Many French have fear of communautarisme, a philosophy based on a view of society as separate communities, be they racial, ethnic, by gender, or another category. (The word “communitarian” exists in English, but it's not connected to identity politics in the same way.) Recognizing any differences between citizens undermines national unity, so there is always resistance to the explicit classification of people.
The US exemplifies this fear, with our tradition of voluntary association, one of Alexis de Tocqueville’s major observations. Philosopher Elisabeth Badinter evoked this classic image of the US in 1999 in warning against gender parity laws, saying that, “Arguing about numbers will inevitably lead to parity claims by other communities, be they racial, religious, cultural, or sexual…In the United States, this war has already begun in all aspects of civil society” (translated).
My experience is as communautariste as you get. I was a member of the Coalition for Asian Pacific American Youth in high school, on the board of the Boston Asian Students Intercollegiate Conference for three years, led a workshop at the National Asian American Student Conference in 2006, was Educational/Political Chair of the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Association, and was President of the Boston Asian Students Alliance. I've attended numerous Asian American conferences, including the ones I was involved with.
This is a very focused direction that I started in high school, and sometimes I feel like I've left it behind. Am I past it all? Did I do all the Asian American things I could do, and now I'm done? I'm not a board member of any Asian American organization anymore, and Asian American conferences don't interest me the way they used to.
It may be that my interests have changed, or it may be the rhetoric. Panels are about the same issues, time and time again: breaking the glass ceiling, how to lead, affirmative action and Asian Americans, struggling with identity, the threat of gentrification, what does “Asian American” even mean? Sure, it means that these questions persist. But I can't help feeling that they should be talked about in new ways. For example, the affirmative action debate is not just over the effects of affirmative action on Asian Americans, but who is affected by these programs, how such programs should run, why we do or don’t want these programs, and if tradeoffs are worth it. Are people coming to events to learn facts, or hang out with other people of Asian descent, or are we trying to build a movement?
It’s not up to me to decide what kind of movement we’re building. Politically speaking, Asian Americans are a notoriously disorganized population. There is no clear voting pattern, huge ethnic diversity, and the largest income gap of any racial group in the US. I've always been more interested in multiracial coalition building, which would mean looking at where borders of racial communities are drawn and how they are negotiated.
No matter what questions we look at, if they are not the more substantive questions, then we’re not doing anything but talking, and communautarisme becomes the divisive force the French fear it to be.
A version of this blog will be performed on April 19th.
1 comment:
what appears implicitly but not explicitly in your text is that we fear "communautarisme" as a vicious circle. If one social group, would it be racial, gender or anything else, begins to act for it self, to gather,... this will lead to "communautarisme" for all social groups ("snowball effect" in French).
But we need to recognize specific identities because individualism and the modern society are increasingly pushing for this.
The real problem in France is then : how to recognize specific identities and, in the same time, avoid "communautarisme" ? It is a very difficulty balance to find...
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