1. Adding Insult to Injury
   Debating Redistribution, Recognition, and Representation
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2008
   This volume collects the responses of leading American social theorists to issues dealing with the rise of identity politics. Nancy Fraser’s widely-cited work looks at ways to combine multiculturalism with a commitment to egalitarianism.
2. Against multiculturalism 
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   First Published: 2002
   Multiculturalism is an authoritarian, anti-human outlook. True political progress requires not recognition but action, not respect but questioning, not the invocation of the Thought Police but the forging of common bonds and collective struggles.
   
3. Black Immigrants, 'Model' Minority? Plus: Don Imus
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   First Published: 2008
   'Black' is a label which obscures more than it illuminates.
4. Chasing a Mirage
   The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2008
   According to Tarek Fatah, "Morality is doing what is right, regardless what we are told; Religious dogma is doing what we are told, no matter what is right."
   Fatah argues that since Islam's advent, there have been two parallel strains of the religion that are in clash. The first "state of Islam" is a person's moral compass; the way Islam governs an individual's personal life. By contrast, the yearning for "an Islamic state" has been bloody and fruitless.
   
5. Common Sense for Hard Times 
   The Power of the Powerless to Cope with Everyday life and Transform Society in The Nineteen Seventies
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1976
   Presents a vision of society as it is and as it could be. Putting the problems of contemporary daily life in historical perspective, it reveals that they have their roots in the way our society is organized, and thereby enables us to re-examine our own situation and experience.
   
6. Connexions Library: Race, Racism, Ethnicity, Multiculturalism Focus 
   Resource Type: Internet WWW site
   Published: 2009
   Selected articles, books, websites and other resources on race, racism, ethnicity, multiculturalism, identity.
7. 'Free speech' - as long as it doesn't offend anyone 
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   First Published: 2009
   On the issue of free speech most of the right and much of the left are in agreement, and so too are many liberals, activists, and human rights apparatchiks. They hold essentially the same position on freedom of expression – they are for it ‘in principle’, but only so long as it isn’t used to express views that they find unacceptable or offensive. What they disagree about is merely who gets to decide what ideas are unacceptable, i.e., who gets to censor who.
   
8. Free speech for me - you shut up
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   First Published: 2008
   The right to express offensive views is at the very heart of the principle of free speech.
   
9. How 'diversity' breeds division
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   First Published: 2004
   Diversity training is supposed to help 'promote good relations' between different ethnic groups and capitalise on workforce diversity. However, there is warranted scepticism about whether such training alleviates tensions or exacerbates them. Much of the content of this training is overreliant on pop sociology and pseudo-therapeutic techniques. Participants are expected to talk about stereotypes they harbour deep in their subconscious, and disclose feelings of harassment and victimisation. Trainers claim to eliminate stereotypes in the workplace, yet in talking about 'different cultural perspectives' they end up generating new and more insidious stereotypes in their stead.
10. Identity is that which is given 
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2008
    In this age of globalisation many people fret about Western culture taking over the world. But the greatest Western export is not Disney or McDonalds or Tom Cruise. It is the very idea of culture.
    
11. Identity politics
    Connexipedia: Article in Wikipedia
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Refers to political arguments that focus upon the self interest and perspectives of social minorities, or self-identified social interest groups.
12. Inclusión o exclusion?
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2008
    
13. Inclusion or exclusion 
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2008
    People who advocate a vision of distinct communities that speak different languages, keep apart from each other, and communicate with the structures of the larger society only through interpreters, are doing more harm than good. What they are advocating is not diversity but entrenched division.
    
14. Integracja czy wykluczenie?
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2008
    
15. Intégration ou Marginalisation?
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2008
    
16. Interview with Ellen Meiksins Wood 
    Democracy & Capitalism: Friends or Foes?
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1996
    Postmodernist pluralism, just like the old variety, obscures the realities of power in capitalist societies. It also disarms and disintegrates the opposition to capitalism. Postmodernism brings us back to the old and uncritical forms of capitalist ideology, which leave the system fundamentally unchallenged. Marxism -- historical materialism -- is the best foundation for an understanding of the society in which we live and therefore also the best guide in our search for a better one.
17. Malik, Kenan
    Connexipedia: Article in Wikipedia
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    (Born 1962). Writer, lecturer and broadcaster.
18. Mistaken Identity
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2008
    Historically, antiracists challenged both the practice of racism and the process of racialisation; that is, both the practice of discriminating against people by virtue of their race and the insistence that an individual can be defined by the group to which he or she belongs. Today's multiculturalists argue that to fight racism one must celebrate group identity. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities. Racial theorists and multiculturalists, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observes, have 'conflicting credos but the same vision of the world'. Both fetishise difference. Both seek to 'confine individuals to their group of origin'. Both undermine 'any possibility of natural or cultural community among peoples'. Challenging such a politics of difference has become as important today as challenging racism.
19. Multiculturalism or World Culture? 
    On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1991   Published: 2000
    Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
20. The OIC does not speak for Muslims
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2008
    Tarek Fatah says that "To suggest that any criticism of Islamism, the political ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian Ayatollahs, is anti-Islamic is a bogus and fraudulent position. I would contend that my religion Islam demands that I stand up to these bullies and take away from their right to put padlocks on poetry and chastity belts on independent thinking."
    
21. Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social 
    Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2001
    We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
    
22. Radical Digressions 5
    Resource Type: Internet WWW site
    First Published: 2008
    
23. The Real Value of Diversity 
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2002
    The real failure of multiculturalism is its failure to understand what is valuable about cultural diversity. There is nothing good in itself about diversity. It is important because it allows us to compare and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, make judgements upon them, and decide which are better and which worse. It is important, in other words, because it allows us to engage in political dialogue and debate that can help create more universal values and beliefs. But it is precisely such dialogue and debate, and the making of such judgements, that multiculturalism attempts to suppress in the name of 'tolerance' and 'respect'.
24. Selling Illusions
    The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1994   Published: 2002
    Since he immigrated to Canada, Neil Bissoondath has consistently refused the role of the ethnic, and sought to avoid the burden of hyphenation - a burden that would label him as an East Indian-Trinidadian-Canadian living in Quebec. Bissoondath argues that the policy of multiculturalism, with its emphasis on the former or ancestral homeland and its insistence that There is more important than Here, encourages stereotyping and division.
25. Strange Fruit 
    Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    Malik makes the case that most anti-racists accept the belief, also held by racialists and outright racists, that differences between groups are of great importance. While racialists attribute the differences to biology, anti-racists attribute them to deep-rooted cultural traditions which are typically seen as inherent in the group. Malik argues that these positions are actually quite similar, and makes the case that racism and racial inequality are best combatted by focusing not on our differences but on what unites us. Malik also strongly criticizes the cultural relativism of many anti-racists, and their increasing tendency to reject science as some kind of western imperialist conspiracy to oppress the rest of the world.
    
26. Thinking About Self-Determination 
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1994
    Does that familiar canon of the left, 'the right to self-determination', actually mean anything, or is it an empty slogan whose main utility is that it relieves us of the trouble of thinking critically?
27. The Writings of David Roediger
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1997
    Roediger criticizes Marxists for too often reducing racial discrimination to conflicts over resources, such as jobs or housing, that are manipulated by a society's upper classes in order to divert attention from the real sources of inequality. Such a focus, he argues, ignores the manner in which race and racial consciousness is integrally tied to class formation and working-class consciousness.

Experts on Identity Politics in the Sources Directory

1. Connexions Library/Archive
2. Radical Digressions