The multiculturalism backlash is largely an attack on welfare provision

Evidence

Yet if we see multiculturalism as, in Talal Asad’s words, part of “the attempt to deal with the practical problems encountered in education and the social services—two major institutions of Britain’s welfare state,” we get a very different view. With this emphasis in mind, the rejection of multiculturalism can be seen less as an expression of concern about integration or “British values” and more as part of the neoliberal attack on the idea of social welfare provision itself. In other words, it is as much an economic objection as a culturalist one. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 148

Categorization

• XREF: Reframes the ‘complaints about immodesty’ / moral panic reading habit toward class-economic analysis; connects to the Frankfurt School reading that culturalist objections mask economic ones. — connects to: Cultural out-group stereotypes yield a two-by-two grid with only welfare recipients purely derogated. — Susan T. Fiske et al., A Model of (Often Mixed) Stereotype…, 238
• QUESTION: Could the ‘British values’ discourse about Muslims map onto the class signaling patterns in Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, where immigrant economic success reads as the deeper grievance?