JohnG@lt wrote:
I happen to like living in New York City for this very reason. I just flew back from Puerto Rico today (and boy are my arms tired!) and I happened to run into a man and his family out by the pool at the resort. He was from Kansas and is a rancher by trade. He was telling me how he loved his life and didn't understand wanting to live in a big city like New York (he'd been here twice). He explained that he enjoyed being away from it all (there are 15 people located in his township, 36 square miles) and was happy having his cheap land, cows and a WalMart 22 miles away. I explained to him that I didn't think either was necessarily a better way of life, they both have their trade offs. I happen to like not living in a one stoplight town with a single restaurant and perhaps a general store or whatever. I enjoy being able to walk three blocks from my apartment, eat Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, or Jewish foods. I like having a supermarket and a liquor store on that same block. It's convenient and gives me the variety that I enjoy. Does traffic suck? Yes. Do the taxes suck? Absolutely. But I personally wouldn't want to subject myself to the small town mono-culturalism that I would experience out by where he lives.
Here I'm not forced to be friends with people simply because of geography. I can move around, find people that share my views without having to do wholesale changes to fit in. Give me a cosmopolitan city any day of the week
You didn't read it either. From the section about defining multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism is closely associated with “identity politics,” “the politics of difference,” and “the politics of recognition,” all of which share a commitment to revaluing disrespected identities and changing dominant patterns of representation and communication that marginalize certain groups (Young 1990, Taylor 1992, Gutmann 2003). Multiculturalism is also a matter of economic interests and political power; it demands remedies to economic and political disadvantages that people suffer as a result of their minority status.
Multiculturalists take for granted that it is “culture” and “cultural groups” that are to be recognized and accommodated. Yet multicultural claims include a wide range of claims involving religion, language, ethnicity, nationality, and race. Culture is a notoriously overbroad concept, and all of these categories have been subsumed by or equated with the concept of culture (Song 2008). Language and religion are at the heart of many claims for cultural accommodation by immigrants. The key claim made by minority nations is for self-government rights. Race has a more limited role in multicultural discourse. Antiracism and multiculturalism are distinct but related ideas: the former highlights “victimization and resistance” whereas the latter highlights “cultural life, cultural expression, achievements, and the like” (Blum 1992, 14). Claims for recognition in the context of multicultural education are demands not just for recognition of aspects of a group's actual culture (e.g. African American art and literature) but also for the history of group subordination and its concomitant experience (Gooding-Williams 1998).
Examples of cultural accommodations or “group-differentiated rights” include exemptions from generally applicable law (e.g. religious exemptions), assistance to do things that the majority can do unassisted (e.g. multilingual ballots, funding for minority language schools and ethnic associations, affirmative action), representation of minorities in government bodies (e.g. ethnic quotas for party lists or legislative seats, minority-majority Congressional districts), recognition of traditional legal codes by the dominant legal system (e.g. granting jurisdiction over family law to religious courts), or limited self-government rights (e.g. qualified recognition of tribal sovereignty and federal arrangements recognizing the political autonomy of Quebec) (for a helpful classification of cultural rights, see Levy 1997).
Typically, a group-differentiated right is a right of a minority group (or a member of such a group) to act or not act in a certain way in accordance with their religious obligations and/or cultural commitments. In some cases, it is a right that directly restricts the freedom of non-members in order to protect the minority group's culture, as in the case of restrictions on the use of the English language in Quebec. When the right-holder is the group, the right may protect group rules that restrict the freedom of individual members, as in the case of the Pueblo membership rule that excludes the children of women who marry outside the group.
