minorities into competing ethnic camps

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.” According to Malik, this process set one minority group against another, broke down the antiracist consensus, and led to intercommunity violence, alienation, and a susceptibility to extremism dressed up as authentic Muslim cultural values. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 157

Categorization

• XREF: Malik’s top-down multiculturalism thesis contrasts with grassroots account — deserves weighing against Hamid’s and Naqvi’s portrayals of community agency.
• QUESTION: Is Malik’s critique fair, or does it itself reproduce the ‘authentic values’ panic he warns against?