Not multiculturalism: A rejoinder to Peter McLaren

Author(s): GREGOR McLENNAN

Source: Ethnicities, Vol. 1, No. 3 (September, 2001), pp. 420-422
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23890321
Accessed: 27-02-2019 04:29 UTC

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Ethnicities

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420«i ETHNICITIES 1(3)

PETER MCLAREN is Professor of Urban Schooling at the Graduate

School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los
Angeles. He is the author and editor of 35 books on a wide range of
topics, from the sociology of education, critical theory, critical pedagogy,
the politics of literacy, to critical ethnography. His most recent books
include Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (Rowman
and Littlefield) and Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory
(edited with Mike Cole, Dave Hill and Glenn Rikowski, Lexington books).
Professor McLaren's works have been translated into 17 languages,
[email: mclaren@gseis.ucla.edu]

Not multiculturalism

A rejoinder to Peter McLaren

GREGOR McLENNAN

University of Bristol

I welcome Peter McLaren's endorsement of some of my arguments against

critical multiculturalism, and I can appreciate his sense of the limitations o
my alternative perspective. Such a level of agreement prompts no lengthy
or adversarial extension of the discussion. However, since the slightly con
tradictory character of McLaren's response reflects the symptomatic
tension within critical multiculturalism that I was at pains to identify in the
earlier piece, this might be worth emphasizing further.
Two minor misconstruals are indicative. McLaren says that one of my
persuasive points is to highlight the lack of an adequate theorization of
heterogeneity in critical multiculturalism. However, my angle was rather to
debunk the whole homogeneity/heterogeneity couplet around which critical
multiculturalism has been articulated. A second issue is that I am supposed
to claim that critical multiculturalist discourse is aimed only at a white
audience, and McLaren wants to falsify this. But that is not what I argued
instead, I was exposing the dubious circuits of association in critical multi
culturalism whereby white gets routinely equated with 'monocultural',
monocultural with 'reactionary', and multicultural with 'progressive' and
'radical'. Then, motivated by the need to take all peoples' political and
cultural situation seriously, I pointed to the distasteful irony whereby
white education professors take it upon themselves to be the agents of
enlightenment for the benighted populist monoculturalists. The brunt of
these minor matters is that in both cases McLaren seems to think that

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 DEBATE • McLENNAN AND McLAREN <1421

critical multiculturalism can be either defended or improved, and indeed he

proposes to go far beyond even my sceptical stance in order to properly
correct multiculturalist waywardness. However, my point is that this is itself
a wayward line of thinking, because to push in my direction, and certainly
to push past me in that direction, is simply to explode critical multi
culturalism as a viable operation.
That McLaren remains awkwardly caught between defending and dis
missing critical multiculturalism can be seen in a number of ways. For
instance, in his response he talks a lot about liberal and left-liberal multi
culturalists, but it is never made clear whether these are meant to include
the 'critical multiculturalists' that are the stated object of my analysis, or
whether they remain precisely the people that the critical multiculturalists
themselves are critiquing. Even if the latter holds, there are times when
McLaren wants to emphasize, perhaps quite properly, that 'early develop
ments in multiculturalism' had an important countervailing impact. But this
supportive nod towards liberal multiculturalism, and indeed any attempt to
identify different positions within the multicultural spectrum, is consistently
undermined by McLaren's tendency to swing away towards wholesale
reductionist assertions, to the effect that multiculturalism (unqualified) is
about 'camouflaging imperialist aggression', that it 'corresponds to the
interests of the ruling class', and so on.
As for the theoretical bearings of critical multiculturalism, which, we
must note, are explicitly held by its own advocates as going very consider
ably beyond liberal multiculturalism, McLaren now denounces various pos
turings in the direction of 'poststructuralist theories of race and identity'.
Obviously, it is good to hear this aspect of my paper echoed, but there is a
corollary that goes unaddressed: that I examined a number of McLaren's
own earlier statements in exactly this context, some of which were
expressed in the same terms of 'revolutionary multiculturalism' that his
response presents afresh. Given this, and given my further argument that
although the later 'Phase Two' critical multiculturalism is less poststruc
turalist in tenor, it still draws upon poststructuralism and other non-Marxist
currents as critical resources, the question persists: is McLaren himself
inside or outside critical multiculturalism? This is hard to say, because on
the one hand he takes me to task for failing to see the depth of May's
and Goldberg's treatment of liberal multiculturalism and the ethno
centrism/racism question - I still plead guilty to this - but then goes on to
concur that the critical multiculturalist accounts of such matters as
Eurocentrism, Otherhood, and pluralism are fundamentally flawed, both
analytically and politically.
So I am not sure that McLaren has fully taken on board the precise focus
and thrust of my critique. The argument specifically concentrates on critical
multiculturalism, and maintains that when pitched as a theoretical perspec
tive rather than as a descriptive rubric, it is incoherent. Poststructuralist

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422n ETHNICITIES 1(3)

critical multiculturalism is incoherent because the almost metaphysical pri

ority given to difference and dispersal undercuts the ability of multi
culturalism itself to stand as any kind of stabilizing principle. And
Marxist-leaning variants are incoherent because of their drive towards
seeing all forms of multiculturalism as ideology in the service of capital.
McLaren's is clearly of this latter sort, confirmed by his choice of authori
ties and his criticisms of myself and Zizek for not being materialist enough.
But in that case, why are we left with this strange concoction called revol
utionary multiculturalism rather than a plain statement that what is going
on here is no variant of multiculturalism at all?

It is at this point, and finally, that I need to say why I cannot fully agree
with McLaren on Marxism either. We both see the necessity of a Marxist
orientation towards social trajectories and human futures, but whereas he
believes my reference to radical humanism compromises that orientation,
possibly inviting liberalism back in, I see humanism not merely as an indis
pensable mediation for class-based struggles and outcomes, but as a sub
stantive and dynamic radical ethic in its own right, something that Marxist
concepts and values interpret and extend, but do not simply exhaust or
supersede. In that sense, humanism is necessarily 'thinner' (I would say
'broader') than revolutionary materialism, but this is its virtue not its deficit.
So even as we criticize the pitfalls of 'critical' and 'liberal' multiculturalist
views, we also need to avoid straight class reductionism in the realms of
human motivation and sociological situation. In that regard, McLaren's
rallying cries around materialism and global class struggle strike me as
dangerously gestural at times.

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