The demand for "recognition" of hitherto oppressed minority groups began to supplant the more traditional claims for a redistribution of wealth in society. Charles Taylor delineated the political effect of this model in his influential essay "The Politics of Recognition," where he claimed that "our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves."

DEFINE: Articulates Taylor's politics of recognition concept, where misrecognition by society damages individual identity.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 153