Multiculturalism, Crime

But he is incorrect in assuming that such an attitude can have any positive consequences whatsoever. In a study of three New Guinean societies, Mead claimed to have found stupendous variation in sex roles that proved biology a non-factor in the face of the superior force of culture.

In one of the societies she described, both men and women showed low levels of aggression; in another, both sexes were highly aggressive; in the third, women were more aggressive than men.

Culture has the final say, and it can say whatever it wants, purported biological realities be damned. By mid-century it had become de rigueur in anthropology to assert that there was no human nature and that culture was the unique cause of human behavior. The basic idea that emerged from this intellectual transformation of anthropology was that human cultures are both infinitely varied and equally viable. It is no small matter that neither of these claims is true. Human culture does vary significantly, but there are a wide range of features that all human cultures share.

The anthropologist Donald Brown compiled a page list of such universal features in It is not a simple matter to rank cultures, and careful attention must be paid to how environmental contexts affect whether a culture is productive or not in a given situation. Nonetheless, the evidence of the objective rank of cultures is, as Sumner argued, in broad relief given by the history of human time on the planet.

Western civilization emerged as dominant in the world in part because of the fact that it was Europeans and not the Chinese who fell upon the incredible resource pool of the New World.

But much of the explanation for why the former and not the latter got there first has to do with cultural facts. Protestant Europeans embraced a religious worldview in which productive labor had a positive, even spiritual valence it did not have elsewhere, and this enabled the rise of market societies.

A non-judgmental attitude may well be of use as a methodological tool for the ethnographer, but the problems with full-blown cultural relativism as moral and political philosophy are difficult to overlook. Some cultures, for example, practice female genital mutilation, which in some cases involves the complete removal of the clitoris, as a rite of passage.

Though there are professional anthropologists who endeavor mightily to rationalize this practice, it is a hard sell to anyone not fully indoctrinated into that esoteric professional belief system.

Most of us have little trouble recognizing that such practices mark these cultures as morally inferior to our own, which recognizes girls and women as meriting the same sacred respect that boys and men receive.

However problematic cultural relativism becomes when seen outside the pure realm of ethnographic methodology, it has had tremendous influence on our way of thinking about American cultural identity. They worked eagerly to turn academic doctrines into broad political platforms.

It was within the Civil Rights movement that this effort became most strenuous. Up through the mids, the dominant figures and groups of the movement still called for racial redress within a framework that assumed American patriotism was still possible. Board Supreme Court decision, the Civil Rights Act of , and the Voting Rights Act of —were a consequence of its adherence to what Sumner would have called an ethnocentric set of cultural values.

The values of individual right and equality under the law, which are at the core of the American project, were to be embraced enthusiastically and fully as our culture, superior not only to other competing cultures but also to our failed practice with respect to race relations prior to the midth century. But, as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. At San Francisco State University in , a coalition of radicals in the Black Student Union and a group calling itself the Third World Liberation Front led a five-month campus strike, during which there were pitched battles between protestors and San Francisco police.

Allan Bloom, in a late chapter in The Closing of the American Mind , gives a bracing account of a similar process at Cornell in In this case, radicals armed with rifles seized control of parts of campus. Too many have forgotten how militant the Civil Rights movement then became, and too many fail to comprehend how effectively its ideas have been mainstreamed.

Many civil rights radicals were by the early s positing that black prisoners were the population most oppressed by white racism and therefore most in need of political aid. At the vanguard of the movement were criminal thugs masquerading as activists. One such radical was George Jackson, whose book Soledad Brother made him a celebrity until his death during a prison escape attempt, in which he murdered three guards and severely wounded three more. Another such activist—Joanne Chesimard, now known as Assata Shakur—participated in the murder of a peace officer.

Convicted of the crime and subsequently smuggled out of prison to Cuba, Shakur is now revered by Black Lives Matter as a founding inspiration. But what most aided the advance of radical multiculturalism was a single piece of legislation. The Immigration and Nationality Act abolished previously existing quotas designed to stabilize the ethnic makeup of the US and limit the number of unskilled laborers entering the country.

The immigrant pool thus changed from its original composition, largely drawn from populations that were culturally close to the existing American society, to a new assemblage of groups coming from much more culturally diverse locations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As this shift occurred, the anthropological doctrine of cultural relativism was readily seized on as explanatory tool and political justification. The creation of a Diversity Lottery visa and new, much more liberal rules on admission of refugees and asylees ensured even more grist for the multiculturalist mill.

The new wave of immigration has had a transformative demographic effect. Whether one approves or disapproves, it is undeniable that we are now in a truly new situation. We have had high immigration levels, and from historically new points of origin, in the past—for example, around the turn of the 19th into the 20th centuries.

But such periods have always previously been followed, after a few decades, by a moratorium on new immigration and intense efforts to assimilate the recent immigrant populations. We are now more than a half-century into a massive new wave, culturally and ethnically more diverse than any other in our history, and there is still, even in the wake of the election, precious little sign of any real and widespread political will to slow it or to assimilate our new arrivals.

Thanks to multiculturalism, that will has been utterly lost. The early incarnations of multiculturalism in educational institutions made use of the empirical fact that, in large urban areas at least, s America was already characterized by a significant amount of demographic diversity.

Given this, it was argued, what harm is there in revising curriculum to reflect that and provide students an accurate view of the lay of the land? Chapter 11 Flashcards Policing and Multiculturalism. Chapter 12 Flashcards Courts and Multiculturalism. Chapter 13 Flashcards Corrections and Multiculturalism. Chapter 1 Key Terms Introduction. Chapter 11 Key Terms Policing and Multiculturalism.

Chapter 12 Key Terms Courts and Multiculturalism. Chapter 13 Key Terms Corrections and Multiculturalism. Chapter 1 Links Introduction. Chapter 11 Links Policing and Multiculturalism. Chapter 12 Links Courts and Multiculturalism. Most colleges offering degrees in criminal justice also offer a curriculum in diversity training.

The criminal justice program at the University of Washington, for example, emphasizes social justice, diversity and community partnerships. The American Bar Association offers resources on cultural differences and cultural competency including its Building Community Trust program. Schools also help encourage diversity in the justice system workforce. Yale Law School has over 50 scholarships available for students with different cultural backgrounds.

In an effort to ensure that a community's police force is representative of its population, many police departments initiate diversity recruitment programs. For example, in , Jersey City, New Jersey announced its recruitment drive to encourage minorities to join the city's police department. Census figures showed that the city was only 34 percent white, while the police department was 63 percent white.

When the Virginia State Police began focusing recruiting efforts on minorities by directly contacting candidates and working with local community associations, it was able to decrease the number of white male recruits from 90 percent to 78 percent in only two years. A published author and professional speaker, David Weedmark has advised businesses and governments on technology, media and marketing for more than 20 years. He has taught computer science at Algonquin College, has started three successful businesses, and has written hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines throughout Canada and the United States.