Multiculturalism

Mark Steyn on Multiculturalism

Mark Steyn hilariously breaks down what multiculturalism is, and why it is destructive and immoral.

The End of the World as We Know It, with Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn talks about his book, America Alone, with Peter Robinson. He lays out his argument against multiculturalism and mass immigration.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Race, various pages

The Multicultural Vision Multiculturalism involves more than a simple recognition of differences in cultures among different groups. It is an insistence, a priori, that the effects of these differences are on net balance positive and that the particular cultures found among less fortunate groups are not to be blamed for disparities in income, education, crime rates, or family disintegration, lest observers be guilty of “blaming the victim” instead of indicting society. Given that premise, it was consistent for multiculturalists to decry educators who sought to get black youngsters to speak standard English or to force Hispanic students to speak English rather than Spanish in school . . . More generally, trying to get minority groups to acculturate to the social, linguistic and other norms of the larger society around them has been viewed negatively by multiculturalists as a form of cultural imperialism.

If the dogmas of multiculturalism declare different cultures equally valid, and hence sacrosanct against efforts to change them, then these dogmas simply complete the sealing off of a vision from facts—and sealing off many people in lagging groups from the advances available from other cultures around them…

Multiculturalism, like the caste system, tends to freeze people where the accident of birth has placed them. Unlike the caste system, multiculturalism holds out the prospect that, all cultures being equal, one’s life chances should be the same—and that it is society’s fault if these chances are not the same. Although both caste and multiculturalism suppress individual opportunities, they differ primarily in that the caste system preaches resignation to one’s fate and multiculturalism preaches resentment of one’s fate. Another major difference between caste and multiculturalism is that no one was likely to claim that the caste system was a boon to the lower castes.

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Response to Declaration on Integral Mission, Part 3 – Welfare and Multiculturalism

In the second half of this video, I break down how multiculturalism, as a subset of Critical Theory or Cultural Marxism, distorts the unique Christian/Biblical perspective on the relationships between cultures.

Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, page 37, 39

The American Missionary Association was quite explicit in their desire to remove black youngsters from their existing culture and place them in enclaves of the culture transplanted from the North. In an 1882 essay titled “Change of Environment,” Dr. W. W. Patton, president of the A.M.A., lamented that many black children “grow up in communities of prevailing ignorance, superstition and immorality, where they live in miserable hovels, see only examples of coarseness and rudeness and hear only a negro dialect,” when what was needed was “a total change of environment” by removing young people to places “where morals are pure; where manners are refined; where language is grammatical.” Far from celebrating the existing culture of the black community, Dr. Patton declared: “All improvement must be by an influence from without, which shall quicken and inspire, which shall teach and guide”—this being the purpose of “planting and strengthening the educational institutions which operate to change for the better the environment of the colored race in this country.”

W. E. B. Du Bois, himself a New Englander and with the first Ph.D. from Harvard earned by a black man, declared the movement “to plant the New England college in the South” to be “the salvation of the South and the Negro.” Perhaps even more remarkable than these dedicated efforts, was the fact that such efforts began to produce educational results, early on:

In 1871, the Georgia legislature created a board of visitors to attend public examinations at Atlanta University. The chairman of the first board of visitors was ex-slaveholder Joseph Brown, who reportedly said that he expected the examinations to confirm the Negro’s inferiority. But the recitations of former slaves in Latin, Greek, and geometry forced from him the confession that “we were impressed with the fallacy of the popular idea…that the members of the African race are not capable of a high grade of intellectual culture.” And the Atlanta Constitution could hardly “believe what we witnessed. To see colored boys and girls fourteen to eighteen years of age, reading in Greek and Latin, and demonstrating correctly problems in Algebra and Geometry…appears almost wonderful.

However discordant the philosophy of the American Missionary Association may have been with “multicultural” views prevailing today, the crucial fact is that it worked—as so many of today’s notions do not.

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Thomas Sowell: Multiculturalism is counterproductive

This article succinctly points out some of the bizarre ideas of multiculturalism, and how multiculturalism results in the exact opposite of what it’s proponents purportedly intend.

Thomas Sowell, The Thomas Sowell Reader, various pages

The issue is not what I say or what the multiculturalists say. The issue is what millions of human beings actually do when they have a choice. Around the world, they treat cultural features as things that help them cope with life, not museum pieces to oooh and aaah over.

When they find their own ways of doing some things better, they keep them. When they find someone else’s ways of doing other things better, they use them and drop what they used before. What they do not do is what the multiculturalists do—say that it is all just a matter of “perceptions,” that nothing is better or worse than anything else.

Alberta Community Development, Multiculturalism… the Next Step, 1993

“’Some people think multiculturalism is a real problem. To them, multiculturalism is a threat. In fact, it is one of the greatest competitive advantages we could have. Quite simply, multiculturalism is the internal globalization of Canada. And it will be one of the key factors contributing to our ability to our sense of confidence that we can succeed in the global economy of the future,’ John Cleghorn, President, Royal Bank of Canada.” – page 5

Definition – Emerson

Colorblindness is a quantifiably ineffective inclusion strategy for individuals, organizations [and societies]. Multiculturalism, the opposite of colorblindness, stresses recognition and inclusion of group differences and has been shown to benefit minority employees, organizations [and societies] at large. (Emerson, 2017, para. 3)

Definition – Malik

Multiculturalism [aims] to manage diversity by putting people into ethnic boxes, defining individual needs and rights by virtue of the boxes into which people are put […]. It is a case, not for open borders and minds, but for policing of borders, whether physical, cultural or imaginative. (Malik, 2010, para. 3)