Multiple marginalized groups demand civil rights beyond religious identity politics

Evidence

Scholars have explained the dearth of alliances among racial minorities through processes of social identification. Sociologists, such as Blumer (1958), have focused on beliefs about the rights and resources that group members are entitled to based on their group’s perceived social standing and past injustices (see also Bobo & Hutchings, 1996); members of a minority group may believe that they have been uniquely oppressed and demand commensurate redress for their particular group. Psychologists, most notably social identity theorists, have emphasized the processes through which identification with social categories induces intergroup behavior, with mere membership in a group driving in-group favoritism (e.g., Tajfel, Billing, Bundy, & Flament, 1971). Still others have linked interracial competition to group size, suggesting that members of numerical minorities display both higher in-group identification and more intergroup discrimination (e.g., Leonardelli & Brewer, 2001). — Chen-Bo Zhong, Adam D. Galinsky, and Miguel M. Unzueta, Negational racial identity and…, 7 (#complicates, via linked claim)

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 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Religious minorities’ rights assertions affirm rather than threaten American institutions — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 285; Not all contemporary social movements center on identity politics or rights claims; Minority groups each claim unique oppression, blocking cross-group alliances — Chen-Bo Zhong, Adam D. Galinsky, and Miguel M. Unzueta, Negational racial identity and…, 7 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Minority groups each claim unique oppression, blocking cross-group alliances #complicates (0.85) — Chen-Bo Zhong, Adam D. Galinsky, and Miguel M. Unzueta, Negational racial identity and…, 7
• Liberal inclusion requires minority groups to approximate dominant cultural sameness #complicates (0.83) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1244
• Not all contemporary social movements center on identity politics or rights claims #complicates (0.82)