Social Injustice
...Keele University, UK
Structural Injustice and the Politics of Difference
Iris Marion Young, University of Chicago, iyoung@uchicago.edu, April 2005
As a social movement tendency in the 1980’s, the politics of difference has involved the claims of feminist, anti-racist, and gay liberation activists that the structural inequalities of gender, race, and sexuality were not well perceived or combated by the dominant paradigm of equality and inclusion. In this dominant paradigm, the promotion of justice and equality requires non-discrimination: the application of the same principles of evaluation and distribution to all persons regardless of their particular social positions or backgrounds. In this ideal, which many understood as the liberal paradigm, social justice means ignoring gender, racial or sexual differences among people. Social movements asserting a politics of difference, and the theorists following them argued that this difference-blind ideal was part of the problem. Identifying equality with equal treatment ignores deep material differences in social position, division of labor, socialized capacities, normalized standards and ways of living that continue to disadvantage members of historically excluded groups. Commitment to substantial equality thus requires attending to rather than ignoring such differences.
In the context of ethnic politics and resurgent nationalism, another version of a politics of difference gained currency in the 1990’s, which focused on differences of nationality, ethnicity and religion. It emphasizes the value of cultural distinctness to individuals, as against a liberal individualism for which culture is accidental to the self or something taken on voluntarily. Most modern societies contain multiple cultural groups some of which unjustly dominate the state or other important social institutions, thus inhibiting...
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