Be careful what you wish for
Sometimes people just don’t think things through.
In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council.
Think it through, liberals in Hamtramck (pronounced Hamtrammick). Are you sure a theocratic city council is what you want? Not all Muslims are theocrats, of course, but some are, and it’s a very theocratic-leaning religion. I wouldn’t rejoice for a second if Seattle elected a Catholic-majority city council, or a Southern Baptist-majority one, or a Haredi Jewish-majority one.
This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.
What I’m saying. “Muslim” means something. There are secular Muslims, who view their Muslimitude as an ethnic identity or similar. Many Jews and Christians are like that. But it’s risky to assume everyone is.
Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.
See, just because Trump enjoys bullying Muslim immigrants doesn’t mean all Muslims are warm caring pillars of tolerance.
While Hamtramck is still viewed as a bastion of multiculturalism, the difficulties of local governance and living among neighbors with different cultural values quickly set in following the 2015 election.
Whew. So close to getting the point but it flew right past. News flash: multiculturalism means different cultural values. You know what that means? Values you don’t share, values you hate, values that are bad values. It sounds like such a friendly word but sometimes different cultural values cannot be reconciled. How had the liberals of Hamtramck not noticed that?
“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”
It’s sad. People really do need to take on board the fact that religions can be cruel, harsh, narrow, unjust, wrong on the facts and the morals. They’re not just a bit of color; they have substance, lots of it.
Muslims who follow an Islam which doesn’t sound like one of those feel-good liberal churches? You don’t say! A lot of people who Don’t Think Things Through seem to have a view of the world inspired by inspirational movies as opposed to one which looked at what the critics and skeptics have to say about What Could Go Wrong.
Today I ran into another bit of irony from Nellie Bowles at The Free Press.
As “peaceful “ and “beautiful “ as Islam, it seems.
Ophelia:
Yep, multiculturalism is one of those things that liberal people give knee-jerk support. They never actually think about what it means, either literally or in terms of consequences for society. Remember when America was supposed to be a melting pot where everyone brings new ingredients, and the dish is all the richer for it? Yeah, that’s called racist assimilation now. I think that when most liberal sorts hear talk of multiculturalism, their brains translate it to the melting pot metaphor, not at all realizing that’s not at all what’s meant.
Exploiting that kind of “unintentional” support is standard operating procedure nowadays. Given that multiculturalism almost necessarily leads to disunity and societal dysfunction, those who push it should probably be listened to with caution.
Sastra:
I find it wearisome how Democratic voters basically memory holed most of the 2020-2021 “protests”. Like, attempted coups are bad, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore or excuse everything lesser.
Ah but Christianity is bad because it is associated with white-colonial-cis-imperialist-colonising-fascist-heteronormative-white-feminist-colonial colonialism. It is the Enemy.
Anti-semitic bigot!
Christianity is bad because it is rooted in authoritarianism, much like Islam. We’re just more used to it,
Sarah Haider has a good article on the alliance of socially conservative Muslims and the Christian right against gender ideology in schools, and its possible effects on the wider culture war (she’s pessimistic).
https://sarahhaider.substack.com/p/muslim-christian-alliance-against
Nullius @ 2 – I know. See Susan Moller Okin’s classic “Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women?”
That Molly Moon item is hilarious. Thanks Sastra!
In the case of gender ideology in schools, the right may be correct, even if for very wrong reasons.
Nullius: Were the protests “lesser”? The riot seemed a little pathetic to me more than any real threat to “democracy”. The activities of the Koch Brothers and right wing think tanks are far more dangerous.
The protests caused an awful lot of damage and many cities seem to be suffering a months/years continuing long epidemic of slow burn looting even to this day. But hey, if you are a heroin addict you deserve to wander into the nearest corner store and steal armfuls of stuff, amiright?
However…I am a little uncomfortable with your implication that we need to focus on unity, which can lead to monocultures that are oppressive. If you take your comment to an extreme we should have Chinese Exclusion Acts and rigid militarized borders because we need to reserve the pure American culture???!
Brian M: The dominant implicit premise on the left is that the significance of action is proportional to where it occurs in the social/political hierarchy. Because the Jan 6th thing happened at the federal level, it is therefore more significant than anything that might happen on the municipal level. This is, of course, roughly the same argument that justifies only having nationwide riots when a black man is unjustly killed by a cop.
There’s a difference between uniformity and unity. Uniformity is hegemony and homogeneity. Unity is harmony and heterogeneity. Multiculturalism is dissonance and difference.
A society functions in part on the basis of shared values. If citizens’ values are too disparate, then no accord can be achieved, and society crumbles. If citizens’ values are static and monolithic, then there is no means of correcting unhealthy values and bad ideas, and society crumbles. Between these extremes is a Goldilocks zone of agreement and disagreement, a place where our individual ethical and epistemic inadequacies can be corrected by social interaction.
It’s not so much that we need to focus on unity. Rather, we need to foster a healthy degree of unity, because we’ve let what unity we had rapidly dissipate since the end of the Cold War.