Essay On Multiculturalism Without Culture

We all have a sense of what injustice looks like in our society and it is sometimes easier to define what injustice is rather than defining what justice is and looks like. However, we also know that an unequal society can never be just. In Equality in a Multicultural Society by Bhikhu Parekh, Contesting Cultures by Uma Narayan and Multiculturalism without Culture by Anne Phillips, all theorists believe that in order to achieve a multicultural society that effectively treats all people as each other’s moral equals; we must create equal opportunity using a culturally sensitive lens, challenge Western perspectives of Third World Feminists and stop allowing patriarchal norms to characterize minority cultures. In Parekh’s piece, he discusses minority rights in a multicultural society in terms of needing more implementation of equal opportunity in our society, but that our society needs to use a culturally sensitive lens while doing this. In other words, he believes we need more discussion, negotiation and compromise between the dominant cultures versus the minority cultures in a society. He discusses this notion of equal opportunity involving focus on one’s cultural identity when he states, “Equality involves equal freedom or opportunity to be different, and treating human beings equally requires us to take into account both their similarities and differences…At the most basic level it involves equality of respect and rights” (240). Minority individuals that live in our society and coexist with the majority cultures deserve to have the same equal freedom as any other person. However, Parekh argues that it is difficult to agree on what respect each individual should be treated equally when the society that they are living in is already culturally diverse. In order to attain our desire to respect the customs of minority cultures and religions, every individual in our society, must enter themselves into the minority culture, educating themselves in the background of the culture so that they can have respect for these other cultures, as these minority cultures who came into a society with a majority culture had to do. Our society has a dominant language and dominant Western practices that many people have learned to abide by in order to live within the society, so it is only fair that we, the majority culture, show them the same respect through discussion and compromise, that their culture is equally as important in our society. Another theorist who focuses on how to achieve a multicultural society that effectively treats all people as each other’s moral equals, is Uma Narayan in her piece Contesting Cultures. Much like Parekh, Narayan highlights the dominant Western practices that still thrive throughout our society that creates inequalities for individuals, but rather than fixing on cultural inequality, she focuses on looking at this issue using a gender specific lens. Because of the Western beliefs that thrive throughout our society, there have been many misconceptions about Third World feminists and their place in this society. Narayan argues that there is a need for Third World feminists and recognition for them because of the importance they have in fighting for women’s rights in society. She states that they “have often been instrumental in making the systematic problems of unfairness, mistreatment, and devaluing that women face in their national …show more content…
Phillips argues that our society has fallen into a system of complacency regarding how we view multiculturalism. She explicitly states that is has “promoted a cultural relativism that can no longer distinguish between right and wrong. Culture is operating as a reason for public inaction and an excuse for immoral behavior” (72). Because Western practices have been perpetuated for numerous years now, society seems to have just thrown their hands in the air and regarded this issue of multicultural inequality as something that cannot be reversed. Phillips also makes a point to state that she does not think it’s the evidence of cultural inequality that generates problems of this unequal treatment, but rather when this evidence is matched with mainstream Western conventions. In order reconcile our duty to achieve gender equality, as well as respecting minority cultures in our society, we need to stop viewing culture as something that requires individuals to do certain things which they cannot do, and instead view culture in ways more equivalent to the power of gender or