Multiculturalism

Origins

Many point to the 1965 preliminary report of the Canadian Royal Commission of Bilingualism and Biculturalism as the quintessential official source of multiculturalism as an idea. The commission's final report, which was published between 1967 and 1970, became the first publication that mentioned a multicultural society; thus coining the term. Multiculturalism has been primarily used to define the cultural diversity based on identity and distinctiveness that depended on one's native language and ethnicity. However, this was not necessarily a biologic definition; one person might have come from diverse genealogical lineage and still adopted a particular third ethnic identity or language through a certain identification process.

The initial understanding of multiculturalism mostly referred to the efforts of protecting minority or aboriginal cultures. Many democratic nation-states considered enabling their minority and aboriginal ethnic groups for political self-representation and granting them autonomy. Thus, the term gained popularity during the 1970s, especially in countries like Australia, which intended to follow Canada's lead. This trend was even apparent in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which recognized 16 autonomous ethnic republics in its 1976 constitution.

Many countries, too, pondered the idea of multiculturalism as a consequence of having or inviting large numbers of immigrants inside their boundaries. Therefore, multiculturalism obtained more interest, as the term also began to define a benevolent attitude of a state toward its immigrant populace, allowing them to keep and maintain their distinct ethnic and linguistic identities regardless of their status of residency and citizenship. The purpose here was to integrate new arrivals to the predominant culture and to provide a peaceful platform for coexistence of different cultural ethnic groups without perpetrating a form of oppression and marginalization. In different political and geographic regions, the objectives of multiculturalism based on immigration naturally varied between assimilation and accommodation. Countries such as the United States, Brazil, and Canada are examples of immigrant nations that each have their own distinct pains in the process.

Multiculturalism also found its place as a movement against racism and any type of social, political, and cultural division of a society based on racial segregation, that defended individual as well as group rights and demanded equality for all, in politics and law, regardless of race. Many prominent figures theorizing multiculturalism even considered race as an illusionary social construct that was used as a political instrument of domination, conceiving cultural difference and ethnic diversity as a sign of inferiority.

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