Liberal Universalism and Multicultural Advocacy

Diversity progressivism is made up of two general categories: liberal universalism and multicultural advocacy.

The first is activism around feminism, gay rights and class mobility. It rallies against patriarchy, homophobia/heterosexism, income inequality and the ways that those on top in each category conspire to maintain their power.

Multicultural advocacy is activism around the flourishing of various ethnic, racial and (to a much lesser extent) religious minority groups. It rallies against white supremacy and colonialism and is also hyperaware of how (white) power operates to obstruct the thriving of these groups.

The bridge between these categories is a power analysis, which essentially states that the powerful people in each category assign and enforce lesser roles for those without power. The patriarchy persists because men assign women roles with more labor and less pay. Men are heralded for sexual promiscuity, while women are labeled sluts. White supremacy exists because white people have assigned lesser roles to people of color. White people lead, black people work.

I generally think this is right. The next time you deplane after a domestic flight, take a look at the people waiting on the Jetway, the ones wearing plastic gloves, carrying cleaning supplies and preparing to pick up the plastic cup you forgot to throw away. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that they are mostly women of color, and especially if you’re flying to a business destination (New York, Chicago, San Francisco), they are demographically very different from the disproportionately white and male group of people disembarking.

This did not happen by accident, and it is not a function of superior intellect by some demographic groups. It is absolutely a legacy of structural racism, sexism and the like -- and it is high time that there is an appropriately loud hue and cry over this gross injustice.

And yet, the current hue and cry reveals some very interesting tensions between the two categories, liberal universalism and multicultural advocacy.

What I highlight below is not meant as a call out, but rather an exploration, the kind of thing I think intellectuals do for a living. I think of it as “Hmm, the frameworks we are using don’t quite match the facts of the world. Let’s investigate further, think a little harder, and hopefully come up with better frameworks.”

I speak here of the obvious: that while diversity progressives are increasingly joining the two categories of liberal universalism and multicultural advocacy in phrases like “what immigrants, people of color, women, LGBTQ folks and Muslims want,” several facts of the world suggest that many minority cultures are less than friendly to the key liberal universals of feminism, gay rights and class mobility.

This is not a new argument. Susan Okin Miller made it powerfully in a classic essay called “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women.”

But a handful of recent experiences have made it particularly salient for me.

One was attending an Indian Muslim American wedding. It was a liberal affair, as these things go -- gender mixing and celebratory dancing -- and lots of fun was had by all. But there were plenty of clues, especially recognizable by insiders (I grew up in an Indian Ismaili Muslim American household), of dynamics that were far afield from liberal universals. The people who did the official religious parts of the ceremony were all men. This was not a coincidence -- it was a requirement. There was much talk of the pride the parents took in the bride and groom both being doctors, and references to the specific responsibilities that males have to females (protection) and females to males (taking care of children).

All of this was very familiar to me. The vast majority of the ethnic and religious minorities I know grew up in households with focused understandings of how a life should be lived, often delineated by gender and birth order. You need to get married by your late 20s and to a very specific kind of person. (By the way, there is no mainstream American parallel to the industry of marriage matchmaking in Indian culture, organized blatantly by wealth, skin color, education, occupation, family background, region, religion and caste.)

When it comes to career choices, you should choose to be a doctor, and if for some reason that doesn’t happen, the other choices are engineer, accountant, pharmacist or something in IT.

These things are not just what your parents think are best for you, they are a matter of honor for the family.

An interesting window into how many (of course not all, but undoubtedly many) South Asians view the importance of upholding the family’s honor when it comes to career choice and, especially, protocols of courtship and marriage -- going a different route is referred to as being “too American.”

So, in the spirit of intellectual exploration, this is interesting. The very liberal universals (choosing a creative career, or a nontraditional sexual expression) that diversity progressives criticize America for grossly violating are in fact specifically called “American” by a minority culture who views the embrace of such universals as polluting its cultural patterns.

The second recent experience that inspired this recent exploration was a visit to Mexico City, where I did a deep dive into Sandra Cisneros’s writings. I love Cisneros’s ability to paint multicultural scenes and populate them with real-world human dynamics, including the patriarchal dimensions and rigid race/class divisions in Mexican culture. She writes unflinchingly about the restaurants in Mexico that brazenly tell dark-skinned Mexicans that all the tables are reserved even when the room is empty at 7 p.m. The girls “chewing on their boyfriends’ lips in the park” who “can only imagine love as the greatest accomplishment of their small lives.” The confusion of the Mexican town where she now lives at the presence of a 60-year-old professional female writer with no children. She is beyond being una senorita because she is past her childbearing years. But nor is she properly a senora, because she is nobody’s mother. These are the only categories Mexican society seems to offer women.

Cisneros is not doing political criticism, she is doing intellectual exploration -- finding and following the facts of the world, pointing to beauty, highlighting tensions.

We are confronted by a fascinating paradox: the more self-righteously you insist on a full-tilt version of liberal universals, the more you wind up indicting a slew of minority cultures. And the more you insist on a full-tilt version of multicultural affirmation, the more you wind up compromising liberal universals.

So, what’s the answer? I think it’s a recognition that not all good thinks go together (Isaiah Berlin called this “values pluralism”). An allergy to squeezing the world into your worldview. Less self-righteousness in general. More modesty. More intellectual exploration.