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Multiculturalism
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Multiculturalism is a catchall term that refers generally to a set of related cultural movements and trends which emphasize the diversity of U.S. culture and society. Its various projects seek to recognize, encourage, and affirm the participation of ethnic minorities in all aspects of American life. They tend to celebrate the contributions made by diverse groups and to consider those contributions as vital to the economic, social, and cultural fabric of the United States. In higher education, multiculturalism began to assume definitive shape during the 1980s, as universities revised their programs, textbooks, and curricula to reflect a more inclusive view of American culture. This change in focus toward women, minorities, and non-Western texts and perspectives would generate heated debate among academics and spark the so-called "culture wars" of the 1980s and 1990s. On one side of the debate, critics argued that multiculturalism promoted factionalism and undermined the foundations of Western culture; proponents claimed that it advocated tolerance and equality.
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Multiculturalism can be an ideology that is used to bludgeon one's way into tenure, because affirmative action alone is insufficient. The essence of affirmative action becomes clear after leaving grad school and spending fifteen years working for small companies as well as several large corporations. Affirmative action (the PR phrase is "equal opportunity" and the accurate phrase is "preferential treatment") is a facade, affecting only the low-level and public-interface positions in large corporations. After instructing their human resource departments along federal guidelines, upper management stays the same, secure in the knowledge that the low-level hires will statistically offset the white males behind their closed office doors. Feminists call this the "glass ceiling."
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Multiculturalism ... has support from the political left. Support from the political left comes mainly from those who are communitarian. Communitarians support multiculturalism because it gives immigrant groups a sense of community when they settle in new countries. Immigrant groups generally settle together in the same community which helps their transition to their new countries. Communitarians also support multiculturalism because of the need for society to be tolerant of all races and religions.
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Multiculturalism ... has the potential to promote a more effective formation of social and economic capital. By preserving links to their ethno-religious communities, entrepreneurs have an additional network of social and financial capital in addition to the institutions and networks in broader society.[29] This has the potential to accelerate innovation, entrepreneurship and business development.
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Multiculturalism can be said to resonate from the cultural eruptions of the 1960s, when civil rights, Native American, "new ethnicity," and women's liberation movements in the United States shattered images of a coherent national identity. The force and urgency of these protests challenged the authority and credibility of "the establishment," and shook the public's confidence in the social and political structures that validated it. Students marched in protest against America's involvement or intervention not only in Vietnam, but ... in neighboring Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to questioning social conformity, economic inequality, and political legitimacy, voices rose in defiance against long-held cultural assumptions and myths. As thousands of demonstrators across the nation expressed their defiance of U.S. policies and systems, Americans struggled to redefine their roles, values, and allegiances. Many strove to foster some sense of communal belonging, forging a place for themselves within a more pliant cultural framework. Others questioned the desirability of aspiring to a unified national identity in an increasingly transnational world.
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A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of this discussion. It is now joined by Jürgen Habermas's extensive essay on the issues of recognition and the democratic constitutional state and by K. Anthony Appiah's commentary on the tensions between personal and collective identities, such as those shaped by religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and on the dangerous tendency of multicultural politics to gloss over such tensions. These contributions are joined by those of other well-known thinkers, who further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism, and cultural separatism.Praise for the previous edition:
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