TAKING SELVES SERIOUSLY

In his inaugural address entitled Multiculturalism: The Politics of Recognition presented at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University in 1990, Charles Taylor argues that a person suffering from the lack of adequate recognition is an evil that can be ranked in the same echelons of harm as inequality, exploitation, and injustice.1 This is so, Taylor argues, because people's identities are established as a function of what can be negotiated in the public sphere.Thus, misrepresentation, or lack of representation, can produce distorted and negative identities that can result in extreme psychological suffering and faulty life plans-something feminists, and others, have been arguing for decades. 2 It is for that reason, that Taylor argues that due recognition "is not just a courtesy we owe people.It is a vital human need." 3 Having thus made the case that non-recognition or misrecognition, "can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone is a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being," 4 Taylor goes on to briefly review the potential clash that this "self fact" sets up between "the politics of equal dignity" (which is based on the idea that all humans are equally worthy of respect, regardless of gender, skin colour, sexual orientation, etc.) and the "politics of difference" which objects to the difference-blind fashion 5 that the former advocates, and argues instead that "we have to recognize and even foster particularity."6 This, in turn, leads to the notion that, since an individual's identity may be tied to her culture, cultures (rather than mere individuals) have legitimate claims to recognition.Taylor cites, as an example, the French-Canadian bid for recognition as a "distinct society" which has clashed with the "difference-blind" Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.Taylor also analyzes how the dynamics of self-recognition makes a serious claim on what counts as adequate educational material.That is, if the struggle for freedom and equality must pass through individual identity-formation, it seems to follow that concerted efforts ought to be made to include, for example, Afrocentric texts in mainly black schools 7 and authors other than dead white males in university humanities departments.Taylor, and others, goes to considerable length in analyzing the latter issue, i.e., the degree to which the established canon must be modified so as to accede to the demands of multiculturalists.1 Taylor 1994, p. 64. 2 Thus, Taylor says that people can suffer real damage "if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or contemptible picture of themselves."Ibid., p. 25.

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