Can we formulate a Canadian national identity in this time without invoking, at least once, the idea of multiculturalism? And what of this idea, the vicissitudes of behavior and policy it has effected over the last decades? The Canadian Multicultural Act (or rather the group of rather vague and limpid policies that define it) was only passed in 1985, a year after I was born, and emerged into a social climate that can be regarded as utterly alien to the post 9/11 world we now occupy. We purport to be a society with a telos that is identifiable to equality, and yet we are subjected daily to a pervasive and systemic racism, sexism and a violent appropriation of the Other. And furthermore, is ‘equality’ really coincident with an ethical treatment of the other? That might sound blasphemous to say, but it is the thought that has been consuming me in the last weeks. Policies of multiculturalism may have unintended and degenerative effects, springing from our fundamental ideas of self and other, and the moral relation between them. The catastrophic surges of racial violence and outright hatred – as we observed and continue to observe in Gaza, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Pakistan, Sudan, Congo, and countless other countries – and also the conversely cool and rationalized exterminations might stem directly from our attitudes towards the idea of a utopian, multicultural society and its immediate implications.
Too often multiculturalism has been used as a ‘safe-word’, to be brought out and brandished like an oft-polished truncheon at the first hint of racist accusation and polemic. “Look!” we can say, “Look at all the policies, mandates, social institutions and plain money we have put forward to ensure and respect the preservation of ethnicity. Look at how well we have functioned on the world stage as a model of race-relations and equality politics, etc…” And yet, as anyone unafraid to look truth in the eye will know, racism is far from being history. In fact, half of the problem is that most people deny that racism is as widespread, systemic and relevant as it actually is. Multiculturalism (and this is a critique that many others have made before me) has devolved into a glamorization of the other, a word that can be paraded around as justification for culturally specific bazaars, festivals, parades, and other shallow interpretations of ‘national pride’. Meanwhile, the real problems of race are swept under the policy-carpet: wage discrepancies, educational impediments, accessibility problems, territorial concessions and so on. But this is all old hat. We need a much more incisive look at this term ‘multiculturalism’, and everything – ethically and socio-economically – that it entails.
As Francis Mulhern states in his article, ‘Culture and Society, Then and Now’ (New Left Review No: 55), “The idea of multiculturalism was always questionable as a line of solution to the crisis that prompted its adoption, that of racism and the struggles against it. Culture is an anodyne representation of race, which is a historically constituted relation of organized inequality, domination and subordination. To speak blandly of a plurality of cultures in coexistence is to obscure the historic dominance of one of them, that of Anglo-Britain, and an array of continuing social effects that are not mainly ‘cultural’. Yet in the cultural multiplex as which liberal discourse pictures the UK’s population, the leading theme as been ‘diversity’, as though that were warrant of equality, and as though some kinds of diversity were not the effects of a long-standing inequality. (Likewise, social exclusion is now deplored as an obvious evil, as though the goal of full inclusion in neo-liberal Britain were the outer limit of social aspiration for all of us, and as though ‘exclusion’ itself were not in truth a structural variety of its benign other, inclusion.) The promotion of culture as a defining social relation has tended to obscure the articulations of ethnic and class formation, which differ crucially from one part of the multicultural landscape to another. The resulting patterns of relative success or failure, adjustment or deadlock, inter-ethnic convergence or particularist assertion, may have at least as much to do with generic class situations or with historic changes in the division of labor as with the specificities of cultural inheritance.
This shortcoming is in part that of liberalism generally: once capitalist social relations are excused fundamental questioning, progress can only take the form of improved life-chances for selected individuals. But in this context individuals are specified as members of communities, and here the idea of culture plays its own contradictory part in the working out of multiculturalism. The idea, as I began by saying, valorizes difference at the expense of inter-cultural commonalities. Whatever the biographical reality (individual or collective) of our formation, what counts as culture is what distinguishes us from others with whom in reality we may share as much if not more. The kind of difference that counts is custom: confirmed, received difference. It is for this reason that the multiculturalist appeal to diversity has the paradoxical effect of promoting cultural stereotypes even as it deplores their negative effects. For the commercial sector of the cultural multiplex there is an irresistible logic in this: niche markets in authenticities are potentially beyond counting, and without prejudice to the emerging market of hybridities, which has yet greater potential. The junk-word ‘vibrant’, without which no description of the metropolitan multiplex sounds quite right, belongs to the vocabulary of tourism and, even on the lips of the well meaning, degrades the multiculturalist ideal of a shared home to a tainted image of exoticism for all.”
Well and good, but let us refine the problem down to its bare essentials. What matters is our ethical treatment of people and groups who are, in some way, different. And this is the primary word: difference. How do we treat those whose conceptions and structures of life diverge from our own? First of all we must recognize that a person brought up with vastly different cosmological ideas (religiously and secularly speaking), different methods of seeing, analyzing and reacting to the world, will have a fundamentally different nature from our own. This might sound obvious but is, in my experience, the hardest thing to fully realize. We speak of human nature as if it were a singular, monolithic thing. We easily attest to it certain qualities that we assume hold fast to everyone the world over. But if we accept that culture creates wildly variant natures, then how can we in good faith assert our homogeneous claims to identity? Here some of the humanists will speak up and lay claim to a primal human identity of sorts, one that remains consistent at its core (whatever that is) but manifests its outer regalia in heterogeneous fashions reflecting the environment. But the fundamental flaw in this argument is too easily overlooked: how can one truly speak for the other without appropriating their identity? Is not my fundamental experience of the world as a person of brown skin different from your fundamental experience of the world as a person of white skin? And if so, how can you assume to speak for my experience (and I to yours)? Our desires and their trajectories might be coincident (we might both be striving for a more equitable society; we might both crave for chocolate ice-cream), but it is a fallacy to confuse the desire with the person.
Luce Irigaray, operating in feminist discourse, suggests the same thing: human nature must at least be two. Easier said than done. Most of our progressive slogans and politics revolves around the theme of ‘unity’. Unity with Palestine; Unity with the oppressed laborer; Unity with the LGBT community; Unity with women facing violence, and so on. But what do we mean when we evoke this mythical ‘unity’. What we want to mean is that we are both fighting for the same thing, what we want to mean is ‘solidarity’. But do we also mean that we are one and the same, that in working towards a shared goal we in effect become the people we support?
Most of you have seen the Canadian Center for Diversity PSA that’s running on TV that goes along the lines of “I am a woman when… I am a Jew when… I am an immigrant when…” If not, here it is.
While I am sure that it was made with admirable aims, I found it to be quite problematic. Are you really a woman when you’re confronting inequality? Are you really a person with special needs when you’re realizing how inaccessible this world is? Of course I understand the intent of “putting yourself in another’s shoes”, but that is exactly the idea that I find lacking. Because you can never put yourself in another’s shoes. All you can do is recognize how hard those shoes must be to walk in and consciously align yourself in thought and action to overcoming the draconian policies and ideations that mandated that hardship. Stark has a good post about this ad over on the Shameless blog as well.
Appropriating identity is unethical. By assuming the space of a different person while purporting to support them all you are doing is negating that difference and forgetting your own privilege. We must learn to treat the Other as other, which is to say not with fear and distrust or even with the other extreme of fetishization or exoticization, but with the simple recognition of fundamental difference.
So, to bring this discussion back on topic: multiculturalism. What Mulhern states is true – multiculturalism as an ideational tool for fighting racism, despite the immense gains it has had on raising public consciousness about the issue, seems to be at the end of its rope. It teeters between the two extremes of radical alienation and an equally radical neutering of difference. Levinas (pardon my compulsive invocation of philosophers) in his Infinity and Totality, talks about the gulf between I and You, and likens it to our ideas of infinity. ‘Infinity’ as a signifier can only be a shadow of what it signifies; we can speak of it, but we cannot in reality approach its truth. In the same way I can speak of You, I can see You, recognize You, talk to You, feel You, even love You, but all of these are mere shadows to the unapproachable reality of You – your infinity of being. It is perhaps with the same notions that we should approach issues of ethnicity, class and gender – by recognizing that no matter what our shared intentions might be, we cannot approach the infinite reality of each other. Morality only owes its allegiance to the truth, and it is on this truth that we must begin to construct it.
