f implied worth that has fostered so much social grief ever since
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Scholars often think that academic ideas must remain at worst, harmless, and at best, mildly amusing or even instructive. But ideas do not reside in the ivory tower of our usual metaphor about academic irrelevance. We are, as Pascal said, a thinking reed, and ideas motivate human history. Where would Hider have been without racism, Jefferson without liberty? Blumenbach lived as a doistered professor all his life, but his ideas have reverberated in ways that he never could have anticipated, through our wars our social upheavals, our sufferings, and our hopes.
I therefore end by returning once more to the extraordinary coincidences of 1776 as Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while Blumenbach was publishing the first edition of his treatise in Latin. We should remember the words of the nineteenth-century British historian and moralist Lord Acton, on the power of ideas to propel history:
49. Geometer of Race
It was from America that... ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin folios, burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man.
FOR FURTHER READING
Daughters of Africa. Margaret Busby, editor. Pantheon, 1992. A comprehensive anthology of prose and poetry written by women of African descent, from ancient Egyptian love songs to the work of contemporary Americans. The collection features the work of Phillis Wheatley, the first black to publish a book of poetry in the United States.
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Article 50
MINORITY RIGHTS: ON THE IMPORTANCE OF LOCAL KNOWLEDGE
I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect.	 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Daniel A. Bell
Daniel A. Bell teaches political philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Communitarianism and Its Critics and the co-author of Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia.
a
 A SB small set of crucial human rights are valued, at least in theory, by all governments in the contemporary world. Rights against torture, murder, genocide, and slavery are simply not contested in the public rhetoric of the international arena. Of course, gross violations occur  off the record,  but in such cases the task of the human rights activist is to expose the gap between public allegiance to rights and the sad reality of ongoing abuse. There is not much point deliberating about practices that everyone already condemns.
But political thinkers and activists can and do take different sides on many pressing minority rights conflicts. Whether the dispute is over the choice of language in schools and parliaments, the decentralization of govermental powers to regions controlled by minorities, or the protection of traditional homelands, there do not seem to be any readily available general proposals for noncontroversial solutions.
In my view, it is important to refrain from moral and political judgments about disputes of this sort until one has acquired detailed knowl
edge of local political circumstances and relevant cultural outlooks. Unlike most contemporary philosophers and political theorists, I want to found judgments not on principles derived from reasoning about universal human needs and interests but rather on the actual dispositions and pressing concerns of a society in this or that historically contingent condition. This  culturally sensitive  approach, needless to say, requires a great deal of time and energy spent learning a society s culture, history, politics, and language, but there may be no other path to sound and effective political judgments. In this essay I propose four arguments in favor of a  culturally sensitive  approach to minority rights.
Identifying the Group
Political thinkers tend to define cultural groups in terms of language, race, or religion. Vernon Van Dyke, for example, defines an ethnic community as  a group of persons, predominantly of common descent, who think of themselves as collectively possessing a separate identity based on race or on shared characteristics, usually language or religion.  If the aim is to identify vulnerable minority groups deserving of special political rights, however, definitions in terms of shared language, race, or religion may have the effect of unjustifiably rewarding some groups and denying the legitimate aspirations of others.
From Dissent, Summer 1996, pp. 36-41.   1996 by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
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It is instructive to look at some examples from China. According to the Chinese government, there are over fifty-five ethnic minorities in the country, amounting to more than 8 percent of the population. These officially recognized minorities are labeled as such by virtue of being  non-Han,  meaning they do not use the Chinese script or bear all the physical characteristics of the Han Chinese. Leading experts on the subject such as June Teufel Dreyer (author of China's Forty Millions) and Colin Mackerras (author of China's Minorities) also operate with the government s definition of a minority group.
Contrary to popular belief, the Chinese government does recognize in principle that minority groups are entitled to special status in the Chinese political system. For example, the National People s Congress in 1984 passed  The Law on Regional Autonomy for Minority Nationalities  that allows for self-administration in Tibet and other  minority regions.  Self-administration in practice, needless to say, does not amount to much. But some tangible benefits are in fact granted to officially recognized minority groups. Nicholas Tapp notes that  provisions for representation of minority nationalities in state organs, general exemption from the most stringent applications of the regulations on birth control, and the lower marks commonly required of members of minority nationalities who apply for admission to universities or colleges add up to a policy of positive discrimination. 
The problem, however, is that under the current system benefits may accrue to individuals and groups not in need of special protection. Not surprisingly, the children of mixed marriages between Han and minority members usually choose minority rather than Han status. Whole counties and districts have applied for autonomous minority status on the basis of extremely slender evidence, such as the discovery of nonHan names in genealogies of several generations  depth.
^^t the same time, restricting the definition of minority groups to shared language or ethnicity can conceal vulnerable minority groups from political view and so play into the hands of conservative majorities intent on denying legitimate aspirations for self-administration. As Emily Honig explains in her book Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 18501980, the prejudice against Subei people is comparable to that experienced by African-Americans in the United States. Unlike African-Americans, however, the Subei are not physically dis-
50. Minority Rights
tinct from the rest of the Shanghainese population, almost all of whom are Han Chinese. Rather, Subei are defined as such by virtue of being individuals whose families were originally poverty-stricken refugees from Jiangsu province. The political result is that Subei people do not benefit from the official Chinese policy of positive discrimination and special political representation for minority groups.
Consider as well the development of a distinctive Taiwanese identity defined primarily by a common experience with free market institutions and (more recently) a relatively democratic form of government rather than by shared language and ethnicity. Any prospect for a fair and workable reunification with the People s Republic of China cannot ignore the fact that many Taiwanese now think of themselves as sufficiently distinct to seek some form of self-administration. But this is a non-issue if one accepts the official Chinese view that the Taiwanese are not a distinct cultural grouping. And defining minority groups in terms of language or ethnicity leads one to endorse the official view.1 Vulnerable minorities are more likely to be protected by policies sensitive to their actual history and self-understanding.
Trade-Offs
Much ink has been spilled debating whether or not civil and political rights need to be sacrificed in the interests of economic development. Proponents of  authoritarianism  primarily government officials in East and Southeast Asia  argue that if factional opposition threatens to slow down economic development or to plunge the country into civil strife, then tough measures can and should be taken to ensure political stability. Liberal thinkers in the West then counter by reaffirming the value of civil and political liberties for human beings in general or by pointing out that social scientific evidence simply does not support the claim that there is a causal connection between authoritarianism and economic success.	.
There is, however, a narrower claim being presented by  authoritarian  governments that cannot be dismissed so readily: namely, that particular rights may need to be curbed in particular contexts, for particular economic or political purposes, as a short-term measure, in order to secure a more important right or to secure that same right in the long-term. Xin Chunying, a lawyer working at the Human Rights Center of the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, notes that East Asian governments emphasize
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9. UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL PLURALISM
 the particularity of human rights protection and the priority determined by the specific conditions of each country. 2 Justifications for the temporary suspension of a particular right are put forward by government officials, but often attract significant local support.
Consider for example the recent political history of Singapore. Kevin Tan, a professor of constitutional law at the National University of Singapore, notes that Singapore in the 1960s was plagued by a  communalism which pitted Singapore s majority Chinese population against the minority Malays.  Communalism, and the attendant threat of racial riots, was dealt with by measures intended to construct an ethnically neutral national identity that might override par-ticularist commitments to ethnic groups. This included such policies as a public housing program designed to break up ethnic enclaves and compulsory education in the unifying language of English.
T^ese policies seem problematic: what do minority rights mean in practice if not the right to education in one s mother tongue and the right to live together as a community? Note, however, that the Singaporean government need not object to the principle of minority rights. If all it meant to say is that rights had to be curtailed in response to a pressing social problem (the need to curb racially motivated violence), then it seems besides the point to counter with the argument that rights are universal and cannot be restricted under any circumstances. Singaporean officials can concede that governments ought ideally to secure minority rights, adding that in this case these rights had to be sacrificed in order to secure more important rights to life and minimal subsistence.3
Nor would it be appropriate to respond with social scientific evidence based on generalizations. The specific argument that in the Singaporean context restricting minority rights was the most effective way of dealing with racial riots need not be (and may not be) a 