It is argued that the full inclusion of individuals into national life hinges critically on their integration into, and identification with, the dominant orientation of the larger community-which means their integration into a unified world of intersubjectivity. The analysis relies on Alfred Schutz’s discussion of meaning and the social relationships between contemporaries, emphasizing his ideas of the stock-of-knowledge-at-hand, typifications, and anonymity. A case is made here for cultural integration from the standpoint of social phenomenology, which lends itself well to the macrolevel interpretation of interpersonal life and social situations as products of the larger structural context. Race becomes an ontological condition, and a condition of perpetual difference, thus functioning as a cultural prison for minority persons, barring their absorption into the national mainstream. Racial status has been ever more predominantly construed as a binary (white/nonwhite) attribution, which in turn essentializes it and imparts to it a quasi-metaphysical character.
The main focus here is on groups marginalized on the basis of racial status. This stems from the perception of its deleterious effects on minority populations, which is linked to the multiculturalist and postmodernist movements of the 1990s, and their corollary politics of difference, or identity politics. The integration of cultural systems has gained increasing scholarly and popular attention, mostly negative, in recent decades.
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