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Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is a political and social movement that acknowledges and supports cultural diversity within a society. The discourse of multiculturalism has become central to public debates around education, immigration, national identity, and democracy. Multiculturalism, as a social movement, has been promoted as a means for undoing social oppressions associated with race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Proponents of multiculturalism hail it as the respect and celebration of the cultural diversity, and opponents often malign it as an ideology that is relativist and thus damaging to morals, truth, and national identity. Empirically, it is a virtual social fact that in once predominantly white nations, daily life had become actually, if not always agreeably, multicultural by the 1990s in the sense that peoples once marginalized have risen to positions of power in state and corporate life.

Beginnings

Multiculturalism first became an issue in large immigrant-based nations, most notably in Australia, Canada, and the United States. Canada was the first country to adopt an official “multicultural policy” in 1971. The Canadian policy was a reflection of the growing recognition of the bilingual and bicultural (Franco and Anglo) nature of the country but was also a response to growing immigration into all the Canadian regions. Canada could no longer assume that it had one distinct national culture. Australia changed and dismantled its policy of white-only immigration following World War II and officially ended it in 1973. The United States, known for the assimilationist ideal of the “melting pot,” had the notion challenged by the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Debates over multiculturalism have often focused on education in the United States (see Bloom 1988). From these beginnings, the multiculturalism debate spread quite quickly and prominently into primary and secondary education with the goal of reorganizing education for the benefit of students from minority groups. Since then, multiculturalism has been central in debates on culture, identity politics, and cosmopolitanism that are apparent in all labor-dependent, globally economic nations in the world.

In particular, multiculturalism has been associated and concurrent with the rise of globalization. Since, as far back as the late 1960s, the emergent global era has become one of unparalleled flows of people and their cultures, both through physical migration and immigration and the dissemination of information through the Internet and mobile communication technologies. Information about and engagement with other cultures seems to be increasing along an irreversible line.

Culture

Culture, by traditional definition, is a local or regional phenomenon, expressing a singularity that does not sit easily with the prefix multi, which designates an ideal. Cultures have always been in contact with one another. In fact, it is hard to imagine any kind of society or culture that is or has ever been completely homogenous. Multiculturalism, some have argued, is thus less a reaction to increased cultural and ethnic diversity than a new form of political imaginary of cultural identity. Seyla Benhabib argues that the various popular modes of characterizing multiculturalism, whether it is citizenship or cultural rights, taken together “signal a new political imaginary that propels cultural identity issues in the broadest sense to the forefront of political discourse” (2002, viii).

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