Multicultural Social Movements

Race and racial identities and ideologies critically affect social movements. Multicultural social movements theory addresses the connections between demands for the recognition of identity and the redistribution of resources. It also highlights the role of racialized systems of oppression and identities on social movement demands and outcomes. Building upon and synthesizing existing theories regarding “new” social movements, race, and multiculturalism, this theory posits that in social movements, race and racialized identities and group cultures play a pivotal role. Using examples from the Civil Rights Movement, this entry describes the resources on which these movements draw and the role racial identity has played in these movements in the United States.

During multicultural social movements, activists draw on their particular cultures and histories to articulate politics of difference and semblance, reflecting [Page 917]their cultural past and U.S. citizenship, respectively. Multicultural movements' trajectories of activism, mobilization, and success are shaped by race-related social, historical, and institutional contexts; characteristics of the group (such as networks of solidarity, access to various forms of resources, communities of support, oppositional consciousness, and traditions of activism); and the decisions and reactions of state agencies. Different racial constraints on mobilization and different group histories in particular times and places critically affect both short- and long-term outcomes.

Like identity movements, recognition struggles, and new social movements, the ultimate goal of multicultural movements is to rearticulate and recognize group-based identities such that they no longer retain connotations of inferiority. However, multicultural movements move beyond identity politics by seeking redistribution and equalization of resources. Similarly, multicultural movements theory recognizes that not all identities provide activists with equal resources to mobilize and sustain protest, nor do they result in similar constraints. Racialized groups enter protest cycles with unique culturally and historically based resources, while groups maintaining a White racial identity are considerably more advantaged than non-White activists in societies organized as a racial hierarchy, such as the United States.

By explicitly linking identity to resources, multicultural struggles seek to subvert the subjective reality of activists' political and racial status, question society's meanings of race and racial identities, challenge preexisting ideologies, and construct alternative oppositional frameworks of belonging within U.S. society. They not only destabilize the racial terrain through the reconstruction of identities and privileges using group cultures embedded within each racial community but also often attempt to rearticulate a larger national identity such that the formerly disadvantaged group is able to claim membership within the U.S. citizenry. These attempts to change the racial hierarchy result in the potential instability of racial meanings for all racial groups such that the system must either allow for change or further institutionalize racial difference.