Replacing ‘race’, historicizing ‘culture’ in multiculturalism

Replacing ‘race’, historicizing ‘culture’ inmulticulturalism

ALANA LENTIN

ABSTRACT Lentin sets out to unravel the history of the discourse of culturalism in

the post-Second World War period. Culture is now almost universally used to

categorize distinct human groups and to refer to the differences between them. As

the liberal acceptance of multiculturalism as a recipe for contemporary living

affirms, the use of culture as a viable conceptualization of human difference often

goes unchallenged in present-day scholarship. Lentin focuses on how the concept of

‘culture’ came to replace the language of ‘race’ in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Looking at the history of the ‘UNESCO tradition’ of anti-racism, she shows how

racial categorizations were replaced by cultural distinctions as a means of explaining

human difference. Whereas ‘race’ was seen as irrevocably invoking the superiority of

some human groups over others, culture was assumed by anti-racist scholars on

both sides of the Atlantic to imply a positive celebration of difference while allowing

for the possibility for progress among groups once considered ‘primitive’. Lentin

argues that such a shift, on which the western discourse of anti-racism is grounded,

by merely replacing ‘race’ with ‘culture’, fails to expunge the ranking of humanity

implied by theories of ‘race’. The essentialization of ‘cultures’ inherent within this

cultural relativism is carried through into multicultural approaches to education,

policymaking and activism that fail to include the dominant group in their

schematization of contemporary social and political relations. Furthermore, the

failure of culturalist approaches to counter racism effectively has been attributed to

the purported identity politics of ‘minority groups’. Contrary to the notion that

culture has come to pervade politics due to a bottom-up call from the marginalized

for greater recognition of their cultural ‘authenticity’, Lentin shows how culturalism

originated within the anti-racist elite and has resulted in the depoliticization of the

anti-racism of racism’s actual targets.

KEYWORDS anti-racism, culturalism, culture, interculturalism, multiculturalism, race,racism

In the West, the first years of the new millennium are being marked by agrowing public preoccupation with the supposed incompatibility of

diverse groups of people, at both a global and a local level. The ongoing‘war on terror’, launched by the United States and its allies in response to theattacks of 11 September 2001, is defined by a discourse that pits ‘civilizations’against each other in a Manichaean struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’,

Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 39, No. 4, 2005

ISSN 0031-322X print/ISSN 1461-7331 online/05/040379-18 # 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/00313220500347832

‘enlightened’ and ‘barbaric’. Likewise, at the level of western nation-states,

problems such as the erosion of national identity, the lack of political

participation, the decline of the welfare state and urban unrest have been put

down to the allegedly unmanageable diversity of contemporary postcolo-

nial, immigration societies. Commentators who have voiced fears about

what they see as the over-extension of cultural diversity have linked them to

a critique of multiculturalism, a policy of western nation-states that is now

pronounced ‘in crisis’ by governments and thinkers alike.1

In response, in countries such as the United Kingdom and the Nether-

lands, anti-racists have rushed to defend multiculturalism and denounce the

return to assimilationist policies that is increasingly being witnessed, for

example, under the present New Labour regime in Britain.2 While criticism

of the insistence on the primacy of ‘national values’ by current governments

is crucial, the opposition made between multiculturalism and assimilation-

ism in such critiques overlooks an important point. The policy of multi-

culturalism itself was not historically the outcome of the struggle by

‘minority communities’ for greater recognition, as is often supposed.3 On

the contrary, multiculturalism can be seen as an institutional policy that, by

replacing an analysis of the link between racism and capitalism with a focus

on the importance of cultural identity, depoliticized the state-centred anti-

racism of the racialized in postcolonial societies. In order to conceptionalize

the current debate about multiculturalism, which is far from being the first,4

it is crucial to set its terms in a wider political-historical context: namely, the

culturalization of politics that marks the post-war period in the West and the

inextricable relationship this has with racism in the history of modernity.Accordingly, I intend to look critically at one of the ways in which culture

has come to dominate the language of politics in the post-war era, namely, by

means of the struggle to eradicate racism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. I

will look at one specific and central aspect of this ensemble of campaigns: the

approach taken by UNESCO, which in turn informed the anti-racist policy of

many western states. As was revealed by my research into the development

of the discourse and practice of anti-racism in Europe,5 the UNESCO

approach also informs what can be thought of as the mainstream anti-racism

practised by many in the anti-racist movement, governmental agencies,

supranational institutions and NGOs. I suggest that a look at the history of

this anti-racist project may throw light on the artificial nature of the divide

1 See, for instance, David Goodhart, ‘Too diverse?’, Prospect , February 2004.2 Arun Kundnani, ‘Rally round the flag’, IRR News (online news network), 7 April 2004,

available at www.irr.org.uk/2004/april/ak000006.html (viewed 1 August 2005).3 Cf. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2004).4 Cf. Paul Gilroy, ‘The end of anti-racism’, in James Donald and Ali Rattansi (eds), ‘Race’,

Culture and Difference (London: Sage 1992).5 Alana Lentin, Racism and Anti-racism in Europe (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto

Press 2004).

380 Patterns of Prejudice

between ‘race’ and ‘culture’, and influence the way we look back on the

evolution of multiculturalism.This mainstream and institutionalized approach to racism in the western

societies of the post-war era is based on a belief that racism, propelled by

aberrant extremists, comes from the outside to infect society. It therefore, to

my mind, fails to place the racism of the postcolonial western world

satisfactorily in the political and historical context of its evolution from the

Enlightenment through slavery, colonialism and the Holocaust. As such,

mainstream approaches often adopt a psycho-social attitude to racism,

seeing it as the problem of pathological or ignorant individuals. Therefore,

they propose individually based solutions, emphasizing the need to over-

come ignorance through education and a greater knowledge of the Other.

Finally, whereas they may admit the wrongdoing of governments, they

avoid connecting racism with the historical development of the modern

European state, thereby seeing racism as an aberration of democracy and the

public political culture of the modern European nation-state.6 Such a view

contrasts strongly with the argument of those such as Hannah Arendt or

Zygmunt Bauman,7 and largely accepted by many theorists of ‘race’ and

racism, that, far from being external to the capitalist liberal-democratic

nation-state, modern racism was a consequence of modernity. In particular,

the political conditions brought about by the institutionalization of nation-

alism in the modern European nation-state, the need for populations of these

territorial units to be defined vis-a-vis external Others, made race-thinking

politically relevant and, indeed, expedient.Looking critically at the way in which the approach of western govern-

ments to tackling racism has evolved over time can help us to uncover the

foundations of the ‘multicultural regime’. Multiculturalism may be thought

of as being a regime because, in many ways, it has become an ideological

straitjacket and critical distance from it has been all but abolished. As a policy,

multiculturalism would have us see our societies as ‘race-free’ and culturally

rich. However, with the commendable aim of shunning those who condemn

6 In my theorization of anti-racism, I used John Rawls’s concept of ‘public politicalculture’ to describe the way in which the various discourses of anti-racism positionthemselves in relation to the state (Lentin, Racism and Anti-racism in Europe ). Accordingto Rawls, public political culture is a set of ‘familiar ideas’ that ‘play a fundamental rolein society’s political thought and how its institutions are interpreted’ (John Rawls,Justice and Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press 2001), 5�/6). I argued that anti-racist principles may be seen asbelonging to a wider set of principles contained in the public political culture ofwestern, liberal-democratic nation-states. The extent to which anti-racists adhere to orcritique these notions informs us as to their stance on the relationship between ‘race’and state.

7 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York and London: Harcourt BraceJovanovich 1966); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: PolityPress 1989).

ALANA LENTIN 381

societal diversity, it has become impossible to see clearly the artificiality of thedivide between ‘race’ and ‘culture’ within official discourses that valorizesculture while*/albeit strenuously*/demonizing ‘race’. The emphasis placedon the difference between these two means of categorizing human differenceoften serves to mask the persistence of racism in what is widely believed to bea post-racial age.8 Indeed, a multicultural approach to living together in thediverse societies of the post-war western world was built on ways ofconceptualizing and suggesting solutions for racism that, by bypassinghistory and politics, enabled culturalist interpretations to come to the fore. Wecannot, therefore, discuss multiculturalism historically without looking athow it evolved out of an increasing emphasis on culture as a means ofbringing about a state of ‘racelessness’.9

The culturalist approach to opposing racism becomes dominant preciselybecause it focuses on the need to find an alternative to ‘race’ as an adequatemeans of describing human differences. The antidote to racism, accordingto this thinking, is the denial of the viability of ‘race’ as a category andthe introduction of alternative conceptual tools based on culturalizedunderstandings, such as ethnicity or, more recently, identity. By concentrat-ing on the need to replace ‘race’ at all costs, proponents of this form of anti-racism have denied the necessity of historicizing the emergence of racism,not as a mere pseudo-science, but as an ideology that came to dominatepolitics from the end of the nineteenth century until the Second WorldWar.

This denial has led today to a failure to disentangle ‘race’ and state.Furthermore their interconnectedness remains largely obscured despite theintroduction of affirmative action and quota policies in many countries andadmissions of institutional racism, most significantly that following the 1997Macpherson inquiry into the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence inthe United Kingdom.10 While we may accept that individual institutionscontain racist elements or have even become steeped in a culture of racism,extending this to the idea that the state itself may be structured by racism isgenerally considered to be an extremist position. The success with whichracism has been portrayed as a type of fungus that grows on the bodypolitic means that we generally believe that, in a postcolonial, post-Holocaust era, racism has been expunged from the realm of the state andthat any residues that persist lurk on the fringes of politics and society. Forthese reasons, campaigns against racism often focus on the activities of far-right groups and individual cases of racially motivated hate crime. Whilethese should by no means be ignored, the constant identification of racismwith the actions of the politically marginal enables the apparently more

8 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2002).9 Ibid.10 William Macpherson, The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William

Macpherson of Cluny, Cm 4262-I (London: Stationery Office 1999).


banal, everyday racism experienced by the racialized in all social, political,economic and private spheres to be played down. In addition, today, theincreasing control over asylum and immigration has led to the criminaliza-tion of migrants and a public acceptance that their detention anddeportation is necessary for the protection of national interests. Never-theless, these state policies are accompanied by a declared commitment bygovernments to ‘tackling racism’, which brings about a situation inwhich*/despite all evidence to the contrary*/the belief that racism existsoutside of the state and that, therefore, immigration policies are not racistbut merely common sense has become ingrained in the contemporarywestern consciousness.

In order to provide a solid, historically grounded argument for my claimthat multiculturalism emerges from culturalist responses to racism thatdepoliticize anti-racist discourses and obscure the link between ‘race’ andstate, I will, first, offer a brief history of the so-called ‘UNESCO tradition’ atthe core of culturalist anti-racism. I then go on to critique the idea thatbecame prominent in the 1980s and 1990s, and that largely dominatesthinking on racism in the West today, that a so-called cultural racism hascome to dominate its biological predecessor and, more importantly, that itsappearance is due to the diffusion of anti-racist, anti-colonialist and‘minoritarian’ discourses in society. In conclusion, I discuss how thepredominance of cultural interpretations of human differences and theirofficial endorsement suppress state-centred critiques of racism that focus on‘race’ as, above all else, a political idea that, chameleon-like, adapts itself to avariety of political circumstances.

The roots of culturalism: the UNESCO tradition

Martin Barker introduced the idea of a ‘UNESCO tradition’ of anti-racism inreference to the opposition to racism-as-science, one of the central principlesof the anti-racism of the inter- and post-war years.11 This branch of anti-racism, first promoted by anti-racist scientists and anthropologists such asFranz Boas, Julian Huxley and Otto Klineberg in the 1930s, was based on abelief in the necessity of defeating racism on its own terms, as first andforemost a science that could, therefore, be disproved. This approach, basedon an a priori separation between ‘race’ and politics was considered by itspromoters to be the most effective way of establishing the impracticality ofracism as a system for making sense of human diversity.

UNESCO first brought together its panel of ‘world experts’ in 1950. Theirmeeting resulted in the publication of the UNESCO Statement on Race andRacial Prejudice which, having been updated several times, still serves as thebasis for the UN position on racism. The Statement, as well as pamphlets on

11 Martin Barker, ‘Empiricism and racism’, Radical Philosophy, no. 33, Spring 1983, 6�/15.

ALANA LENTIN 383

various issues related to racism written by the various members of thepanel,12 formed the basis of the anti-racist policy of post-war internationalinstitutions, a policy that was also widely adopted by western governments.The Statement is well characterized by the key idea that emphasizes, as IvanHannaford demonstrates, that a distinction be drawn between ‘race’ andethnicity: the former pernicious, the latter a supposedly benign means ofcategorizing human beings. This idea assumes that

all men belonged to the same species, Homo Sapiens , that national, cultural,

religious, geographical, and linguistic groups had been falsely termed races; that

it would be better to drop the term and use ‘ethnic groups’ in its place; that the

‘race is everything’ hypothesis was untrue.13

The UNESCO project is mired in two problems, both of which relate to theargument being made here that culturalist approaches to explaining andproposing solutions to racism are inadequate because they avoid thepolitical relationship of ‘reciprocal determination’ between ‘race’ and state.14

The first problem is that UNESCO aimed to tackle racism on its own terms,namely as a pseudo-science, reasoning that disproving the scientific validityof ‘race’ would lead to the demise of racism. Second, the project’s authors(mainly the anthropologists involved) aimed to provide an alternativeexplanation of human difference to that of ‘race’ that would serve to ridthe conceptualization of human difference, necessary for making sense ofincreasingly diverse populations, of the dangerous reverberations of race-thinking that were still sounding in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

In order, first, to disprove the validity of the pseudo-scientific concept of‘race’ it was imperative for the UNESCO panel to diminish the significanceattached to it. This aim nevertheless resulted in a view of racism that deniedits effects on the state and politics, relegating it to the realm of misusedpseudo-science. Point 3(b) of the 1968 version of the UNESCO Statementreads:

The division of the human species into ‘races’ is partly conventional and partly

arbitrary and does not imply any hierarchy whatsoever. Many anthropologists

stress the importance of human variation, but believe that ‘racial’ divisions have

limited scientific interest and may even carry the risk of inviting abusive

generalisation.15

12 Leo Kuper (ed.), Race, Science and Society (Paris: UNESCO Press and London: GeorgeAllen and Unwin 1975).

13 Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press 1996), 386.

14 Etienne Balibar, ‘Racism and nationalism’, in Etienne Balibar and ImmanuelWallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso 1991), 37�/67.

15 ‘UNESCO Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice’, Current Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 4,1968, 270�/2 (270).


However, while the UNESCO project contributed to undermining the

scientific credentials of the ‘race concept’,16 it did not address the political

implications of racism in the history of the West. It failed to deal with the

important fact that, while race-thinking may have had its beginnings in the

scientific or philosophical domain, it was through the medium of politics

that it had been propelled to significance. For example, while the Statement

on Race and Racial Prejudice recognized that the colonial ‘conditions of

conquest’ contributed to racism,17 this did not entail, in the analysis, any

agency on the part of the colonialist state. Furthermore, while admitting the

historically rooted, rather than natural or universal, origins of racism, the

Statement does not expand on the precise character of these origins. On the

contrary, it skims over the history of colonialism and the resultant

‘dependency’ of the colonies to claim that progress had since been achieved

due to the inclusion of many ‘formerly dependent countries’ in international

organizations.18 The formulation of the Statement ignores the power

relations between large and small, western and ‘developing’ states that still

define the workings not only of such institutions, but also of the neo-colonial

dependency that persists despite the official withdrawal of western rule.The second problem in the UNESCO approach relates more directly to the

history of how culturalist explanations came to dominate understandings of

human difference and be posed as the solution to persistent racism,

interpreted as an irrational prejudice between groups of culturally different

human beings. The UNESCO panel, in particular the anthropologists who

dominated it, wished to replace ‘race’ as a theory of human difference with

‘culture’, seen as a non-hierarchical, and thus more suitable, means of

conceptualizing diversity. The culturalist interpretation of difference em-

phasized in the Statement is epitomized by the following assertion:

Current biological knowledge does not permit us to impute cultural achievements

to differences in genetic potential. Differences in the achievements of different

peoples should be attributed solely to their cultural history. The peoples of the

world today appear to possess equal biological potentialities for attaining any

level of civilization.19

UNESCO wanted to be able to answer questions about why human

groups differed from each other in appearance, in traditions and in levels of

‘progress’. This was perceived to be even more necessary as the immigration

to Western Europe of non-Europeans meant that indigenous populations

16 Elazar Barkan, ‘Race’, in Theodore R. Porter and Dorothy Ross (eds), CambridgeHistory of Science. Volume 7. The Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press 2003).

17 ‘UNESCO Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice’.18 Ibid.19 Ibid., 270.

ALANA LENTIN 385

were, many for the first time, coming face to face with Others whom theyoften considered racially inferior or, at the very least, dangerouslyunfamiliar. The concern at this time with ensuring that racism should neveragain ‘raise its ugly head’ in places where the assumed homogeneity ofnational identity was being transformed by the arrival of newcomers isdirectly associated with the subsequent development of the multiculturalistideal as a principle for coping with the diversity of contemporary westernsocieties.

The main proposal made by UNESCO, and most forcefully by ClaudeLevi-Strauss in his short book Race and History,20 was that human groupscould be divided according to cultures that were relative to each other. Therelativity of culture eradicated the hierarchical implication of ‘superiority’and ‘inferiority’ built into the idea of ‘race’. Therefore, Levi-Strauss andUNESCO insisted on the replacement of ‘race’, as a way of categorizinghuman difference, with ‘ethnicity’ or ‘culture’. Racism, too, was thereforereplaced by the term ‘ethnocentrism’ which Levi-Strauss thought moreadequately described the intolerance between different cultural or ethnicgroups; this was considered to be almost inherent in groups and, therefore,more benign.

The idea that each culture contributed ‘in its own way’ to humanity as awhole countered the widely accepted belief that a hierarchy of ‘race’ dividedEuropeans from non-Europeans. Levi-Strauss celebrated the diversity ofhumanity, demonstrated by what he called the ‘distinctive contributions’ ofeach cultural group.21 He claimed that the different levels of progress of suchgroups could not be attributed to any innate differences. Rather, progresscomes about as a result of interaction between groups. The historical chancethat led to the onset of modernity taking place in the West meant that theother cultures that rubbed shoulders with the Occident experienced morerapid progress. Those that remained isolated did not. In the culturallyrelativist framework adopted by Levi-Strauss, which so greatly influencedthe UNESCO approach and which formed the basis of the multiculturalistapproach to the ongoing discrimination of non-Europeans in westernsocieties, the differences between human groups were seen as fortuitousand almost arbitrary.

By so forcefully making this point, Levi-Strauss rightly critiques aEurocentric notion of progress, which he sees as emerging from theevolutionist idea that all cultures are merely stages towards a single modelof humanity epitomized by the West. Rejecting the idea of ‘primitive’ and‘civilized’ cultures and the ideal of assimilation, Levi-Strauss proposed thatthe only means to curb ethnocentrism was through the greater exchangeof knowledge between different cultures. This interculturalist objectiveunderpins the anti-racism that dominates the policy of international

20 Claude Levi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO Press 1952).21 Ibid.


institutions, such as the United Nations and the Council of Europe, to thisday.

There is a twist, however, to Levi-Strauss’s celebration of cultural diversityand his advocacy of greater intercultural knowledge. The anthropologistclaimed that the ideal of a ‘world civilization’, based on what he described asa fact of cultural diversity, would only be worth pursuing if each culturewere to retain its originality. The more different the cultures involvedwere from each other, the more fruitful the intercultural communication.However, the only way to ensure diversity was actually to enforce thestratification of human groups according to colonialism’s class hierarchies.As multicultural society became a reality, Levi-Strauss feared that culturaldiversity would become a thing of the past. This extreme approach to theidea of cultural diversity, as something static within which cultural groupswould ideally remain hermetically sealed despite the fact that they wouldincrease their knowledge of each other, reveals the problems associated withanthropology’s involvement in the search for solutions to the ongoingproblem of racism. While certainly no longer universally the case, the legacyof the anthropologists’ role in colonialist regimes and their contribution to anexoticizing and reifying view of non-European cultures cannot be comple-tely overlooked.

The UNESCO tradition that developed out of the contributions of thinkerssuch as Levi-Strauss overlooked the complexities of such arguments and,indeed, later elaborations of them, such as Levi-Strauss’s own re-evaluationof Race and History in his essay entitled ‘Race et Culture’.22 The approach itoutlined was based on three fundamental principles that formed the basis ofthe proposed solution to the persistent problem of what now had becomeknown as ‘ethnocentrism’.

. Because ‘race’ has no scientific validity, it should be replaced by ‘culture’or ‘ethnicity’, and the notion of racism by that of ethnocentrism;

. the benefits of cultural diversity should be promoted as a means ofenriching society; and

. greater knowledge of other cultures among western societies should beencouraged in order to bring about awareness of the ‘fact’ of culturaldiversity on a global scale and to combat the inclination of ignorant andprejudicial human beings to adopt ethnocentric attitudes.

There are three main problems arising from this package of solutionsproposed by UNESCO that have a direct bearing on the way in whichmulticultural approaches to racism have affected the politics of anti-racismspecifically and the lived experience of many racialized people inwestern societies more generally. First, by proposing that racism is a

22 Claude Levi-Strauss, ‘Race et Culture’, in C. Levi-Strauss, Le Regard eloigne (Paris: Plon1983).

ALANA LENTIN 387

misconstrued attitude based on misleading, pseudoscientific information,the UNESCO approach implies that it can, therefore, be overcome at thelevel of the individual without questioning the role of the state. Thisapproach forms part of what is today a widespread attitude to racism, onethat characterizes analyses of institutionalized and state racism as theparanoia of ‘minorities’ or the extreme left. Racism, from this commonsenseperspective, is the pathological problem of ignorant individuals who ‘knowno better’, an analysis based on an in-built class stereotyping that equatesracism mainly with working-class ignorance. This interpretation of racismpsychologizes and individualizes it, making it impossible to proposepolitical analyses or solutions. Therefore, slavery, colonialism, the Holo-caust and contemporary discrimination against immigrants can only beinterpreted as aberrations and not as political components of modernnation-states.

The second problem entailed in the UNESCO project is that to propose‘culture’ as an alternative to ‘race’ does little, contrary to the belief of thosesuch as Levi-Strauss, to refute the widely accepted view that groups areorganized hierarchically according to levels of progress. While theoreticallyaccepting the validity of ‘different but equal’ cultures, the transposition ofthis principle into anti-racist action was nevertheless accompanied inpractice by paternalism because, as Levi-Strauss himself observed, theprinciple of cultural relativism could only work if ‘cultures’ were kept inisolation from each other. Once populations moved, they were naturallyinfluenced by living in a new society and interpreting its codes forthemselves on the basis of their own lived experience. However, whennon-white, non-European populations were confronted with racism in thewestern societies to which they had come as immigrants, they were oftenconfronted with the fixed anti-racism of the local left that assumed that, asnewcomers, immigrants lacked knowledge about the workings of the societyand would require guidance before acquiring political and social maturity.This was a particular problem in the early anti-racism of the white left inpost-war Europe, which allied itself with the romantic figure of the anti-colonial freedom fighter but found it difficult in practice to make politicalspace for immigrant activists in the metropole. On the contrary, the ideaprevailed that white people had a duty to help new immigrants, producing apaternalistic attitude that reproduced the idea of western superiority overso-called Third World backwardness.

Finally, the idea that people can be assigned to different groups accordingto culture is powerless to avoid the essentialism implied by ‘race’. Whetheror not it is as pernicious as an idea, culture is no less reifying. Here wecan see the direct link to the critique of multiculturalism that has oftenbeen formulated. Multiculturalism has been accused of seeing culturalgroups as internally homogeneous and static, and of being unable to makeroom for the necessary hybridization that comes about as populationsoriginating in various parts of the globe share space in the urban


metropole.23 Moreover, the homogeneity of culture is almost always evokedby members of the dominant culture in reference to that of so-calledminority groups. In such a schema, the dominant culture is rarelyscrutinized, but merely accepted as the norm. Therefore, it is common tohear references to ‘ethnic’ food and music on the assumption that this onlyrefers to what does not originate within the national space. While it is lessfrequent for what are considered to be cultural characteristics to be putdown to genetic differences, there is a tendency to talk in stereotypes about‘Muslim values’, ‘black attitudes’ or ‘Asian work ethics’. Such stereotypingof groups, many of whose members have lived in western societies forseveral generations, belies the influence that common living in multiculturalsocieties has on everyone. The persistence of racism that often consists in theghettoization of racialized groups should not be confused with the commonperception that ‘minority groups’ naturally choose to live in culturalenclaves. The frequency with which such attitudes are expressed strengthensthe suggestion I am making here that the shift from ‘race’ to ‘culture’ or‘ethnicity’ is little more than a cosmetic one in terms of the impact it has onthe actual experience of racism.

Cultural racism, identity politics and the misconstrual of authenticity

The culturalist approach epitomized by the UNESCO tradition has domi-nated ideas about how to interpret and propose solutions to racism in thepost-war western world. Beyond this, it has also contributed to a belief,which came to prominence in the 1980s, that anti-racism could be heldresponsible for the emergence of a new culturalist racism, heralded bygroups on the far right such as the French Front National. However, while itis true, as several commentators have pointed out,24 that the language ofcultural relativism was adopted by the far right in an overt effort to shunblatant racism in favour of a discourse of cultural incompatibility, it ismistaken to attribute the diffusion of culturalism itself to the rise of identitypolitics. What I am suggesting is that commentators who have proposed thatthe call for the recognition of the cultural specificity of ‘minority’ groups inwestern societies is a process that originates at the grassroots, with themarginalized or racialized themselves, have failed to historicize adequatelythe way in which multicultural approaches to targeting discrimination have

23 Cf. Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialised Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender,Colour and Class and the Anti-racist Struggle (London and New York: Routledge 1992);Gilroy, ‘The end of anti-racism’.

24 Pierre-Andre Taguieff, La Force du prejuge: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: LaDecouverte 1989); Pierre-Andre Taguieff (ed.), Face au racisme , 2 vols (Paris: LaDecouverte 1991); Verena Stolcke, ‘Talking culture: new boundaries, new rhetorics ofexclusion in Europe’, Current Anthropology, vol. 36, no. 1, 1995, 1�/24.

ALANA LENTIN 389

evolved. As I demonstrated in the previous section, culturally basedexplanations of human difference and culturalist solutions to racismemerged out of an elite project, piloted by the United Nations and

legitimized by renowned academics. To blame the racialized for theculturalization of politics and the resultant depoliticization of anti-racismis to misunderstand the origins of the culturalist project and to disregard thechoice often faced by black and ‘minority ethnic’ anti-racists, from the 1980son, between adopting the language of multiculturalism or ceasing to besocially and politically engaged.

The idea that the culturalist approach to the fight against racism has

contributed to the rise in acceptability of the discourse of the far rightoriginates with the idea of a new cultural racism. The ‘new racism’ isepitomized by the idea that cultures should be seen as separate but equal.The translation of this in far-right, nationalist rhetoric is that each culturedeserves its own homeland in which its members can live undisturbed byothers. Publicly, proponents of this view claim that, just like Europeans,immigrants too would be happier ‘at home’, in their ‘natural surroundings’.The idea of a new racism was first proposed in 1981 by Martin Barker in hisanalysis of the relationship between Thatcherism in the United Kingdomand the rise of sociobiology as a means of proving the incompatibilitybetween the inherently different ways of life of British people and‘immigrants’. The new racism was based on the idea that ‘it is in our

biology, our instincts, to defend our way of life, traditions and customsagainst outsiders’.25 Barker insisted, however, that culturalism was an elitediscourse that infected the racist politics of fringe groups from the top downbecause it had been legitimized by both the governing Conservative Partyand by key thinkers in the academy.

In contrast to Barker’s perspective, cultural, or so-called differentialist,racism was analysed in a very different way by Pierre-Andre Taguieff.Taguieff proposed that the success that cultural racism had enjoyed in

appealing to the French public in the late 1980s, as seen in growing supportfor the Front National, was due to anti-racism, which he saw as having beenpropelled by anti-colonialists and the far left. Taguieff suggested in severalworks on the nature of anti-racism that anti-racists had been responsible forcreating the language used to such effect by the racists of the FrontNational.26 The diffusion of the discourse of cultural relativism has,according to Taguieff, directly enabled the resuscitation of a far-right politicswhose association with the distasteful history of European fascism had led toits previous decline.

25 Martin Barker, The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe (London:Junction Books 1981), 23�/4.

26 Taguieff, La Force du prejuge ; Taguieff (ed.), Face au racisme, vol. 1: Les moyens d’agir andvol. 2: Analyses, hypotheses, perspectives; Pierre-Andre Taguieff, Les Fins de l’antiracisme(Paris: Michalon 1995).


Taguieff is a self-styled French republican thinker whose more recent workhas targeted Islam in France as the carrier of a ‘new Judaeophobia’ that posesa threat both to Jews and to the principles of laicite upon which the Frenchstate was ostensibly founded.27 Therefore, while professing his commitmentto fighting racism, he opposes what he sees as the ‘communitarianization’ ofanti-racism, namely, the association of the opposition to racism with theexperiences of the targets of racist discrimination. His stance is onecommonly adopted in France whereby anti-racist principles are establishedby reference to a public political culture that upholds the belief that theFrench state is foundationally anti-racist. This form of anti-racism, practisedby organizations such as SOS Racisme and the Ligue contre le racisme etl’antisemitisme (LICRA), is referred to as ‘generalist’ because it seeks toappeal as widely as possible to the general public, and therefore refuses to beseen as associated with what are written off as being the ‘particularist’concerns of racialized people. As was pointed out in an interview with arepresentative of SOS Racisme:

From the moment that we would rely on a communitarian model, we would lose

all our power and all our force because we wouldn’t be speaking to everyone’s

hearts. We would not be speaking to 60 million people, we’d be speaking to the

victims concerned. And the victims concerned are not the majority of the activist

force.28

Taguieff blames anti-racism for the emergence of culturalist racism. Heignores the heterogeneity of anti-racism. Rather, he identifies it whollywith the actions of the extreme left and those whom he sees as being anti-western, epitomized by anti-colonialists such as Frantz Fanon. Furthermore,he proposes that cultural relativism has destroyed any chance that thestruggle against racism*/associated exclusively with the activities of the farright*/might succeed. Cultural relativism is seen as stemming from theinsistence of those of non-European origin on creating exclusivist commu-nities that threaten the secular and assimilatory ethos of French republicanpolitical culture. Nowhere does he admit the possibility that the ‘ghettoiza-tion’ and ‘communitarianization’ that he sees as so damaging may not havebeen the outcome of a choice made by those of immigrant origin in Europe,but rather the result of the state racism that persists despite officialendorsements of equality and meritocracy and a publicly professedcommitment to ‘weeding out’ racism.

The possibility of blaming racialized ‘communities’ for the diffusion of thelanguage of cultural racism is founded on a purposeful misreading of thedevelopment of culturalism, which was top-down and not, as Taguieffwould have it, bottom-up. This misreading is based on a view of identity

27 Pierre-Andre Taguieff, La Nouvelle Judeophobie (Paris: Milles et une nuits 2002).28 Quoted in Lentin, Racism and Anti-racism in Europe , 185.

ALANA LENTIN 391

politics that claims that political action by ‘minority groups’ is solely

founded on a need for the culture of each ‘community’ to be equally

valorized in a diverse society. The ‘politics of recognition’ are based,29 it is

claimed, on the significance of authenticity as a means both for establishing

internal cohesion within a given ‘community’ and for seeking legitimacy in

the public sphere. Like Taguieff, Charles Taylor sees Fanon’s thinking as

fundamental to notions of authenticity and recognition. Taylor’s misreading

of Fanon is a useful example of how culturalism came to be associated, not

with the elite anti-racism of the international institutions, but with the self-

organized anti-racism of the racialized in the postcolonial West.Taylor bases his view of identity politics on what he claims to be a search

for authenticity in the process of throwing off domination. And he attributes

the concept of authenticity in the contemporary world to Frantz Fanon.

Fanon argues that the main weapon of colonization was the imposition of

the image of the colonizers on the subjugated so that they were no longer

recognized*/even by themselves*/outside of a view of them constructed by

their oppressors.30 Ignoring Fanon’s grappling with the ontology of black

people’s existence in Black Skin, White Masks , Taylor dwells on Fanon’s

justification of violence in the process of decolonization in The Wretched of the

Earth . During this period, Fanon’s writings emphasized the assimilation of

the culture of the oppressor as characteristic of colonization and the creation

of the ‘native’ by the settler. He calls for the effects of colonization on the

colonized to be consciously reversed through the shattering of the self-

perception of oneself as subjugated resulting from oppression.Taylor confuses his own view of the ideal of authenticity as a model for

society with Fanon’s advocacy of violence as a necessary stage towards the

achievement of national self-determination for the colonized. He then links

this artificial connection to his theorization of contemporary identity politics.

By doing so, he purposefully avoids the very strangeness of Fanon’s

situation: a Martinican who had elected to fight for Algerian liberation

from French rule, under which his own country had elected to remain.

Taylor’s view that Fanon’s appeal to authenticity is a foundation of present-

day collective action by ‘minority’ groups for recognition skims over the

vital fact that, for Fanon, the achievement of national liberation must eschew

any appeal to ethnicity or ‘race’. Fanon recognized how nationalism comes

to rely on racism when he remarked that the ‘racial and racist level is

transcended’ in an Algerian nation that must emerge on the basis of will and

consciousness and not on the grounds of shared ethnicity.31 The openness of

Fanon’s vision of the membership of a new self-determined nation opposes

29 Taylor, Multiculturalism .30 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press 1963); Frantz Fanon,

Black Skins, White Masks (London: Pluto Press 1967).31 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth , 108.


the essentialism of the authentic identity that Taylor claims it is necessary toconstruct for the achievement of equal recognition.

Taylor fails to read Fanon’s own ambivalent relationship to the authen-ticity claims made by the advocates of negritude. Ultimately, Fanon seesnegritude as a transitory stage in the process of decolonization but not as anend in itself. Such an authentic identity cannot be sustained because to do sowould be to belie the extent to which the ‘Negro’ has been brought intoexistence by the white man. The impossibility therefore of ‘returning’ to aprecolonial authenticity is evident in Fanon’s explanation of his condition: ‘Iwanted to be typically Negro*/it was no longer possible. I wanted to bewhite*/that was a joke.’32 Fanon’s negritude is a pragmatic position boundup more with a concern for making the Black visible as such, independent ofthe white gaze. However, it is clear that, for Fanon, visibility is of little usewithout self-determination, not in the individualist sense applied to it byTaylor but as a process of freeing a people from colonial rule. As David TheoGoldberg notes, ‘being recognised, whether as self-conscious or as Other,and thus being visible, requires that one be outside the Other’s imposition,free of the Other’s complete determination’.33 Therefore, the recourse toauthentic negritude can be a first step towards humanizing the colonized bymaking them visible. Its necessity, however, can begin to be reconsideredonce self-determination is established in order to create a new politics that,as Barnor Hesse suggests,34 particularizes Eurocentric universalism byconstructing itself in opposition to it.

Culturalism and the depoliticization of anti-racism: contemporaryeffects

The history of anti-racism in Europe reveals that the political project of thosefacing racism that attempted to ground itself in a Fanonian commitment tolived experience as a key to interpreting racial domination has always facedsuppression. This has come both from the right and from those generally onthe left who have looked for anti-racist responses in western public politicalculture and denounced the self-organized anti-racism of the racialized as‘communitarian’, ‘particularist’ or ‘culturalized’. I have attempted to showthat a culturalized view both of the interpretation of racism and the solutionsproposed to it was a top-down project that was then mis interpreted asemerging out of identity politics as a search for authenticity. This readingignores the fact that, with the diffusion of multicultural policymaking,

32 Fanon, Black Skins, White Mask , 132.33 David Theo Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (New York and

London: Routledge 1997), 81.34 Barnor Hesse, ‘‘‘It’s your world’’: discrepant M/multiculturalisms’, in Phil Cohen

(ed.), New Ethnicities, Old Racisms (London : Zed Books 1999).

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political demands in reaction to racial discrimination could only be framedin a culture-oriented language that sees intercultural knowledge as the keyto combating so-called ‘ethnocentrism’. Politicized approaches that stressinstitutionalized racism and that look to ground the anti-racist project in thelived experience of racism’s targets have been seen as counter-productive tothe aim of creating a generally non-racist society.

What have been the repercussions of the dominance of culturalism and theconcomitant marginalization of self-organized, state-centred anti-racism?First, the replacement of ‘race’ with ‘culture’ has done little to counter theidea that humanity is organized hierarchically. This is due to the fact thatdifference has been culturalized by Europeans and imposed on others as ameans of coping both with the recent history of the West and with thediversification of its societies. As such, like universalist values, culturaldifference is theorized in relation to a European standard that escapes therelativization that it proposes for others.

Within the logic of multiculturalism, the members of non-white and/ornon-European cultural groups are generally thought of as internallyhomogeneous. Members of these purported cultures are essentialized assuch. This essentialization often acts like racialization: so-called minoritiesare pigeon-holed and as a result rendered invisible. Once an individual hasbeen assigned to his/her cultural group and tucked away at the fringes ofsociety (both metaphorically and often geographically), any sense ofhybridity or heterogeneity is lost.

Many theorists, artists, musicians and writers have emphasized thefluidity of cultural identities. Yet, without challenging the underlyingreasons why culture dominates our understandings, this is unlikely tohave a significant impact in the realm of politics and policymaking. Thinkingculturally about difference is the default position for not talking about ‘race’and avoiding the charge of racism. But this very need for such a substitutecovers up the fact that the hierarchy put in place by racism has beenmaintained. It no longer exists as blatant persecution. It is more ambivalent.It can continue precisely because it has been deleted from official discourse.The ultimate signal that it has been rejected is the fact that it has beenreplaced: ‘benign’ culture has taken over from virulent ‘race’.

Nevertheless, racism persists. And this is even admitted by elites. Theirresponse is also formulated in terms of culture. Multiculturalism, intercul-turalism and diversity management have, over the years, been different waysof talking about the same thing: how to ‘integrate’ difference and curb theproblems that it may lead to. However, it is now increasingly obvious thatculturalist policies have not brought about the end of racism. This is becauseneither multiculturalism nor its updated version*/interculturalism*/ques-tions the very reason for the focus on culture.

People targeted by racism generally see through the idea that recognizingcultural differences, providing for them and encouraging others to learnabout them will bring an end to discrimination. At local, national and


European levels, virtually the only anti-racist projects that receive fundingare those that mobilize culture under one form or another. Mainstream anti-racist organizations propose that culture is the best way to break downbarriers and increase tolerance. They thus organize concerts of so-called‘ethnic music’, food festivals and even intercultural football matches. As myresearch revealed, in Italy, for example, groups such as the Roma orSenegalese communities are invited to share their food and music withlocal Italians as a way of bringing ‘cultures’ together, despite the fact thatsome of them have lived in Italian society for up to two decades. As one ofmy British interviewees from the Campaign against Racism and Fascismpointed out in a comment made about the problem of receiving financialsupport for anti-racist activities:

I don’t think we got any money from the European Union at all . . . what was

funded was not anti-racist work. It was cultural work, multicultural work. The

best way to get funding was multicultural work, not stuff that was going to be

critical of state institutions.35

There is a widely accepted perception that culture is inherently devoid ofpolitics. It is therefore possible for states, supranational institutions andprivate bodies close to them to promote anti-racist initiatives without callinginto question the participation of state institutions in racist discrimination.Even the admission of institutional racism by the Metropolitan Police in theUnited Kingdom following the 1997 Macpherson inquiry has primarilyengendered policies of ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversification’ within institutionsthat fail to transform the culture of racism by which they are structured.Indeed, these policies fail to scratch the surface to reveal the often deeplyracist premises on which these institutions have been built.

There is an idea in our multicultural societies that it is futile to historicizethe development of the concepts we take for granted. Instead, we can revelin our cultural richness, ignoring all those for whom the official embrace ofdiversity makes little difference to their daily lives. The story of how thepotentially liberating, political tool of culture was harnessed in the aim ofbypassing ‘race’ and the real effects of racism may assist us in the vitalproject of rethinking multiculturalism at a time when it is being challengedby those on the political right who seek to replace it with policies thatemphasize the primacy of national identity. Rethinking multiculturalismmust not mean an acceptance of the new assimilationism that, as ArunKundnani rightly points out,36 seeks to impose the symbols of patrioticallegiance on populations for whom, happily, the need for a strongnationalist identity has been progressively being eroded. It should rathersignal the necessity of challenging classifications that would not have been

35 Quoted in Lentin, Racism and Anti-racism in Europe , 289.36 Kundnani, ‘Rally round the flag’.

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chosen by those they aim to describe. This may pave the way towardsquestioning the way in which notions of identity and belonging areconceived, by whom they are developed and for what purpose: not onlyin theory but in political practice.

Alana Lentin holds an EC Outgoing International Fellowship at the CityUniversity of New York where she is continuing her research, begun atOxford University, on the link between globalization, immigration andcollective action. She is the author of Racism and Anti-racism in Europe (PlutoPress 2004).


Documents

Replacing ‘race’, historicizing ‘culture’ in multiculturalism