What is multiculturalism?
This cannot be understood without understanding the history of “western civilization” and how they have treated all other groups in the past (and even now). Let’s just stick to America as an example of ‘western civilization’. There were so many different kinds of native peoples living in the place we now call USA for thousands of years.
But then the Europeans came: Spaniards, English, French… and claimed all that land as their own. And even among the Europeans, it was the British Puritans who became the most dominant. So then just an one example, French language was suppressed in Louisiana, which had been a French colony for years. Italians, Irish, Polish, Jews were looked upon as dirt, cheap labor and had to be assimilated.
And these Europeans did want to join the mainstream, plus their skin color matched the other whites’, so quickly you had the whites versus blacks and reds. Reds were put into reservations, and blacks were made subhuman. So then all you were left with was one culture… the white one.
Which actually was Anglo-American Christian culture.
But now the Blacks and Native Americans and also the Asian Americans and Hispanics are asserting their voices, they are proud of their own culture, and they do not want to be a part of the mainstream culture. And when so many minorities begin to assert themselves, the mainstream feels threatened, they feel their “culture” is getting “eroded.”
Actually, they have been eroding all other cultures and even been living off other cultures all the while. For example, the American constitution owes a lot to Native American political ideas. Western science and math as we now know it with the decimal system owes a lot to Arabic and Indian influences. The list is endless…
But to come back to multiculturalism: many people think that once you know about the foods and music and language and dress of other cultures, then you are culturally aware, that is multiculturalism. But it is only a “tourist’s perspective” of multiculturalism.
bell hooks criticizes it saying that:
The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.
Instead of using multiculturalism as the spice added to liven up the mainstream culture, Hade calls for a critique of the same. I quote these lines extensively as I believe it defines multiculturalism from a very important perspective:
Multiculturalism as a social movement has three aspects. First, multiculturalism is a systematic critique of the ideology of westernness. This means we challenge the domination of assumptions held by our western culture. Second, multiculturalism is also the challenge of living with each other in a world of difference.
Multiculturalism means searching or ways to affirm and celebrate difference, while also seeking ways to cooperate and collaborate across different groups of people.
Third, multiculturalism is a reform movement based upon equity and justice. Goods and privileges are concentrated with white, wealthy males; they are nit distributed justly across race, class, and gender. Multiculturalism is about social change and social justice. (p. 240) [Hade, Daniel D. (1997). Reading Multiculturally. In V. Harris (ed) Using Multiethnic Literature in the K-8 Classroom. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon.]
Thus, multiculturalism becomes an important framework for critiquing the dominant white culture’s assumptions and ideology. Secondly, negation of other cultures is not to be countered with assimilative ideas or the liberal white perspective, rather difference is to be celebrated and affirmed.
In other words, the “Other” is not to be treated as the same, or to be discriminated against because of otherness.