Multiculturalism Policy and Practice: Divide and rule continues
By Sheila Wilmot
When you are black-skinned, it often matters little if the person refusing to rent to you is Polish-, Anglo-, or Italian-Canadian. The result is the same. And multiculturalism, as we presently know it, has no answers to these or other problems such as the confrontation between the police forces in urban areas like Toronto and Montréal and the African-Canadian communities that live there. - M Nourbese Phillips
Multiculturalism policy and practice have been a “highly problematic and contradictory”(Tania Das Gupta) tool that, in comparison with other Western countries, is uniquely applied in Canada. As a term, it is best when used to describe the population mix in Canada, “which is characterized by a heterogenous ethnic composition, the racial complexity of which has multiplied as a result of increased immigration from non-European source countries since the 1970s” (Peter S Li). In fact, by 1987, 70% of immigrants had such origins.
The official state policy was a result of three factors, more or less in the following order of significance: the need to forge a new national identity in a fragmented, geographically dispersed nation-state; the ruling-class challenge of dealing with Quebec nationalism; and the need to contain anti-racist struggles by addressing the impact of increasing migration of non-white people.
The policy has resulted in some practical benefits and relief. For example, there is a somewhat better social climate of “tolerance” of people of colour in Canada than in some other Western nations. In contrast to Canada, France has a determined universalist, secularist approach to civic life that flies in the face of often intense racism from a far right much more significant in size than Canada’s. One could also speculate that this greater white Canadian “tolerance” of people of colour has geographic and demographic roots as well. There is no third world country bordering Canada so the state can look much friendlier in its general treatment of (for example) Mexican visitors and migrants as it quietly supports the US doing its dirty work. And, demographically, Canada-wide migrants of colour still remain a relatively small percentage and a relatively small population, in contrast with geographically smaller, more populated western European nations.
As well, although on the decline, some amounts of funding have been available here to some immigrants with the right papers for official language training. By and large, however, the policy has had a significant negative impact on organizing around anti-racist demands by converting racism into race relations. This is not an accident; on the contrary, it fits into an overall nation-state policy of putting white Canada first, controlling non-white people and making sure that some of the insiders (immigrants and other people of colour) maintain their outsider status.
This new shift in racism-based social control was developed in the 1970s, at a time when the post-war boom was forgotten in the wake of an economic crisis that created a need for lower and lower waged workers, which meant more migrants of colour. Although opposed by the right and not originally intended to have only this function, Canadian multicultural social policy has ended up supporting neo-liberal political-economic policy in propelling the rightward direction of our society in the last few decades. The fragmenting and marginalizing consequences of multicultural policy delivery fit well with the rolling back of social programs and with “an aggressive market-oriented economic doctrine and highly individualistic social philosophy” (Kenan Malik).
The Quebecois nationalism that started to flourish in the early ‘60s — which, at the time, had both moderate and militantly radical forms — was an important social force in the 1971 passing of the Multiculturalism Act: “the adoption of official bilingualism in 1969 and then multiculturalism in 1971 was a calculated move aimed at compromising the demands of French Canadians and the aspirations of those not of British or French origin…[as]…it promoted an ideological claim of cultural choice for all Canadians to counteract the demand of special status underlining Quebec’s separatist sentiments” (Li).
Multiculturalism therefore became the ideological glue in the recent history of the construction of the Canadian capitalist nation-state as it made the necessary move from a white settler colony to a liberal democracy.
Often multiculturalism is expressed in the form of a kind of pluralism that says individuals can make “personal cultural choices” to keep their “personal cultural life,” including language, but only in the private sphere because the publicly funded and supported life is to be “Canadian” and the languages that go along with this are only English or French. The fact that most of us considered to be of real Anglo-Saxon British or French origin are white, and non-French or non-Anglos are in the majority — people of colour — disappears as we now all apparently have these individual cultural options from which to choose.
And so the eradication of racism and the fight for true equality disappear into the void of this narrow and opportunistic idea of culture that shifts between two contradictory poles. On the one hand, people of colour are subjected to frozen-in-time ideas of tradition and culture that range from romantic to dangerous: all Aboriginal people know how to survive in the bush and are very spiritual; most Black men are Jamaican and have a pre-disposition to crime and pursuing white woman; and all Arabs are suspects or sympathizers of terrorism. At the other pole is an anti-essentialist notion that transforms particular cultural practices for everyone’s entertainment and commodification. For example, white folks strip dreadlocks of political significance by wearing them, and sweat lodges become another deep experience for non-Aboriginals at expensive weekend retreats.
Instead of dealing with racism, multiculturalism therefore explains differences in behaviour and attitudes to try to get us all to adapt to and then celebrate our differences through potlucks and parades. This adaptation is deemed necessary because it is supposedly the differences rather than institutionalized inequality that create conflict. While non-white people become hyper-ethnicized, we white folks remain the de-ethnicized models of Canadian-ness. Just how “different” non-white people are is “measured or constructed in terms of distance from civilizing European cultures” (Himani Bannerji). It “has also produced a peculiar brand of ‘Canadian racism’ described by many as ‘polite,’ ‘subtle,’ ‘systemic,’ and even ‘democratic’” (Das Gupta).What this also means is that people of colour are supposed to adapt to racism and white people are apparently removed of our responsibility for it.
The rising demands of people of colour, which the state so wished to compromise on, to contain and control through multicultural policy, are a fundamental threat to elites. Of particular concern have been those struggles of immigrant women of colour. Who would do all those under-paid, at times unsafe, nanny jobs if migrant women workers won rights to permanent residency and so had a few more options in their work conditions as well as more freedom to further organize for higher wages and better jobs? Instead, the state believes, it’s better to put in place some reforms such as community-specific social programs. The social control goal has been met with the support of some segments of the target communities. Criticisms of the limited symbolic nature came from the left and Aboriginal people generally saw multicultural policy as doing nothing to advance their struggle for self-determination, but some leaders of particular communities of colour (depending upon their political and/or class position) got the official state recognition that they sought and so got behind the program.
Even while it has served the state well, nonetheless the hostility of the elites and dominant society toward multicultural policy started in the 1980s with the start of large-scale contraction in manufacturing industries, deregulation, erosion of the welfare state and the negotiation of “free” trade agreements. Due to the tight link between multiculturalism and immigration, socially and economically, white hostility to the former meant an equal hostility to non-white migration from the South. Yet, at the same time, the federal government started to link its multicultural policy with business development. While both Tories and Liberals have done this now, it was Brian Mulroney who initiated the “Multiculturalism Means Business” conference in 1986. So we see once again how the state must juggle increasing racist contradictions: on one hand, through middle- and upper-class immigrants, “we, as a nation need to grasp the opportunity afforded to us by our multicultural identity, to cement our prosperity” (Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Christina Gabriel). On the other hand, even as more workers are needed to do increasingly precarious, lower-waged jobs, the ruling class blames those same migrants for somehow stealing “our” higher wage jobs that are being lost in the wake of neo-liberalism.
In 1993 the whole multicultural bureaucracy was abruptly submerged into the Heritage Department and by 1996, the need for intense state multicultural policy promotion and funding was at an end because it had already become an integral feature of “our” national identity. Neo-liberalism’s ongoing need for deeper and deeper social program cuts dovetailed with this to produce the “Strategic Evaluation of Multicultural Programs.” In 1997, the federal Liberals put forward a new program with three goals: “identity, participation and justice.” The ideological piece of the neo-liberal shift had now been further developed: your identify is your private matter, you must volunteer to meet any needs that result from that and, as a result, you will reach another symbolic place of social justice. This shift eventually resulted in a move from the promotion of identity labels (for example, South Asian-, Caribbean-, et cetera, Canadians) to the language of “special interest groups” competing for shrinking pots of funds. Along with this shift came what Bannerji calls an “ethnicization of politics, shifting (the) focus from unemployment due to high profit margins, or flight of capital, to “problems” presented by immigrants’ own culture and tradition.” To address the “cultural conflicts” that arise from such “problems,” diversity workshops now pepper the landscape of both nonprofit and corporate organizations. At best, white folks are signed up for such workshops at the first whiff of a complaint of racism, often coded and diluted by white managers as “inappropriate behaviour.”
One on-the-ground economic impact of all this for immigrants of colour can be a community-based isolation. As multiculturalism has created a mask for “community” as all things traditional and good, class distinctions within various communities are apparently erased. For example, non-white elites of a particular language group and/or country of origin, perhaps marginalized by racism within capitalism, nonetheless have the means to set up their own industries and service-based businesses. One such business becoming more common to workers generally, as a result of neo-liberal attacks on workers’ job security, wages and conditions, is the “temporary agency,” which supplies workers on a short-term basis to companies who then save money and time on hiring employees directly. Working-class immigrants excluded by racism and sexism from a chance at getting the higher waged, more secure jobs that still exist in the labour market as a whole — an exclusion often coded as “lack of Canadian experience” — and/or without English or French language skills often end up in the most underpaid, insecure and unsafe types of employment. The Workers Action Centre in Toronto works with many Sri Lankan-Canadian women working for Sri Lankan-Canadian temp agency employers. Reporting on this kind of phenomenon in Los Angeles, Hoon Lee suggests that “the hidden side of the Korean success story was that it relied in large part on the exploitation of cheap Korean immigrant labor.”
And so now we have a climate in this democratic, diverse society of “ours” in which a child of colour yelling “trick or treat” too loudly for a white neighbour’s taste can be confidently screamed back at to be quiet because he’s “acting like a terrorist.” We have increasing deportations of refugee claimants to dangerous political climates in their countries of origin as well as limitations on who can legitimately make a refugee claim depending on how they managed, against all odds, to get themselves to our kind and gentle nation. We are living in a climate of veritable hysteria about “our” safety and security, about protecting “ourselves” from dark, sinister threats. Despite initial state attempts to stem a potential tide of organizing by managing the intensified, on-the-street, everyday racism after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, the centuries of white rule in Canada have laid a foundation so firm that it can only be removed with serious social transformation.
