Comments

Can there be love crimes? Or perhpaps dislike crimes? Or unesteemed crimes?

The whole hate crime thing is like putting a round peg in a round hole, it fits perfectly.

Jesus said, "Whoever say You fool to someone is in danger of hellfire".
There's something people should ponder, and try to find out what our sovereign Lord meant when He said that.

Mr. Guthrie, you know what he means. Your criticism harkens to the leftists' criticism of Don Imus when he complained to the Rev. Al Sharpton on his radio show that "I just can't win with YOU people." Quit being so hyper-sensitive. Yes, language matters, but common sense dictates we know what he means. It's the leftists who categorize unnecessarily, not realists.

Yes, that is what he means. He simply does not identify with those people "singled out" as being the more likely targets of hate crimes. And that is exactly how so many of the Republican Party wing of Evangelicals come across -- what they say, and what they think (not necessarily what they do, because the Republican Party and the evangelical community do indeed include people of all stripes, colors, economic and gender groups.

I honestly can't understand why you would "agree" that the hate crimes bill demeans family values. It is not, contrary to what FRC and others have been saying, a "thought control" bill. It does not in any way restrict or threaten to restrict speech about moral issues, including homosexuality. All it does is increase the penalties for violent crimes motivated by animus against a protected class, including religion, race, and gender, as well as sexual orientation. Even without the hate crimes penalty enahncements, the things covered by the bill -- things like rape, murder, battery, and such -- are crimes.

Relating a penalty or remedy to a state of mind is nothing extraordinary. Murder, for example, is usually defined as the "unjustified killing of a human being with malice aforethought." "Malice aforethought," obviously, is a state of mind. In civil cases, state of mind often relates to available remedies. When I was a commercial litigator, I handled many cases in which the defendant's bad intent gave rise to a claim for punitive damages or attorney's fees. As a law professor, it seems absurd to me to question whether courts should be able to consider state of mind in assessing a civil or criminal penalty. Of course they should.

The truth is that this is all routine. The law has always addressed state of mind issues. "Hate crimes" laws are nothing novel or frightening. I fear that the FRC, CWA, and other such groups are not accurately representing the present hate crimes bill because the focus on homosexual politics provides a convenient wedge issue. We should call that what it is and move on to more pressing matters.

And from a missional perspective, I think this push against the hate crimes bill is a disaster. What kind of message about the love of Jesus does this send to the homosexual community? "Jesus loves you, but it's ok with us if people who hate you beat you up or kill you?" I don't get it.

Perkins is trying to say that all crime is a hate crime. If a disabled woman and an "abled" white man are both murdered, they are equally dead and their crimes should be treated equally.

DiverCity writes: "common sense dictates we know what he means." Yep--common sense dictates that he means just what he said, which is that the FRC's "we" is healthy, straight, white males. That's not hypersensitivity; that's just taking the words of a professional communicator like Tony Perkins at face value. It is, however, revelatory: the FRC is far more interested in a golf-buddy Jesus than it is in the Lord testified to in Gal 3.28.

To expand on Dopderbeck's wise words, since so many people seem confused, the idea of a "hate crime" is that it's a crime against an individual which is also an assault on an entire group of people--for example, the Klan burning a cross on a black family's lawn. That doesn't just hurt the people on whose property the violation happened, it's a move to terrorize an entire community. And regardless of what you think about homosexuality, you cannot deny that gays and lesbians face just such circumstances. When Matthew Shepard got hung on that WY fence and left to die, it was a message: this is what happens to people like you.

That's why white male bluster against the hate crimes bill is so thunderously unimpressive: it's very easy to dismiss the need for such a bill when you belong to a group so dominant that "people like you" aren't even threaten-able. We (yep, I'm a straight, white, male evangelical preacher) have never been enslaved, never been denied the vote, never feared for our existence because of our social membership. There's nothing for us to be "hypersensitive" (to use DiverCity's word) about, so we're delighted to tell others to quit whining. Of course, to do so is to reject compassion and empathy, but it's easy to be dismissive when you're on top. (And Amen to Dopderdeck's missional critique--our opposition is void of love.)

What's not so easy is to disregard privilege as something to be exploited, but rather to empty ourselves and serve others. Someone I know did that very thing, but I don't see him much in church these days.

dopderbeck, you're confusing mens rea, which applies to most all crimes, with something that is insidious in the various permutations of hate crimes legislation, to wit: special victimhood status conveyed upon the "Other," which in liberal ideology is more righteous, better and deserving of protection than those not part of the "Other" and who thus cannot be victims in any meaningful (writ, liberal) sense, but rather are best described as the oppressors of the "Other." Indeed, law school is a bastion of leftist ideology and apparently, while evangelical in your bent, that is a worldview which you nonetheless wholeheartedly (but perhaps, I hope, unwittingly) accept.

Hate crime legislation is anything but routine, at least before 1965, which is when protected classism burst on to the scene. You view such things as innocuous, seeing them as you do through your liberal spectrum. But a generalized state of mind, not state of mind as it concerns protected classes, is the principle imbedded in our common criminal and civil law.

Exactly, Tyler! Natch, those white males can't be deserving of protection because they're such evil oppressors. It's not merely that the white male power structure is not even "threaten-able;" nay, I tell you, it's the evil white males who perpetrate all that hate against the "Other."

"We" and "Those People". The FRC is basically a fascist political action committee. It's about time people started recognizing this.

I think you are twisting what Perkins means.
Try this: I don't see a bill protecting single straight adult males and/or females from hate crimes; I don't see a bill protecting married straight adult males and/or females; I don't see a bill protecting straight juveniles of either gender. I don't see a bill that would protect EX-HOMOSEXUALS from hate crimes...which they are victims of BY HOMOSEXUALS...

Do you, JohnW, even know the meaning of the term "fascist?" I wouldn't be so quick to throw that out. When you do you not only show your ignorance, you also deprive it of its real and sinister meaning.

DriverCity said: But a generalized state of mind, not state of mind as it concerns protected classes, is the principle imbedded in our common criminal and civil law.

You are missing the point. The FRC, CWA and other religious right organizations are attacking the hate crimes law as an effort at "thought control." The FRC's petition against the hate crimes bill says this: "one purpose of so-called "hate crimes" laws is to increase punishment for the thoughts a person may have been having while committing a crime, meaning such laws are really thought crimes laws." The FRC presents this as some sort of radical departure from ordinary legal principles. As you've conceded, it is not. Mens rea is an foundational aspect of criminal law, and intent often relates to penalties as well as culpability. The penalty for killing someone is different if your intent is to commit premeditated murder as opposed to a killing without premeditation in the heat of passion (manslaughter); and on and on.

If the FRC and CWA want to say there should be no protected classes (including religion), they should simply make that argument. Doing this through the back door by labeling a hate crimes law as an effort at "thought control" because it deals with intent, however, IMHO, is just dishonest.

Sam,
I know what fascism is. It's a loaded word, perhaps I should have just said right-wing authoritarian instead. There was an article a couple of years ago by Dr. Laurence Britt describing 14 characteristics of fascism and many seem to be relevent to our country today. I'll paste the list below (Nos. 3 and 8 are relevant to the FRC and Focus on the Family in my opinion).
14 Points of Fascism
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism
5. Rampant sexism
6. A controlled mass media
7. Obsession with national security
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together
9. Power of corporations protected
10.Power of labor suppressed or eliminated
11.Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
12.Obsession with crime and punishment
13.Rampant cronyism and corruption
14.Fraudulent elections

John W, you are addressing the wrong person; names are posted below their entries here. You are responding to 4Generations' entry.

Sorry S.A.M.

"There is considerable stigma attached to the name and to the concept, and it is not uncommon for people to label their political opponents (or authority figures in general) pejoratively as 'fascists'." Quoted from Wikipedia entry on Fascism.

Do religious conservatives believe and advocate for removing the statute altogether? The current law as spelled out by the president in a statement yesterday protects "race, color, religion, or national origin", and the Matthew Shepard inspired addition to the existing law would simply add, "gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability" to the existing law giving women, the disabled and the folks the right-wing most loves to hate some protection from the types of crimes that Shepard and Brandon Teena suffered.

There is only a three-percent difference between religious bias crimes, with 17% reported for religion and 14% reported for gender bias since 1991.

Should the whole statute be thrown out or do supporters of vetoing this much needed addition to the law think if religion was to be removed from the statute that those who are making all the noise might have a different attitude?

We reported on this issue heavily at BBSNews and from my research, the religious right simply wants to protect their right to advocate against gays and transgender people while retaining the protections that they enjoy under the very same statute.

I'm pretty sure that's the very definition of hypocrisy given that no one wakes up one day and says "I think I'll be gay today." If anything is a choice, selecting ones religion is a choice, not gender identity or sexual orientation.

Michael Hess
Editor, BBSNews

"Hate crimes" were outlawed in Sweden a number of years ago. The law has turned out to be applied only to politically incorrect crimes. Here are some examples, pertaining to race:

In the 1997 report about domestic security, The Swedish Security Service comments that "the judicial possibilities to proceed in the legal process with such a report [hate crime against ethnic Swedes] are today nonexistent, or very small".

Likewise, in a report from the Board of Crime Prevention (2001:7), the authors write that there is no lack of reports about incitement against ethnic Swedes, "but that they have, for various reason, been removed from the list".

In 2004, a citizen complained to the Office of the Chancellor of Justice about a column in the largest Swedish evening paper Aftonbladet (April 10, 2004), which seemed to be a clear incident of hate crime against ethnic Swedes. The perpetrator, however, was freed, on the grounds that the law had been made to protect minorities and, hence, "the case when somebody expresses himself in a critical and depreciatory way against the group 'men of Swedish ethnic origin' was probably not intended to be caught by the penalty regulation" (Decision April 19, 2004).

A Swedish government report (SOU 2000:8) refers to a precedent from the Supreme Court, which states that incitement includes "disdain against people belonging to other ethnic groups than the nordic".

If we are to judge from the experience from other nations, Tony Perkins seems to be foresighted.

Joakim Förars
Finland

The whole reason legislation regarding hate crimes exists and needs to exist is because those who are members of majority or empowered groups are prone to use their status to demean, dehumanize and in some cases cause physical harm to those in the minority, on the fringe. Can anyone call themselves a Christian and think that acts of dehumanization and/or violence against others (even others one may disagree with) are appropriate? Instead of complaining about laws that protect people, whoever they might be, Christians should be in the forefront promoting the rights and freedoms of all. If you happen to diagree with someone in one of those minority groups, TALK TO THEM, don't cause them harm or seek to leave them open to being harmed by others.

http://blue.butler.edu/~jfmcgrat/blog/

Look at Mr. McGrath's statements closely -- in them you'll clearly see the trojan horse of these anti-freedom, anti-speech, and hyper-politically correct laws. He says we need such laws to protect against the majority or empowered groups (writ, westerners or white males) who "demean, dehumanize and in some cases cause physical harm...." So he unequivically admits that the real target is demeaning or dehumanizing speech, whatever that is. And oh yeah, sometimes violent crime. It's maddening to watch liberals who supposedly want to protect free speech rights do so only when such speech fits within their leftist ideology.

So, the answer to Michael Hess's question, at least for me, is that hate crimes legislation should in every single case be repealed, opposed, and killed, just like the gentlemen from Finland points out was done in Sweden.

lawyer criminal phoenix http://criminallawyerp.spotbb.com > phoenix criminal lawyer

Kenan Malik's talk on 'The changing meaning of race
kenanmalik.com



This talk was given to a dayschool on 'The Reinvention of Race', Oxford
University Department of Continuing Education, 22 September 2001.

For an extended discussion of these themes see The Meaning of Race. On the
history of race and pluralism see also my paper 'Race, pluralism and the meaning
of difference'. For a critique of multiculturalism see

'Against multiculturalism'

'All cultures are not equal'

'The real value of diversity'

Review of Isaiah Berlin by Michael Ignatieff kenan
malik.comlecturesthe changing meaning of race

If the proverbial anthropologist from Mars were to land in Britain today, he
would probably regard us as schizophrenics when it comes to the question of
race. He would find a population within which there is a general consensus that
racism is morally abhorrent and yet is keen to define itself in terms of its
ethnic or racial background. He would find a Commission for Racial Equality that
stresses the importance of promoting diversity, and also a former chair of the
CRE who blames racial violence on the entrenchment of differences between
different ethnic groups. He would find a government about to embark on a war
against the Taliban and yet which refuses to admit into the country refugees
fleeing from that regime. He would find a prime minister who stresses diversity,
pluralism and respect and yet who wants to lock up foreigners simply on grounds
that they are seeking asylum.

My talk is aimed at the puzzled Martian. For what I want to do is to try and
explain these contradictions not as expressions of a schizophrenia, or even of
official hypocrisy, but rather as expressions of the changing meaning of race. I
want to suggest that much of our attitudes to race appears contradictory because
much of what passes for antiracism today is in fact rooted in the same
philosophies that gave rise to racial thinking in the first place.

The celebration of difference, the promotion of a pluralist society, tolerance
for a variety of cultural identities - these are regarded as the hallmarks of a
progressive, antiracist outlook. As the American academic, and former critic of
pluralism, Nathan Glazer, puts it in the title of a recent book, We're All
Multiculturalists Now. I want to show this to be a naive and dangerous view. I
want to argue, rather, that contemporary pluralism is a deeply ambiguous
outlook. Far from being a bulwark against racism and tyranny, a plural outlook
appropriates many of the themes of racial ideology and reproduces the very
assumptions upon which racism has historically been based. Most critically, I
want to argue that the embrace of 'difference' as a political goal has
undermined our capacity to defend equality - and led to all the contradictions
that so puzzle our Martian friend.

The ambiguities of pluralism can be seen even, or maybe especially, in the work
of its most trenchant proponent - the late philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Berlin's
key idea was that of 'value pluralism'. For Berlin, there was no such thing as a
universal truth, only a variety of conflicting truths. Different peoples and
cultures had different values, beliefs and truths, each of which may be regarded
as valid. Many of these values and truths were incommensurate, because there was
no common language we could use to compare the one with the other. Hence, argued
Berlin, we have to accept that society is irredeemably plural.

Berlin linked his belief in pluralism to another of his key beliefs: his
commitment to freedom and liberty. Freedom, for Berlin, lay in the acceptance of
the plurality of society and of the incommensurability of cultural values.
Pluralism, he argued, was the best defence against tyranny and against
ideologies, such as racism, which treated some human beings as less equal than
others. This link between freedom and pluralism has become the cornerstone of
modern liberalism.

Shortly before he died, Berlin was interviewed by the political philosopher
Steven Lukes. Lukes asked him whether it was ever possible for peoples of
different cultures - such as Arabs and Jews - to live together. 'When you have
two peoples of different origins and cultures', Berlin replied, 'it is difficult
for them to live together in peace'. He added that 'it is quite natural that
each side should think that they cannot lead free lives in an integrated society
if the others are there in quantity'.

Such a view, claimed Berlin, 'is not sheer bigotry'. It is a view, however, not
too different from that of many politicians who most would accept are bigots.
For instance, consider the following: 'Every society, every nation is unique. It
has its own past, its own story, its own memories, its own languages or ways of
speaking, its own - dare I use the word - culture.' That's not Isaiah Berlin
talking but Enoch Powell, one of the most openly racist of postwar mainstream
politicians. Because every culture is distinct, Powell argued, so immigrants,
who belong to different cultures and different traditions, could never be fully
British.

Anyone who saw Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, being
interviewed on BBC's Newsnight in the wake of the violence in Oldham and
Bradford will know how he rang rings around Jeremy Paxman by pursuing the logic
of the pluralist argument. Asians are not inferior to whites, he argued, they
are simply different, with different cultures, values and lifestyles, all
incommensurate with white cultures, values and lifestyles. That's why whites
should live in their own communities, Asians in theirs.

Isaiah Berlin abhorred the claims of the far right. Yet it is difficult to deny
that the logic of his claim that two peoples of different origins cannot live
together in peace, and that it is not bigotry to believe this, leads inexorably
to the arguments of Powell and Griffin.

Indeed, Berlin himself, in his magazine interview, observed that 'the ferment of
the French Canadians, the Flemings in Belgium, Basques in Spain, Corsicans,
Bretons, Tamils, Irishmen, Jews and Arabs, Georgians, Armenians, Indians and
Pakistanis' had made him question the 'nineteenth century [idea] that
multicultural societies were desirable'. Moreover, he questioned whether black
immigrants to the Western nations were 'ready for assimilation'. Black
immigration was 'a problem' he said, because 'Cultures which have grown up with
no contact with one another have now collided.'

These views are not an unfortunate aberration, the illiberal thoughts of a man
with otherwise impeccably liberal credentials. They are the inevitable
consequence of a pluralist outlook. What I want to do is to explain why this is
so by looking at three things: first, at the development of the idea of race to
show how the celebration of difference has always been at the heart of the
racist agenda; second, I want to look at the development of the idea of
pluralism, to show how it developed out of a skepticism about progress and an
ambiguous attitude to immigration. Finally, I want to show that in a world that
is profoundly unequal, the pursuit of difference inevitably leads to the
accommodation to, and exacerbation of, such inequalities.

The idea of race has not been ever-present in human history. In historical terms
it is a relatively new concept, and has only become to our thinking over the
past two centuries. Before the modern concept of race could develop, the modern
concepts of equality and humanity had to develop too. Racial difference and
inequality can only have meaning in a world that has accepted the possibility of
social equality and a common humanity. It was through the Enlightenment, the
intellectual transformation of Europe in the eighteenth century, that such ideas
became firmly established in the modern imagination. Most Enlightenment thinkers
held that humans were by nature rational and sociable, and that there existed a
common human nature. Implicit in these beliefs was the idea that all humans were
potentially equal. Through Enlightenment philosophy humanity had for the first
time a concept of universality that could transcend perceived differences.

What is striking about Enlightenment discourse is the lack of any discussion of
race. Compared to writings both before and after, eighteenth century writings
show a remarkable disdain for racial arguments. When in 1800 the French
anthropologist Joseph-Marie Degerando wrote a methodological text for the
Société des Observateurs de l'Homme, the principal anthropological society of
its time, he did not think it necessary to deal with the question of race.

Of course Enlightenment thinkers clearly held racist views, some very openly and
overtly. It would have been astonishing if it had been otherwise. The racial
comments of the likes of Kant, Hume and Voltaire are well known. But what was
absent at this time was any sustained discourse of race. Michael Banton, Robert
Miles and Anthony Barker, in their various surveys of racial thinking, have all
argued, in Banton's words, that 'though there was a substantial literature in
the seventeenth and eighteenth century about Africans and other non-European
peoples, the word "race" was rarely used either to describe peoples or in
accounts of differences between them.'

The Enlightenment, however, was not simply an intellectual movement. The belief
in equality and a common humanity was the ideological embodiment of a wider
social and political movement through which the pre-modern order crumbled and a
new society - capitalism - emerged. Out of the complex interaction between the
ideology of equality and developing capitalist social relations emerged the
discourse of race.

Most Enlightenment thinkers believed that all humans were potentially equal, and
in principal all could reach the summit of civilisation. Progress would overcome
the divisions within the human family. But it had become clear by the early
decades of the nineteenth century that such optimism was misplaced. Far from
progress healing social divisions, it appeared to exacerbate them. In an address
to the Medico-Psychological Society of Paris in 1857, the leading French
physician Philippe Buchez considered the meaning of social differentiation in
France:
Consider a population like ours, placed in the most favourable circumstances;
possessed of a powerful civilisation; amongst the highest ranking nations in
science, the arts and industry. Our task now, I maintain, is to find out how
it can happen that within a population such as ours, races may form - not
merely one but several races - so miserable, inferior and bastardised that
they may be classed below the most inferior savage races, for their
inferiority is sometimes beyond cure.
The dilemma that a man like Buchez faced was this. He, like most men of his
class and generation, had a deep belief in equality, a belief that had descended
from the Enlightenment philosophes. Like the philosophes, he trusted in progress
and assumed that potentially progress could touch all men. In practice, however,
his society was not like this at all. Social divisions seemed so deep and
unforgiving that they seemed permanent, as if rooted in the very soil of the
nation. France was a highly civilised nation, whose scientists, engineers,
philosophers and novelists were the envy of the world. Yet sections of French
society seemed trapped in their own barbarism, seemingly unwilling to, or
incapable of, progress. How could one rationally explain this?

For many prominent thinkers, the only answer seemed to be that certain types of
people were by nature incapable of progressing beyond barbarism. They were
naturally inferior. Here were the origins of the nineteenth century idea of
race. 'Race' developed as a way of explaining the persistence of social
divisions in a society that had a deep-set belief in equality. From the racial
viewpoint, inequality persisted because society was by nature unequal. The
destiny of different social groups was shaped, at least in part, by their
intrinsic properties.

It was the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century which gave birth to
the thought that the whole of humanity may not possess a common, innate nature.
This shift in perception was encouraged by the Romantic view of human groups,
not as static constructions, but as moulded by history. The idea that different
groups had different histories gave rise to the view that every group had a
unique history, and this in turn led to the belief that each had a unique
nature.

Many Romantics believed that the values of different cultures and societies were
incompatible. Each people was unique, the uniqueness given by its particular
culture, language, history and modes of living. For the German philosopher
Herder, for instance, the people or volk was both a contract between
contemporaries and a continuing dialogue between generations. The nature of the
people was expressed through its volksgeist - the unchanging spirit of a people
refined through history expressed through myths, songs and sagas.

Once it was accepted that different peoples were motivated by sentiments unique
to themselves, it was but a short step to view these differences as racial.
Herder's volksgeist became transformed into racial make-up, an unchanging
substance, the foundation of all physical appearance and mental potential and
the basis for division and difference within humankind. Herder had accounted for
cultural variety by imagining that different peoples had unique histories.
Nineteenth century racists explained social inequalities by reasoning that
different group had distinct natures. At the roots of modern racism, therefore,
lie Romantic visions of human differences.

What transformed the Romantic notion of difference into the dominant view of
race was its alliance with positivist philosophy and with science. Positivism
was a philosophical tradition, developed largely from the work of the French
thinker August Comte, who looked to science to legitimise social order. For
positivists, the laws of nature also underpinned social laws. Inequality was the
inevitable consequence of the working out of nature's laws. 'True liberty' as
Comte put it, 'is nothing else than a rational submission to the preponderance
of the laws of nature.'

The reorientation of the scientific outlook towards the positivist vision of the
world transformed the way in which scientists looked at the relationship between
humanity, society and nature and opened the way for racial science. It catalysed
a shift from a view of human beings as primarily social creatures, governed by
social laws, to a view of human beings as primarily biological entities governed
by natural laws. Racial science viewed humanity in terms of a hierarchy
generated outside of society and governed by natural rather than social laws. As
the English naturalist William Smellie put it,Independently of all political
institutions nature herself has formed the human species into castes and ranks.
How many gradations may be traced between a stupid Hottentot and a profound
philosopher! Here the distance is immense but nature has occupied the whole by
almost infinite shades of discrimination.

Racial theories accounted for social inequalities by ascribing them to nature.
Racial thinkers divided humanity into discrete groups, each with particular
properties, and the divisions between which seemingly immutable and unchanging.
I am not suggesting that the concept of race was created or invented to meet a
particular social need. Rather, as social divisions persisted and acquired the
stamp of permanence, so they began to present themselves as if they were
natural, not social, ones. Racial ideology was the inevitable product of the
persistence of differences of rank, class and peoples in a society that had
accepted the concept of equality. People came to understand the world in racial
terms because there seemed to be no other way through which to make sense of the
world around them.

The idea of race helped give a sense of order to the Victorian world. The issue
that taxed so many Victorian brains was the search for a way of reconciling
order and progress. Victorians had a great belief in the inevitability of
progress, but also feared the disruptive consequences of such progress,
particularly through the creation of class conflict and social disorder.

The idea of race helped bind together order and progress. It allowed Victorian
to thinkers to imagine that progress was inevitable, but only in the hands of
certain races. White, middle-class males were destined by nature to progress to
the summit of civilisation. Others - women, the lower orders, non-European
primitives - would travel so far, and so far only, on the road to civilisation.
Progress, therefore, brought about a natural order to society, with every group
finding its ordained place in the scheme of things.

A vignette in the Saturday Review, a popular English Victorian magazine, is
typical of mid-century attitudes to race and working class life:
The Bethnal Green poor... are a caste apart, a race of whom we know nothing,
whose lives are of quite different complexion from ours, persons with whom we
have no point of contact... The slaves are separated from the whites by more
glaring... marks of distinction; but still distinctions and separations, like
those of English classes which always endure, which last from the cradle to
the grave, which prevent anything like association or companionship, produce a
general effect on the life of the extreme poor, and subject them to isolation,
which offer a very fair parallel to the separation of the slaves from the
whites.

This separation of the classes is important because each had to keep their
allotted place in the social ladder: the English poor man or child is always
expected to remember the condition in which God has placed him, exactly as the
negro is expected to remember the skin which God has given him. The relation
is both instances is that of perpetual superior to perpetual inferior, of
chief to dependent, and no amount of kindness or goodness is suffered to alter
this relation.
We have become so used to thinking of race in terms of skin colour that it is
often difficult to understand the Victorian perception of race. For the
Victorians race was as much a description of class differences within European
societies as it was of ethnic differences between European and non-European
peoples. Class division denoted the relation of 'perpetual superior to perpetual
inferior', a distinction that to the Victorians was every bit as visible as that
between black and white, or slave and master.

Not till the end of the nineteenth century did race become identified with skin
colour in the contemporary sense. Imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth
century, in particular the 'scramble for Africa', exacerbated the sense of
difference between Europeans and non-Europeans. At the same time the development
of democracy modified the application of the language of racial inferiority to
the working class. The belief that the lower orders were inferior did not
disappear but it became less public and increasingly confined to private diaries
and dinner table talk. The public language of race was refocused exclusively on
black and white, the West and Rest, helping to establish the 'colour line' in
its modern form.

Understanding the historical and intellectual roots of the idea of race is
important because Romantic notions of human differences also lie at the heart of
contemporary visions of cultural pluralism. Racial theory and cultural pluralism
both display a hostility to Enlightenment universalism, but in different ways.
Ernest Gellner has pointed out that there are two sets of questions that arise
from the debate between universalism and relativism: 'Is there but one kind of
man, or are there many? Is there but one world, or are there many?' While the
first questions the biological unity of humankind, the second questions the very
idea of a single truth or objective understanding of the world.

Belief in a single world assumes that common laws and values operate across all
societies but that different people respond in different ways to them, the
nature of the response being determined by the racial make-up of any given
people. Belief in many worlds, on the other hand, denies a common objective
understanding of the world and in its place posits a plurality of ways of
understanding and evaluating the world around us. Since the social world is
constructed by the people who inhabit that society, not given in nature, so
every world is specific to the people who inhabit it and incommensurate with the
social worlds that other people inhabit.

Schematically, one may say that the discourse of race holds that there is one
world but that it is inhabited by different types of humanity, while the
discourse of culture holds that there is one type of humanity, but it inhabits
different cultural or symbolic worlds. Both emerged out of the degradation of
universalism, but they did so in different ways. Given the belief of nineteenth
century racial theorists in inevitable social progress, the growing gulf between
'civilised man' and the 'primitives' that was evident both within and without
European society led many to see such differences in natural, and hence in
racial, terms. Victorian social evolutionists were led to posit a hierarchical
view of humanity, seeing different groups of peoples as arrested at different
point along the evolutionary scale and believing that progress and reason were
the prerogative only of certain races.

The discourse of culture, on the other hand, reflected a disenchantment with the
notion of social evolution, a disbelief in the doctrine of inevitable social
progress and a disillusionment with the values of one's own culture. It was the
emergence of such trends in the early part of this century, and in particular in
the wake of the First World War, that gave rise to relativist theories of
culture. In the context of a general pessimism about social progress, the idea
of difference was transformed from the notion of 'many men in a single world' to
a 'single type of man inhabiting many worlds'. If social development had not
overcome the vast gulfs that separated different peoples, many argued, then
perhaps that was because such differences reflected the fact that different
peoples inhabited different social worlds, each of which was as valid and as
real as the other. Pluralism grew out of despair about progress.

The main force in the shift from a racial to a cultural view of human
differences was the science of anthropology. Anthropology had always been the
most particularist of the human sciences. In the context of Victorian positivism
and social evolutionism, this manifested itself through physical anthropology
and theories of biological differences. As the positivist outlook disintegrated
along with the long nineteenth century, so anthropological particularism
re-expressed itself in cultural terms.

We can see the way in which the new anthropology reframed the meaning of
inequality by looking at the development of pluralism in the colonial context.
The concept of a plural society first emerged through anthropological analyses
of colonial societies in the first decades of this century. In a study of
Indonesia and Burma, the anthropologist JS Furnival wrote that 'the first thing
that strikes the visitor is the medley of peoples - European, Chinese, Indian
and native' that constitute the society. The different groups, Furnival wrote,
'mix but do not combine'. Each group 'holds by its own religion, its own culture
and language, its ideas and ways'. The result was a 'plural society, with
different sections of the society living side by side but separately within the
same political unit.'

This concept of a plural society proved attractive both to colonial
administrators, grappling with the problem of imposing law and order on the
territories, and to Western liberals keen to protect colonial subjects from the
ravages of imperialism. Pluralism quickly moved from being a description of
colonial society to an explanation for it. The inequalities of colonial society
were rationalised as products of the different cultural outlooks and lifestyles
of the various groups that constituted that society. Through this process
inequality became reframed as difference. The social and economic cleavages
caused by colonial rule, and the limits on social development imposed by
colonial policy, were reread as the fruits of such autonomous cultural
development.

Like racial theory, plural theory provided an apology for social inequalities,
portraying them as the inevitable result, not of natural variations, but of
cultural differences. Whereas nineteenth century racial theory was an attempt to
reconcile order and progress, pluralism was an attempt to think about social
order in a world that no longer believed in progress.

Pluralism effectively turned on its side the evolutionary ladder of Victorian
racial theory: pluralists conceived of humanity as horizontally, rather than
vertically, segmented. Humanity was not arranged at different points along an
ever-rising vertical axis, as the social evolutionists had believed, but at
different points along a stationary horizontal axis.

Humanity was composed of a multitude of peoples each inhabiting their own
symbolic and cultural worlds. But whether differences were seen as biological or
cultural, whether they were seen in terms of inferiority and superiority or not,
racial theory and cultural pluralism were characterised by a common hostility to
universalism, and a belief that differences between human groups mattered more
than the commonalities.

The consequence of all this can be seen in the debate about race and difference
in the postwar world. Following the experience of Nazism, the Holocaust and the
Final Solution, biological theories of human differences became discredited. But
if racial science was buried in the postwar world, racial thinking was not.
While the biological arguments for racial superiority were thrown into disrepute
and overt expressions of racism were discredited, many of the assumptions of
racial thinking were maintained intact - in particular the belief that humanity
can be divided into discrete groups, that each groups should be considered in
its own terms, and that differences, not commonalities, shaped human
interaction. These assumptions, however, were cast not in biological terms but
in the language of cultural pluralism.

In the interwar years the concept of plural society was applied almost
exclusively to colonial states. In the years following the Second World War,
however, the concept of a plural society became applied in an increasingly
promiscuous way to Western societies. The impact of mass immigration and the
political context in which this immigration took place combined to engineer this
transformation.

Eleven million foreign workers came to Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, encouraged
by the economic boom. The political context in which this mass immigration
occurred was an ambiguous one. On the one hand, immigrants were seen as
'different' or alien. On the other hand, in the liberal climate of the postwar
years, racial arguments could not be openly expressed. Pluralism provided a
language through which to understand social differences without having to refer
to the discredited discourse of race. It provided both a sense of continuity
with prewar racial discourse and a means of asserting the aversion to racism
that exemplified the postwar years.

Key to such an ambiguous use of pluralism has been the presentation of social
differences in terms neither of culture nor of race but of ethnicity.
'Ethnicity' is a peculiarly postwar word. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a
first recorded usage in 1953. It was the biologists Julian Huxley and AC Haddon
who first suggested that 'race' should be replaced by 'ethnic group' in their
book We Europeans. We Europeans was immensely influential in the challenging
racial theory in the 30s. But the ambiguous nature of Huxley and Haddon's
arguments are important as they presage the ambiguous nature of pluralism. They
were not so much opposed to the concept of racial differences as to its
political uses, particularly by Nazi Germany. Replacing race with ethnicity,
they suggested, would remove the political connotations of racial difference,
and allow social distinctions to be studied in a neutral, value-free fashion. In
the postwar years ethnicity has indeed come to replace race as a politically
acceptable means of describing social differences.

Like race, ethnicity is a term that is used in a fairly promiscuous way, without
there ever being a consensus as to its meaning. Definitions of ethnicity are
largely tautological: an ethnic group is that which is defined as an ethnic
group. But the very utility of the definition of ethnicity lies in its
tautology. Ethnicity does away with objective, biological distinctions and
instead introduces subjective, cultural differences. Ethnicity is defined
through learned or cultural criteria and boundaries between ethnic groups are
fluid. Yet in actual use, the concept of ethnicity is not so different from that
of race. In practice it is used to define social groups according to
old-fashioned criteria of race or nationality. Ethnicity, in many ways, is race
after an attempt to take the biology out.

Pluralism developed in the postwar years not as a means to establish equality
but as an accommodation to the persistence of inequality. As immigrants remained
ghettoised, excluded from mainstream society, subject to discrimination and
clinging to their old habits and lifestyles as a familiar anchor in a hostile
world, so such differences became rationalised not as the negative product of
racism or discrimination but as the positive result of multiculturalism.

In the nineteenth century, the persistence of inequalities had led to the
emergence of the discourse of race, in which economic, social and technological
differences between groups were attributed to natural distinctions. In the
postwar years the persistence of inequalities in the context of mass immigration
led to the development of a pluralist outlook, in which differences were
welcomed as expressions of cultural diversity.

It may be useful to compare the treatment of postwar immigrants with early waves
of immigration. It is often forgotten that earlier immigrants - east Europeans
or Italians into Britain, Poles, Italians, Portuguese into France, East and
south Europeans into the USA - were often met with the same hostility and claims
of inassimilability as were postwar immigrants. They too were seen as alien, as
mentally defective, as socially immoral and promiscuous, as given to violence,
drugs and drink. This is a useful reminder that the difference of postwar
immigrants had little to do with skin colour or religion.

But the contrast between earlier and postwar immigration lies to a large extent
in wider social trends. There was sufficient dynamic in early twentieth century
society, sufficient self-belief and belief in equality, and sufficient economic
progress to ensure that immigrants, even if they were initially regarded as
alien and inassimilable, eventually lost their marks of difference and become an
integral part of the nation. Despite the hostility to immigrants, this earlier
immigration was not regarded as turning Britain, France or the USA into
multicultural nations. Rather immigrants became part of, and helped transform
the common culture (despite the fact that, in the USA for instance, most of
these immigrants were eventually to become double-barrelled Americans).

Today the picture is very different. At the heart of this has been two major
social changes: First, the very idea of a common culture has weakened as has a
sense of national identity. The break-up of the postwar consensus and the end of
the Cold War has created a fragile and anxious mood, in which the idea of a
coherent national identity has become problematic. Particularly in the USA, the
Cold War provided a common external enemy and a sense of mission around which to
articulate what it meant to be American. The loss of that has sapped the belief
in a common culture to which all belong. The consequence has been a
fragmentation of identity.

While the roots of these changes go back several decades, it is striking that in
America, for instance, the idea of multiculturalism is an almost exclusively a
post-Cold War phenomenon. Nathan Glazer searched a data base of the major
newspapers for the word 'multiculturalism'. There were no reference as late as
1988; 33 references in 1989, 100 in 1990, 600 in 1991, 900 in 1992 and 1200 in
1993 and 1500 in 1994. The fit between the end of the Cold War and the emergence
of the idea of multiculturalism is almost too good to be true.

Second, the notion of equality itself has transformed. The inability of
struggles such as the civil rights movements in the USA to transform the lives
of the majority of African Americans sapped the morale of antiracists.
Campaigning for equality means challenging accepted practices, being willing to
march against the grain, to believe in the possibility of social transformation.
Conversely, celebrating differences between peoples allows us to accept society
as it is - after all, all it says is 'we live in a diverse world, enjoy it'; it
allows us to accept the divisions and inequalities that characterise the world
today. The disintegration of the civil rights movements, and elsewhere of
liberation movements, the demise of the political sphere itself, has gnawed away
at antiracists' self-belief and their willingness to take a stand.

In the America of the 1960s, for instance, most commentators, both black and
white, hoped and expected that African-American migrants to the North would
eventually integrate into US society, as fully as had European immigrants. The
title of a 1966 article by Irving Kristol in the New York Times captured that
hope: 'The Negro Today is like the Immigrant Yesterday'.

Three decades later it has become obvious how misplaced were such claims.
Virtually every social statistic - from housing segregation to rates of
intermarriage, from infant mortality rates to language use - shows that African
Americans live very different lives to the rest of America. The experience even
of Hispanic Americans is far closer to that of American whites than it is to
that of African Americans.

As the possibilities of equality seemed more and more constrained, so there was
an increasing tendency to celebrate 'difference'. The black American critic bell
hooks observes that 'civil rights reform reinforced the idea that black
liberation should be defined by the degree to which black people gained equal
access to material opportunities and privileges to whites - jobs, housing,
schooling etc.'
This strategy could never bring about liberation, argues hooks, because such
'ideas of "freedom" were informed by efforts to imitate the behaviour,
lifestyles and most importantly the values and consciousness of white
colonisers.' The failure of equality has led radical critics like hooks to
declare that equality itself is problematic because African Americans are
'different' from whites.

Politicians and policy-makers have responded to such arguments by reinventing
America as a 'plural' or 'multicultural' nation. Pluralism is premised on the
idea that America is a nation composed of many different cultural groups and
peoples. But in reality it is the product of the continued exclusion of one
group: African Americans. The promotion of pluralism is a tacit admission that
the barriers that separate blacks and whites cannot be breached and that
equality has been abandoned as a social policy goal.

'Multiculturalism', Nathan Glazer has written, 'is the price America is paying
for the inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African
Americans, in the same way and to the same degree it has incorporated so many
other groups.' The real price, however, is being paid by African Americans
themselves. For in truth America is not plural or multicultural; it is simply
unequal. And the promotion of pluralism is an acknowledgement of the
inevitability of that inequality. Indeed, in his own way, Glazer himself
recognises this. 'We must pass through a period in which we recognise
difference, we celebrate difference', he writes, because of 'our failure to
integrate blacks.'

The social changes that have swept the world over the past decade have
intensified this sense of pessimism. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of
the left, the crumbling of the postwar order and the fragmentation of social
movements have shattered many of the certainties of the past. In particular they
have thrown into doubt our capacity to change the world for the better. In this
context the quest for equality has largely been abandoned in favour of the claim
to a diverse society.

A truly plural society would be one in which citizens have full freedom to
pursue their different values or practices in private, while in the public
sphere all citizens would be treated as political equals whatever their private
beliefs. Today, however, pluralism has come to mean the very opposite. The right
to practice a particular religion, speak a particular language, follow a
particular cultural practice is seen as a public good rather than a private
freedom. Different interest groups demand to have their 'differences'
institutionalised in the public sphere. This has led not to greater equality,
but to a greater racialisation of society, a greater entrenchment of
differences, rationalisation of inequality, and the abandonment of political
struggles for equality.

These are the developments that have led to the contradictions that so puzzle
our Martian friend. The question we have to ask ourselves, therefore, is: do we
want an equal society or a plural society? We cannot have both.

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