Vol. 9 No. 10 (October 1999) pp. 448-451.

CULTURAL PLURALISM, IDENTITY POLITICS, AND THE LAW by Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Editors). Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1999. 179 pp. Cloth $49.50.

Reviewed by Gayle Binion, Department of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara.

This ninth entry in Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns', Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, features a series of five chapters, functionally five articles, by noted scholars. It also features an introductory essay by the editors, aptly entitled, "Responding to the Demands of Difference," which situates the contributions and describes the goals of the volume. Focused on the tensions they note have developed in both political and scholarly circles with respect to cultural diversity, identity politics, integration, assimilation, recognition and tolerance, to cite just some of the facets of contemporary discourses on equality, the authors raise a wide and ambitious array of questions for thought. Two of the questions that the editors have sought to address, and to have addressed by others in this volume are: "What role, if any, has law played in structuring the terms on which recognition, accommodation, and inclusion are accorded to persons and groups within the United States?" and "What happens to law when the subject/claimant is constituted by membership in a distinct cultural group or by a distinct identity?" I select these two queries from their much broader range, as perhaps most emblematic of what one will likely glean from reading the essays by Elizabeth B. Clark, Dorothy E.Roberts, George Lipsitz, and Kenneth L. Karst. To my mind, the common core of the essays in the volume, and the arena in which they intersect most fluidly, is their shared concern with how public policy (especially as contoured by the judiciary) understands group claims and how this has impacted demands for equitable distributions of power in American society. A fifth article in the volume, "The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics," by Lauren Berlant, has a rather different nature and focus and I fear is beyond my ability to integrate fairly and effectively with the others in this review. Written by a professor of English, it is in a language of post-modernism in which I had to date believed I was sufficiently schooled to be able to comprehend and analyze the debates concerning law. I am
now persuaded that I am but semiliterate in the language and could not confidently "do justice" to the chapter.

Elizabeth B. Clark, a professor of law at Boston University, who, tragically, died before completing her entry, has, despite her untimely death, provided an interesting study of how 19th century reformers challenged the presumptive "majesty" of law. While the term is not one that Clark employs, it does capture how law was and continues to be envisioned in many quarters, as objective, inclusionary, and neutral. Clark points out in her essay that those persons who sought socioeconomic reform (for slaves, for women, for exploited workers) during the 19th century laid the foundations for

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sociolegal challenges in more contemporary times.

They stressed three major points that have endured: that no one monolithic form could take account of individual difference, that rights-bearing individuals' "personal" experiences were of social relevance, and that ingrained patterns of oppression (particularly those of women) required that domestic life be subject to societal action.
"Natural rights" as understood and promoted by the reformers reflected a Protestant Christianity that valued most highly independence of thought and the birthright of each individual as a full citizen. The interesting aspect of Clark's work as it relates to the subsequent articles in the volume, is that it argues essentially that the contemporary battles for group recognition owe a debt to a movement that stressed the individuality of each person and their sameness in this regard with each other, a superficial paradox. The movements for group rights as we know them today are, in Clark's view, a consequence of the deconstruction and then reconstruction of group beginning in the mid 19th century, moving from the notion of society as a corporate, indivisible entity, to society understood as an amalgam of groups with unequal power and conflicting demands. The development of the women's liberation movement, beginning with a claim from individual moral autonomy of each regardless of sex, to a community demanding justice for women as a group, reflects this development, and is perhaps a model from which to analyze other groups' experiences.

Roberts, Karst and Lipsitz nicely capture perspectives on contemporary struggles over group identity, culture, law, and politics in the three remaining articles. Dorothy Roberts and Kenneth Karst can be imagined as indirectly engaged in a dialogue where the premises of the latter are fundamentally questioned by the former. Roberts observes early in her chapter that American law sees only minorities as having culture. Indeed as she notes, "The more subordinated a community, the more culture it is seen to have." (p. 90.) The presumption of law's neutrality, and its divorce from cultural norms of the dominant force in society, is such a foolish notion that Roberts does not even investigate the possibility of its veracity. Her example of the judicial dismissal of a Title VII claim by a black woman who was prohibited by her employer from wearing cornrows demonstrates how deeply ingrained are white cultural norms, in that case, with respect to what constitutes an appropriate business image. Instead of belaboring the obvious, she does a fine job of demonstrating the ways in which culture (as defined by dominant white society) is a manipulated value in the law. That the law is incapable of effectuating a respect for cultural diversity is in the first instance structural in that a legal system founded
on the myths of individualism cannot integrate values and beliefs that are, by definition, practiced "as groups." But Roberts also cautions that arguing for respect for cultural diversity in the law is dangerous if not coupled with a clear vision of a political agenda. To not place considerations of culture within a framework for the empowerment of minority groups is to uncritically adopt such phenomena as the "cultural defense" in criminal prosecution, a defense more often than not misogynistic
and patriarchal in its application and recognition.

Although Roberts wants to see cultural diversity more fully politicized and understood within the context of challenging hegemonic power, in contrast, Kenneth Karst fears that excessive focus on difference

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threatens to create an unholy alliance between the left and the right in opposition to integration. For a scholar of Karst's stature whose eloquent writings have always
held racial integration to be of the highest priority, this observation is troubling to those of liberal or progressive persuasion. But his thesis may be premised on a particularized view of contemporary political movements that is open to debate and dispute. While Karst builds a well-crafted argument about the fluid nature of unity and diversity in American society, his perspective on multiculturalism equates the movement with forces of disintegration reminiscent of the rhetoric of black
nationalism in the 1960s and 70s. If this premise were a generally accurate one, then much of his argument would build persuasively upon it. But the problem with his thesis may be that contrary to his characterization, exponents of multiculturalism, as I understand that political agenda, are arguably more likely to make the case for integration of minority experience into everyone's education and life experience, not to create distance among peoples but to more fully integrate them.
Multiculturalism may be less about marking cultural difference in the sense of a self-enforced separatism and distance (as distinct from separatism by fiat which Karst correctly observes that the right would enforce) than about empowering the disenfranchised via recognition. Although Karst may be right that Americans are
offered a false dichotomy, an unnecessary "choice" between cultural identities and integration, it is also possible that dichotomization may itself stem from a fear of the redistribution of power that is being called for. Thus, he concludes his "Does Integration Have a Future?" with a confident belief that his most cherished value has not been rendered obsolete in contemporary politics.

George Lipsitz's contribution to the Sarat and Kearns volume intersects with Karst's perspective on the political right. In his, "Civil Rights Rhetoric and White Identity Politics," he critiques the thesis put forth by Sniderman and Piazza (1993). Sniderman and Piazza had alleged that the civil rights movement's noble goal of "color blindness" had been replaced with a (debased) politics of affirmative action, racial separatism and "pork barrel." In Lipsitz's assessment of this neo-conservative polemic on race relations, he provides an insightful framework for viewing civil rights issues in the 20th century. The core of the article offers a devastatingly critical analysis of public policy on race over the past 50 years, documenting the ways in which the U.S. government, labor unions, corporations, the real estate industry, and educational institutions, to cite just the most major actors, have conspired to disempower and segregate African Americans. He documents further how civil rights legislation was itself designed to further the interests of the very institutions most inimical to the social, political and economic advancement of American Blacks. In this context, Lipsitz offers another observation; albeit in a subtler manner, to wit, that Sniderman and Piazza could not, consistent with the
empirical realities of race in America, seriously believe that the civil rights movement was ever about racial "neutrality" rather than effecting racial justice. Simultaneous with his extremely critical assessment of the thesis of Sniderman and Piazza, Lipsitz also suggests that scholars' apparent ignorance of race in America is not accidental, it is itself symptomatic of "white identity politics" to which the academy is not immune. "The problem with white people," Lipsitz observes, "is not our
whiteness but our possessive investment in it" (p. 137.)

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CULTURAL PLURALISM, IDENTITY POLITICS, AND THE LAW offers diverse but intersecting perspectives on the contemporary dialogues of(predominantly) racial equality and the role of cultural diversity in intellectual, political, and legal strategies for social change. Although too few selections are included for the book to be seen as an anthology on the subjects of cultural diversity and law, it will likely be assessed as a significant contribution to debates that are likely to continue for years, if not decades, to come.

REFERENCE

Sniderman, Paul M. and Thomas Piazza. 1993. THE SCAR OF RACE.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press