August 21, 2006
A quote from Racial Culture: A Critique by Richard T. Ford:
The conflict between the norms of minorities and the inconsistent norms of mainstream or white society is assumed to lead, almost inevitably, to the obliteration of the minority group's norms and culture. For instance, Roberts insists that "The assimilationist ideal . . . has only operated in one way While whites have demanded that nonwhites assimilate to an Anglo-American way of life, the possibility that whites should assimilate to nonwhite cultures seems downright un American...9 and Johnson argues that "a white cultural perspective or norm . . . has the effect of stifling or eradicating the consciousness of African-American[s]"...
Then a comment:
Here assimilation is comprehensive and inescapable, an imperative and a legal injunction that gives no quarter and brooks no compromise. This reading is both devastating and perversely attractive: The enemy is monolithic and implacable, the multiculturalists can fancy themselves a heroic resistance, keeping the flame of liberty alive against all odds as they wait for the reinforcements from the Allies (or the courts).
Integration (especially colorblindness and assimilation) became the ideals of the mainstream in the late 1960s and 1970s. To a real extent this must be considered a decisive victory for the radicals. Ford adds that:
The civil rights movement never resolved the conflict within the black community between integration and separatism. Nor could it have. The tug of war arguably reflects not only conflict between committed ideological combatants, but ambivalence as well. Rather than distinctive and coherent options between which one could choose, integrationism (colorblindness and assimilation) and separatism (race consciousness and cultural nationalism) are symbolic and rhetorical oppositions, which one must constantly negotiate and juggle.
Even the most extreme forms of separatism contained elements of integration and assimilation whilst integration assumes racial distinctiveness--or else there would be no reason to care about integration and indeed no meaningful races to integrate.
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