To put it another way, you can only get away with “dissing” your own culture and ideas if you’re part of the majority. It’s fine for white Christians to get rid of nativity plays and rename Christmas as Winterval, because in a perverse sense this reinforces the place of the majority culture as being at the center with everything else outside it.
Yet only people blind to the true experience of what it is like to be a minority group would fail to sense the perversion at the heart of these policies. In fact, one could argue that implicit in these attitudes is a particular type of racism – if we take racism to mean a disregard for the value of the other. This is because the harsh reality is that only those in a position of power, who know by sheer force of numbers that their cultural and racial hegemony is assured, can possibly permit themselves such indulgences.
It is for this reason that, paradoxically, we often see minority groups – Jews and Muslims in particular – in the vanguard of pointing out to the majority the folly of such perverse policy moves. An example is the recent book by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Home We Build Together, which echoes my point in saying that liberal advocates of both multicultural and anti-racist strategies are often aiming at targets that don’t really exist.
You cannot further the cause of the other by suggesting that the majority doesn’t exist or that its culture is of no consequence or value, because for people born into that majority such language in a sense is meaningless – they’ll carry on being the majority either way. Just as important, the corollary of this understanding is that it’s only by strengthening the idea of a majority culture that in fact the white middle classes can ever possibly come to a thoughtful, empathetic understanding of what it means for people to be different.
Again, this will perhaps resonate with those, including myself, who have seen examples of this integrated diversity in public settings. Thus in my first teaching job, following on from that initial interview, I worked for a wonderful headteacher in a multi-ethnic school in west London. He and his deputy were special people who had created, in what was a secular school, one of the most positive educational environments I have ever seen, where there was an almost spiritually authentic encounter between the different groups in that small society. He said to me on more than one occasion that part of the privilege of working with people from different cultures and feeling what life was like for them was that it strengthened one’s own identity.
It’s this crucial link that many on the left have wholly failed to grasp. Only people who have an explicit understanding of their own culture, and who are able to value it, can possibly come to value the culture and identity of the other.
As long as the dominant culture persists in wallowing in the indulgence of gradually dismantling its own sense of cultural coherence, we will continue to see ongoing failure on the part of the white liberal middle classes – who make up the vast bulk of policy- and decision-makers in our lives – when it comes to creating any sense of authentic encounter with the minority groups within their midst.
This is the true tragedy of multiculturalism.