The supposedly neutral public sphere actually reflects the dominant ethnic group’s culture.

Evidence

The recognition of unequal power relations highlights, in turn, the fiction of the supposedly neutral, formally egalitarian, and de-ethnicized civic realm. Thus a defensible multicultural paradigm must be able to deconstruct the apparent neutrality of civism - that is, the supposedly universal, neutral set of cultural values and practices that underpin the public sphere of the nation-state. Civism, as constructed within the socalled “pluralist dilemma,” is not neutral, and never has been. Rather, the public sphere of the nation-state represents and is reflective of the particular cultural and linguistic practices of the dominant (ethnic) group. The principal consequence for many minorities at both the individual and collective level - has been the enforced loss of their own ethnic, cultural, and linguistic practices as the necessary price of entry to the civic realm. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 946

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘civism’ as the supposedly neutral cultural underpinning of the public sphere.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘complaints about immodesty’ moral-panic themes — dominant-group cultural norms presented as neutral universals.