Now underlying the demand is a principle of universal
equality. The politics of difference is full of denunciations of
discrimination and refusals of second-class citizenship. This
gives the principle of universal equality a point of entry
within the politics of dignity. But once inside, as it were, its
demands are hard to assimilate to that politics. For it asks
that we give acknowledgment and status to something that
is not universally shared. Or, otherwise put, we give due acknowledgment
only to what is universally present—everyone
has an identity—through recognizing what is peculiar to
each. The universal demand powers an acknowledgment of
specificity.
The politics of difference grows organically out of the politics
of universal dignity through one of those shifts with
which we are long familiar, where a new understanding of
the human social condition imparts a radically new meaning
to an old principle. Just as a view of human beings as conditioned
by their socioeconomic plight changed the understanding
of second-class citizenship, so that this category
came to include, for example, people in inherited poverty
traps, so here the understanding of identity as formed in interchange,
and as possibly so malformed, introduces a new
form of second-class status into our purview. As in the present
case, the socioeconomic redefinition justified social programs
that were highly controversial. For those who had
not gone along with this changed definition of equal status,
the various redistributive programs and special opportunities
offered to certain populations seemed a form of undue
favoritism.
Similar conflicts arise today around the politics of difference.
Where the politics of universal dignity fought for forms
of nondiscrimination that were quite “blind” to the ways in
which citizens differ, the politics of difference often redefines
nondiscrimination as requiring that we make these distinctions
the basis of differential treatment. So members of
aboriginal bands will get certain rights and powers not en-