[Peace-discuss] Salaita's views on "multiculturalism"

[David Green]

https://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/university-illinois/we-have-a-problem-as-a-community-chancellor-s-email/article_cd6c6aea-4a65-5bcc-9867-c3480f3d4c66.html


*Pertaining to the brouhaha on campus, excerpts from Steven Salaita's
Israel's Dead Soul:*

https://mondoweiss.net/2014/10/scholarship-dismissal-university/

At the modern corporate university, and especially at public neoliberal
high-tech research universities like UIUC, multiculturalism and diversity
constitute the official ideology of identity (as opposed to class)
politics; civility and respect, as they have been evoked by administrators
and trustees in the Salaita affair, constitute its bureaucratic and
disciplinary practices. In the Chapter 1, “Israel as a Cultural Icon,”
Salaita explores Zionists’ exploitation of multicultural spaces on campus:

"What are the ethical consequences of the coterminous relationship of
Israel and Jewishness? They are many, none of them positive. First of all,
it means that Israel cannot be included in multicultural celebrations
without reflecting negatively on Jewish people, many of whom do not want to
be identified in any way with the nation-state or who do not want the
national-state to be their primary cultural identity.

Second, it entraps Jewish people in an unsavory paradigm, one in which they
perform gruesome acts because of their culture. … Herein lies the main
problem of conjoining culture and national character. Hillel and other
Jewish civic organizations render themselves distinctly responsible for
Israel’s violence by proclaiming themselves guardians of the state’s
consciousness. … It is never a good idea, even though the trope of
strategic essentialism, to link an ethnic group to a military apparatus.
Such a move automatically justifies discourses—in this case anti-Semitic
ones—that should never be justifiable. (p. 23)

In a manner that is rarely articulated in the belly of the beast, Salaita
proceeds to place this critique in a larger educational/corporate/power
context:

The frequent inclusion of Zionism in multicultural spaces, both physical
and metaphorical, enables us to think more closely about the utility of
multiculturalism as a discourse and a practice. Zionism represents centers
of power financially and politically. It is an ideology (or set of
ideologies) deeply inscribed in state power all over the world. It supports
an enormous military economy and an imperialism whose reach is capacious.
It partakes of the capitalist structures of neoliberalism that expropriate
resources from the Southern Hemisphere into the Northern. Zionism is
inseparable from the forms of structural injustice that occur throughout
the world.

My point here is not to suggest that Zionism corrupts multiculturalism,
though that is likely the case, at least in the abstract. I suggest instead
the possibility that multiculturalism itself is problematic because it so
easily accommodates Zionism (and other troublesome ideologies). Is the
point of multiculturalism to oppose unjust power and racism? Or is it to
provide spaces within institutions where ethnic minorities can escape
racism? What is the point of using multicultural apparatuses to promote
Israel as the apogee of Jewishness?

Although I have rarely heard it stated that multiculturalism is supposed to
oppose power, it frequently appeases it, a judgment I base on nothing more
than its continued existence. Academic and corporate institutions are set
up to regulate and efficiently eliminate both internal and external
challenges to their modes of governance and authority. In many ways, the
promotion of multiculturalism is a diversion or a delusion … deep seated
racism still exists in the institutions wherein the idea of
multiculturalism was invented. (p. 28-29)"
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