Multiculturalism and gender

I enjoyed this article from Asia Times. The author is a Japanese person, Tawada Yoko, living in Germany. Inter alia, the following passage reminded me of the French riots.

Even right-wing radicals don't need [the term 'German']. They refer to the "whites", an inappropriate term because they often attack ethnic German immigrants from Russia, although they never talk badly of African-American pop stars. They woul love to be racists, but in reality they violently attack those they accuse of being poor.

This reminded me of the French riots because of an article, also written by a person (Alice Schwarzer) living in Germany. It brought to mind not only the question of poverty and powerlessness, but the similarities currently existing between left and right wing politics in advanced industrialized economies (after reading Tawada's article, I am can't bring myself to use the term 'Western'). Multiculturalism which, in a variety of manifestations, is an ideology used to enable minority groups to preserve their own cultures within the society to which they have migrated, seems now to be an out-dated and conservative ideology in a world in which we are faced with the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism. What multiculturalism now achieves is to permit powerful patriarchs to present us with a 'tradtion' to which, under the rules of multiculturalism, we must genuflect. In this particular case, the so-called 'tradition' is one of patriarchy. It's not that patriarchy hasn't been an important element of all such 'traditions', including our own, just that we haven't been confronted by it on such a scale in recent decades. Since the feminist wave of the 1970s, patriarchy has been something that women have had to fight in private. Yes, we have a lot more social support systems than we used to have, but the general climate is that equality has been achieved already - even overachieved and could do with some rolling back. Meanwhile multiculturalism allows patriarchs in communities that haven't been through the 70s feminist wave, or any other for that matter, to assert their own version of 'tradition' with impunity.

As Tawada points out, traditions are fictive. They are created in retrospect, by selecting material from a diverse past to suit the needs of the present. This is a point also made in various writings on the development of nationalism by Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm and Ben Anderson, among others. It is who controls these 'traditions' that is important and how successfully they can be made to appeal to people who are attracted to the 'imagined community' they create.

In the case of the French riots, the constituents of this imagined community were young, mainly French-born, males of North African descent. Multiculturalism attributes their protest to high levels of unemployment. But as Schwarzer pointed out, the unemployment rates, though high by French standards, are twice as high among women of this 'community' compared to men (25% for males and 50% for females). So if it's a question of unemployment, why were the women not present at the riots in large numbers (as they were in the 1968 events in Paris). The answer that Schwarzer gave was that if the women go out of the house dressed, as the men were, in 'French' gear as opposed to 'traditional' gear, they are liable to be viciously attacked by members of their own 'community'. Jeans and T-shirts are, of course, part of 'traditional' Islamic dress for men, while French women have died for daring to suggest the same applies to their own sex.

If you look at it this way, then Sarkozy's response to the riots and other French responses to multiculturalism, such as the recent ban on hijab in public schools, cannot in any way be seen as worse than the response of the left. Multiculturalism has become just another way of putting women back in their place. The fact that many women cooperate with this revival of patriarchy doesn't make it any better. Women in hijab are making a statement of the fact that, by adhering to religion, they are accepting the 'natural order' of patriarchy. I don't want to digress onto my favourite punching bag of religion here, so let me just say that hijab is not prescribed in the Koran. Hijab is a 'tradition' created by modern proponents of Islam to oppress women - specifically, to encourage them to deny their sexuality.

If the 'imagined community' of Saint-Denis is poor and powerless relative to mainstream French society, the women of Saint-Denis are doubly so. Where, in all the chatter of the multiculturalist left do we find any discussion of the brutality of these 'poor and oppressed' men towards the women they live with?

PS: You have to read Tawada's article to get the reference to Montana.