The ethics of assimilation

Ethics

Volumn 115, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 471-500

  Callan, Eamonn ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 20444501005     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/428460     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. Margaret Gibson, Accommodation without Assimilation: Sikh Immigrants in an American High School (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 189-90.
2. Bikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 7.
3. Even when the distinction is made, its importance can be overlooked. Parekh is among the more conceptually careful advocates of multiculturalism, and the index to Rethinking Multiculturalism has separate entries for assimilation and assimilationism. But at no point in the book does he consider the possibility of assimilation without assimilationism.
4. Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1.
5. On the demise of what Alba and Nee call "the bygone era" of complacency regarding assimilation and American cultural unity, see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 327-42.
6. If "fog of moral antipathy" sounds hyperbolic, one might consider how one legal scholar, writing in one of the more exalted academic venues, has recently described assimilation as "that insidious cousin of totalitarianism"; see Nomi Stolzenberg, "He Drew a Circle That Shut Me Out: Indoctrination and the Paradox of Assimilation," Harvard Law Review 106 (1995): 582.
7. The normally sober Alan Wolfe depicts assimilation as "a form of symbolic violence. Like the actual violence of war, assimilation is disruptive and heartless, the stuff of tragedy." See An Intellectual in Public (Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press, 2003), 11.
8. Iris M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 157.
9. Alba and Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream, 4-6.
10. That a culture makes possible good lives for many of its members is consistent with its making good lives impossible for other members. Limiting opportunities to assimilate out of the culture will likely be necessary to keep its oppressed members in their place.
11. Plato's argument is criticized in A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
12. An intriguing contemporary version of the argument that avoids the obvious failings in Plato's is A. D. M. Walker, "Obligations of Gratitude and Political Obligation," Philosophy & Public Affairs 18 (1989): 359-64.
13. My claims run into some philosophical controversy because they presuppose that we are morally accountable for our attitudes, even though we do not choose them. In defense of that view, see Robert Adams, "Involuntary Sins," Philosophical Review 94 (1985): 3-31.
14. By focusing on a case in which the parents of an adult child behave so badly that the child's duties to the parents are annulled, Jane English is led to the mistaken conclusion that adult children have no filial duties in the first place. See "What Do Grown Children Owe Their Parents?" in Having Children: Philosophical and Legal Reflections on Parenthood, ed. Onora O'Neill and William Ruddick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 351-56.
15. Meir Dan-Cohen, "Law, Community, and Communication," in his Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 13-14.
16. "Transcript of the Oprah Winfrey Show, August 24, 1997" (Burrell's Information Services, Livingston, NJ), 15-16.
17. Gary Katimaya, "Cablinasian Like Me," http://www.salon.com/ april97/tiger970430.html.
18. Jay Nordlinger, "Hunting Tiger: Everyone Wants a Piece of Him," National Review, September 16, 2002, http://www.nationalreview.com/nordlinger/ nordlinger090602.asp. Note that his media statement did not quite square with what he said on the Winfrey show. If calling himself African American would be an affront to his mother, it must remain baffling why calling himself American while declaring his ethnic heritage irrelevant to that identity would be less insulting to her.
19. Woods admits that other people see him as African American/black. Contrary to what some of what his more obtuse critics have supposed, he is not "in denial" about how he is perceived. His point is that he does not want their perceptions to define his identity. See "Transcript of the Oprah Winfrey Show," 9.
20. Compare Gregory Clay, "Woods Can't Hide from the Perception He Is Black, Like It or Not," http://www.tigertales.com/tiger/clay050897.html.
21. "Race-blindness" as the ideal terminus of the struggle against racism and as a route to that end are not the same thing, though they are commonly confused. As Glenn Loury has nicely observed, "race-sighted" means may be necessary to achieve race-blind ends. See The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 135-36.
22. Du Bois, quoted in George M. Frederickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 287.
23. The idea of a mythic "Golden Age" as a critical ingredient in national identity is a prominent theme in Anthony Smith's influential work on nationalism. See, e.g., Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 62-70.
24. Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular. Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 176-79.
25. Frederickson, Black Liberation, 297;
26. Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 85-134.
27. Tommie Shelby claims that a common national identity for African Americans would require conformity to a substantive prototype specified by distinctive values, etc. See "Foundations of Blake Solidarity: Collective Identity or Common Oppression?" Ethics 112 (2002): 231-66.
28. But recent work on national identity shows that a common identity is consistent with abundant value pluralism: see, e.g., Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). That said, Shelby's excellent article was an enormously helpful stimulus in writing this article.
29. Signithia Fordham and John U. Ogbu, "Black Students' School Success: Coping with the Burden of 'Acting White,'" Urban Review 18 (1986): 176-206;
30. Signithia Fordham, Blocked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capitol High (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
31. James Baldwin, "Nothing Personal," in his Collected Essays (New York: Library of America), 705.
32. No one could sensibly deny that Woods owes a debt of gratitude to those who in the past have fought antiblack racism in the United States. What is less clear is whether this requires identity-conferring commitment to that particular moral struggle. For example, if Woods became devoted to overcoming world hunger, or with securing human rights in fledgling democracies, and more or less ignored the victims of antiblack racism in the United States, would he be guilty of moral betrayal? I am inclined to think not. In at least one obvious respect, his ignoring the victims of antiblack racism would not be analogous to the man who neglects his aged parents in the pursuit of more grandiose moral ends. In the case of adult filial duty, the particularism of the parental interest that is at stake is crucial to its meaning: aged parents crave the love of their own adult children. But the interests of blacks in the struggle against racism would not seem to be comparably particularistic. Why should it matter who contributes to the success of the struggle so long as success is the outcome? No obvious good answer is available. Yet here again, confusion between a strategic struggle against a universal evil and a quasi-national project of liberation may cast its spell. The quasi-national project valorizes the self-determination of a particular people, and so liberation is essentially their struggle against their oppressors. Foreign allies (e.g., white Americans) may help in the struggle, but the oppressed race itself (including Tiger Woods) must take the primary responsibility for their own liberation.
33. Paul Brodeur, Restitution: The Land Claims of the Mashpee, Passamquoddy, and Penobscot Indians of New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 27-28.
34. I b i d.
35. John Deigh discusses Mills's case in relation to shame in "Shame and Self-Esteem," Ethics 93 (1983): 225-45.
36. One might read his epiphany at Fort Dix as a radical re-creation of the self rather than a conscious recognition of values he had in some sense internalized all along and suppressed through self-deception. But it is noteworthy that Mills uses the language of self-discovery rather than radical choice to construe the experience, and that would seem to favor the latter reading. See Deigh, "Shame and Self-Esteem."
37. My definition of stigma draws on Bruce G. Link and Jo C. Phelan, "Conceptualizing Stigma," Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 363-85.
38. On the connection between stigma and racism see Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, 57-107.
39. Richard Merelman, "Black History and Cultural Empowerment: A Case Study," American Journal of Education 101 (1993): 331-58, 340.
40. Ibid., 353.
41. Richard Kruger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York: Random House, 1975), 156.
42. For an influential argument about the decline of biological racism in America and the corresponding rise of "racial resentment" toward blacks for their alleged cultural failings, see Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Saunders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
43. How this racial resentment is related to distinctively American values, such as individualism, and how politically tractable it might be, are matters of ongoing controversy. See Paul Sniderman, Gretchen C. Crosby, and William G. Howell, "The Politics of Race," in Racialized Politics: The Debate about Racism in America, ed. David O. Sears, Jim Sidanius, and Lawrence Bobo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 236-79.
44. "I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas . . . Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension." W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet Classics, 1982), 138.