Multicultural Citizenship

Multicultural citizenship is the idea that ethnic, racial, gender, and other minoritized groups can maintain significant aspects of their community cultures and values and yet freely participate in the national civic culture and community. This entry describes how the concept of universal citizenship prohibits minoritized groups from fully participating in the civic community of the nation-state and explains why the concept of multicultural citizenship, as defined by scholars such as Will Kymlicka and Iris M. Young, was constructed to make the limitations of universal [Page 1519]citizenship explicit and to describe how it denies rights to groups that are marginalized because of their racial, ethnic, cultural, and gender characteristics.

Although the concepts of universal human rights and universal citizenship were originally invoked to make societies less hierarchical, ...