Multiculturalism, American-Style: The Politics of Race, Culture, and Diversity

This chapter provides a genealogical and conceptual overview of how the politics of race in the USA have shaped cultural discourse and policy frameworks related to racial difference, inequality, and ethno-racial pluralism, often known as ‘multiculturalism.’ This chapter has four main sections that correspond to four distinct historical eras. The first section (i.e., 1950s–late 1960s) describes the USA in the mid-twentieth century. The second section (i.e., the 1970s through the 1990s) describes how conservative political mobilization surrounding race meant that the American political landscape backed away from some of the progress of the civil rights era and shifted toward a smaller social state and a colorblind, individualist ethos. The third section describes how this diversity approach came to be a dominant, even celebrated, discourse and policy framework in the early twenty-first century. In the fourth and final section, we consider what the present and near future hold for multiculturalism and diversity discourse, particularly as tied to today’s racialized politics, and how the two major political parties approach these concepts. Overall, the historical trajectory and contemporary state of affairs described in this chapter lead us to be skeptical that multiculturalism is necessarily resurging in the USA, despite recent electoral victories by the political Left.