Deschooling multiculturalism

In recent work, Geoffrey Brahm Levey has argued that we can distinguish various schools of multiculturalism on the basis of their methodology (in particular, how they relate theory to practice), and their substantive normative commitments (in particular, their normative commitments regarding liberalism and nationalism). In this article, I offer some reservations about Levey’s analysis. I suggest instead that the various authors Levey discusses in fact share a surprisingly similar diagnosis and remedy. They all seek to expose the selectivity in liberals’ self-understanding of core liberal concepts such as impartiality, colour-blindness, equality, anti-discrimination, secularism, citizenship, civic nationalism, or constitutional patriotism. This selectivity operates in a way that impugns minority claims as always already sectarian, partial and exceptional, while rendering majority claims as always already universal, impartial, and normal. And these authors also broadly agree on the proper remedy to this bias, which is not to reject these core liberal values, but to reinterpret them in a more even-handed way. I offer several examples of how this shared mode of argument is found across the different authors that Levey identifies, and how Levey's attempt to put authors into distinct schools is potentially distorting.