I notice a couple of people in this thread who have spoken out against multiculturalism in other threads seemingly supporting the idea here because it fits with a narrative.
When discussing immigration, it's "you have to drop all that baggage when you come here you have to give up the traditions and cultural aspects from back home and be like everyone else in our country", but when it's something like this, it's "no, you can't do that, because we want to promote multiculturalism"
...that does seem to be a bit of a double-standard on the part of some conservatives.
...But, with that out of the way, a religious-specific closed community can cause some issues. Sometimes it's relatively benign like with the Amish communities (though I do still feel like their doing harm to their Children by not properly educating them), other times it can be quite problematic like the FDLS who used their closed off communities as a way of both ignoring certain laws they didn't like (without prying eyes from external law enforcement), and keeping people inside from reaching to the outside for help or telling people on the outside what kinds of things are really going on in there.
The three models available for pluralistic nations who have opted for global immigration are
- segregation
- assimilation
- integration.
Segregation has roundly been rejected in America since the defeat of the last prominent segregationist, George Wallace. It is Jim Crow. It has had a tawdry history. Assimilation is more of the model in which newcomers are expected to conform and adapt the values and mores of the dominant culture. The worse expressions of this model, one might suppose, might be in theocracies like Saudi Arabia, where anyone who does not submit is considered forever an outsider.
Integration is a melting pot model. Everybody brings themselves to the society, adds what they have that is unique and valuable, and takes from the larger society what they find most valuable. It is in the end a uni-cultural model in America for there are the base set of American values— life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and a common lingua franca, in this case English— that people are expected to adopt in order to integrate well with one another. Other than that valuing liberty means the freedom is real enough to think what one wishes, to live as one wishes, and to pursue their own happiness on their own terms.
To the extent that multiculturalism is criticized, from the American conservative point of view at any rate, is because it is ultimately a segregationist model that rejects that there are any core values to serve as the hub of any integration processes. In absolute multiculturalism models, the centre is missing. There is nothing to integrate with. It has gone so far that negative
cultural appropriation has become the newest buzzword. People lose their jobs in liberal establishments for not agreeing to sign on to the anti-cultural appropriation cause. It is Identity Politics at its worse, with the parameters of each identity group set hard and fast, and no set of core principles that would make anything one culture might desire any better or any worse than what any other culture may desire or want.
In the end it is a self-defeating system in our pluralistic world. Or more succinctly, God help us if Whites start signing on to this model in America in large numbers.
Anyone who does not want a return to Jim Crow ought to reject this model. If an Anya Sorensen wants to wear dreadlocks and dance to rap, or an Akachi Mugabe wants to put on a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, this is not something to be scorned as cultural appropriation. And if they both discover that pickeled herring and couscous are to their taste, then so what? This is integration at work. That is the melting pot making one out of the many. Cultural appropriation is the very grease that allow the disparate wheels of a pluralistic society to cog together smoothly.
Multiculturalism at its worse is segregation, solitudes of people sharing the same space, and otherwise going their own separate ways. People are correct to condemn it.
