Contribution to Book
Shy Elitism: A New Keyword in Critical Multiculturalism Studies
Citizenship and Belonging in France and North America Multicultural Perspectives on Political, Cultural and Artistic Representations of Immigration
(2020)
Abstract
Do you have anything to declare? Many of the formal questions posed to migrants and travellers have become recognisable, accessible and banal. Nothing but my genius. Celebrated responses, which demonstrate the wit, flair and imagination of global souls, have passed into folklore. You are a welcome reprieve from the serious business of integration. Immigrants may generate smiles when they help their new neighbours demonstrate their tolerance and commitment to diversity targets. You are placed under scrutiny as a potentially serious threat to the order of things. They raise eyebrows when they do not seem to display enough deference to the established laws, representatives and customs of their “host society”.
The historian of immigration who accesses the archives of departments of Canadian Heritage, Race Relations, Human Rights, Labour, Multiculturalism and the Status of Women finds material from politicians, policy analysts, social scientists and journalists that consider it self-evident that state intervention can solve, and is already solving, the problem of diversity.[i] She scours plans to place stricter limits on immigration, activities designed to promote intercultural exchange, and initiatives developed to celebrate the success of individuals from racialized and marginalized groups. In a country considered “liberal society at its best,”[ii] it is difficult to overstate the amount of material that has been generated to manage anxieties surrounding the size and quality of immigrants and refugees admitted into the country, and how discussions about immigration are invariably connected to multiculturalism, anti-racism and campaigns against religious discrimination.[iii]If the early period of state-sanctioned multiculturalism in Canada in the 1970s focused on addressing cultural and linguistic barriers to inclusion, the institutionalization of multiculturalism in the 1980s involved the grafting of race relations and employment equity onto multicultural departments and agencies. One thus finds social scientists asserting that “the absence of a divisiveimmigration debate in Canada avoids racial polarization … enabling Canada to address its race problems in time to prevent serious social marginalisation of racial minority groups” in 1988.[iv] By 2002, lead writers at The Globe and Mail, which advertises itself as the most authoritative news source in Canada, simply used the terms “visible minorities,” “ethnic minorities” and “immigrants” interchangeably.[v]
What is to be done in a context in which all the immigrants are presumed to be visible minorities, and all the visible minorities are presumed to be immigrants (or, like immigrants, thought to be alienated in “a profoundly psychic sense” from the Canadian nation[vi])? ...
[i] Richard Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (University of Toronto Press, 2000), 26.
[ii] Slavoj Žižek. Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours.
(London: Penguin, 2016), 33.
[iii] Will Kymlicka, The Three Lives of Multiculturalism in S. Guo and L. Wong (eds) Revisiting Multiculturalism in Canada (SensePublishers, Rotterdam, 2015). Also seeYasmeen Abu-Laban and Christina Gabriel. Selling Diversity: Immigration, Multiculturalism, Employment Equity, and Globalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).
[iv]Jeffrey Reitz, “The Institutional Structure of Immigration as a Determinant of Inter-Racial Competition: A Comparison of Britain and Canada,” International Migration Review 22. 1 (1988): 141. Emphasis added.
[v]“The Conservatives are polling visible minorities on same-sex marriage … the Tories see the same-sex message as a wedge they can drive between the Liberals and immigrant Canadians … appealing to the socially conservative attitudes of new arrivals” in “the ethnic press.” John Ibbitson, “Same-sex will smite Harper,” Globe and Mail Friday. February 18, 2005, A4. Emphasis added. Also see Daniel McNeil, Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs (London: Routledge, 2010), 69.
[vi] Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Frontiers: Selected Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture, 1984-1992
(Stratford, Ont.: Mercury Press, 1992), 29.
Keywords
- Shy Elitism,
- Multiculturalism,
- Immigration
Disciplines
Publication Date
2020
Editor
Ramona Mielusel and Simona Pruteanu
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Citation Information
Daniel McNeil. "Shy Elitism: A New Keyword in Critical Multiculturalism Studies" Citizenship and Belonging in France and North America Multicultural Perspectives on Political, Cultural and Artistic Representations of Immigration (2020) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/danielmcneil/37/