Part 3: The Failure of Equality and Emancipation?

A few years back I came across a book, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society, written by the author Kenan Malik. The Meaning of Race really challenged my knowledge about racism and how to view people living in different cultures. The book revealed how racism has been reborn in a new disguise. Some you could detect during the Minaret campaign.

To understand why, we have to go back in time when minority groups fought to obtain the same rights as the majority enjoyed.  We saw this during the sixties and seventies, when the American civil rights movement fought agains segregation laws – We saw this when ANC fought for the exact same in South Africa, We saw this when the natives in South America fought to obtain the same rights as the colonizers and the list goes on. The idea of integration was really based on obtaining the same rights. However this has changed somewhat and as Kenan Malik points out:

 The terrain of antiracist struggle today is no longer that of social equality but of cultural diversity…Indeed the very meaning of social equality has come into question and therefore equality has come to be redefined from the right to be the same to mean the right to be different.

The right to be different is a conscious stand against the western idea of equal rights. So in a strange way equality is now interpreted to signify oppression whilst difference now liberation. So minorities wants different schools, exceptions from the law and their own laws with precedence over national secular law. This is a growing tendency in western countries to allow minority groups to govern their own communities. In Australia – Aborigines can be judged after their own customs rather than being judged by “whitefella law”.

Now you probably wonder why this is a problem, well the problem is that we are starting to view different cultures as something static – something that can’t change:

The biological fact of Jewish or Bangladeshi ancestry, it suggests, somehow make a human being incapable of living well except as a participant of Jewish or Bangladeshi culture. This would only make sense if Jews or Bangladeshi were biological distinct – in other words if cultural identity was really about racial difference.

 This brings us back to how the media, the right-wing parties - such as SVP - viewed their Muslim citizens during the campaign: like all of them belonged to one culture – like they were some kind of creature that had common primary objectives: to create an Islamic state, force women to wear headscarf, be submissive to anyone who rejects Islam and of course abolish democracy. Nuances are not interesting- not if you are going to win a referendum and not if you are going to sell newspapers.

Read also: Xenophobia?

Generalization is the easiest characterization because it deletes all the complexities that come with any story, groups of persons or any individual. We need to wake up and acknowledge that we live under the same roof and should fight for equality and to be judged by your actions and not by the content of your skin, gender or culture.

Clearly no human can live outside of culture. But then no human does. To say that no human can live outside of culture, however, is not to say they have to live inside a particular one. To view humans as culture-bearing is to view them as social beings, and hence as transformative beings. It suggests that humans have the capacity for change, for progress and for the creation of universal moral and political forms through reason and dialogue.

It is important that we don’t loose hope in humanity and our aspiration to always be better. To strive for equality, to condemn segregation and discrimination should always be primary objectives of  any anti-racist movement. The interpretation of the Swiss vote is that the integration of Switzerland’s largest minority has not gone that well. The causes are many but an underlying skepticism that derives from xenophobia, rational fear or cultural generalization cannot be swept under the carpet. Nevertheless, the mainstream politicians should be ashamed over their lame involvement during the campaign. It is obvious that the Swiss authorities have a lot of work to do to heal wounds and to prevent further marginalization of Swiss minority groups.  Hopefully the ban will be ruled down by the European Court  of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Even if that happens, it will take years.

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