The Intersection of Diversity, Inequality, and Culture: Rights and Responsibilities in Race/Ethnicity, Gender, Class, and Citizenship

This paper endeavors to explore the origins of the social divisions that plague us and the mechanisms that reproduce social divisions across time. In so doing, I hope to provide a deeper understanding of how diversity, inequality, and culture intersect in the social categorizations of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and citizenship that are often taken for granted and treated as essentialist. Drawing from a broad literature from the social sciences and humanities, including anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology, history, and philosophy, I try to show how boundaries, distinctions, and ideologies of universalism and civilization have contributed historically to moral justification around claims to both rights and responsibilities within political contexts, but at the expense of external “others” who become targets of oppression, exploitation, and conquest, including through imperialism, colonialism, and slavery.

The following argument will be fleshed out in the paper. In tribal societies, in the transition from “might to right,” homogeneous culture defines community membership and the right to be protected by the collective power of the community from bullies, thieves, deviants, and exploiters. To adjudicate community norms, leaders’ decisions must be seen as God given and charismatic, contributing to status distinctions that evolve into class differences within the community. The rights of group members and the status differentiation of leaders from members place demands on the resources of leaders, especially when the development of a social surplus makes the incorporation of or conflict with external groups feasible. As tribal-states grow into nation-states, loyalty to the political entity is offered only in exchange for citizenship rights that put further pressure on the resources of elites, thus encouraging efforts to exploit non-citizens. In this context, racial and ethnic distinctions are highlighted and justified as boundaries are drawn between “civilization” and “barbarians” or "non-persons."

Thus, categorical differences among people are both ground up (emergent from solutions to the problems of living leading to the homogenization of “culture” which is made sacred as the definition of “civilization”) and top down (organized through processes of domination and governance to homogenize those with citizenship rights and to differentiate those who are outside the boundary of protection and recognition within the community). Such inequality is then reproduced both through legitimizing myths and structural mechanisms that keep people “in their place.” To understand culture and diversity is to understand nation-building; processes of inclusion and exclusion at multiple levels of analyses; inequality in power, status, and numbers; and the micro-processes of identity formation across time. Culture is always sacred, contributing to diversity and inequality through social, political, economic, and historical processes.