ABSTRACT
It is ironic that at the same time that policymakers, scholars, and commentators point to the increasing diversity of the United States, they stubbornly persist in collapsing racial and cultural relations into a blackwhite binary. If we are to make sense of the current state of racial and cultural conflict, it is imperative that we broaden our understanding to recognize the United States for what it is: a multicultural, multiracial, and multiethnic community, characterized by multiple and crosscutting coalitions and cleavages. The politics of difference, in other words, is also inscribed in the interethnic relations of oppressed groups. Cornel West insists that “although this particular form of xenophobia from below does not have the same institutional power of those racisms that affect their victims from above, it certainly deserves attention as a struggle within the politics of identity formation” (1994:109).
