Against multiculturalist dogma

Two snippets of wisdom from two academics. Here’s Fiona Williams:

…the complex forms of racialized inequalities, cultural injustices and misunderstandings which permeated the case of Victoria Climbié… This revealed the awful consequences of allowing poor service delivery in the name of cultural sensitivity, and of investing minority ethnic workers with difficult responsibilities (and subsequent blame) on account of their ethnicity rather than their authority, experience and skills.

Here’s Chetan Bhatt:

The self-marginalising discourses of diaspora academics who have witnessed or experienced the racism of institutional academia can share much with the political spaces of official multicultural Britain that provide a niche from which to expound an ‘anti-Western’ victimology based on racial or religious ‘essentialism’ while claiming to do otherwise, claiming even to decentre the West through projects of home-grown multiculturalism.

Sources: Fiona Williams “What matters is who works: why every child matters to New Labour. Commentary on the DfES Green Paper Every Child Matters” 2004 Critical Social Policy Vol. 24(3): 406–427; Chetan Bhatt “Geopolitcs and Alterity Research” in Bulmer and Solomos, eds, Researching Race and Racism, Routledge 2004