Does ‘Super-Diversity’ Address Majority Anxieties?

This article focuses on the question: “Does ‘super-diversity’ have a language to address anxieties of the majority community?” I will argue that ‘super-diversity’ scholars mostly lack such a language as they tend to present migrants as different from the majority community, resulting in a society that becomes increasingly diverse, even ‘super-diverse’. The alleged failings of ‘multiculturalists’ – that they essentialize differences among groups - make actually more sense in the case of super-diversity scholars. The latter emphasizing that inhabitants of super-diverse neighborhoods will get used to these differences (“the normalcy of diversity”), assuming these differences to be stable over time. As I will argue, empirically speaking, this is not necessarily what is happening in Western countries: whether people are becoming more accepting of differences over time, depends on their political appreciation of these differences. The real change is not the majority getting used to these differences but that those differences themselves change over time, because minorities become part of the mainstream.