I am very grateful to Yeungnam University Press for its decision to publish a Korean- language edition of Multicultiphobia. This book discusses the Canadian experience with multiculturalism and diversity, which is quite different from the Korean experience. The most obvious point of contrast is that over 20 per cent of those who live in Canada are foreign-born. According to government projections, by 2031 over 70 per cent of the population of our two largest cities, Toronto and Vancouver, will be comprised of immigrants and their Canadian-born children.
While the Canadian experience is unusual, Multicultiphobia focusses on an aspect of that experience that is universal: can a society undergoing profound change talk about the fears and hopes sparked by that change? Can the dialogue be respectful and productive? Or is dialogue on such important matters fated to collapse into “duelling monologues,” fuelled by anger and fear, marred by misinformation?
As you read this book, you will see that there are two sets of questions that Canadians have not done a particularly good job of discussing. First: When a society accepts immigrants, what responsibilities does it take on? Is adaptation a one-sided thing, in which immigrants must remake themselves in almost all dimensions of their life? Or is it a two-way street, in which both immigrants and the host society change in various ways? What responsibilities does the host society take on, in particular, towards the children of immigrants, who did not make a decision to migrate, but who are often the ones who bear the brunt of the host society’s fear and hostility? Second: What is our “national identity”? Who are we? Who do we wish to be? In this age of global mobility, both sets of questions are universally important.
To the second type of question, there is a very simple traditional answer: Canadians, or Koreans, or Germans, or whoever, are people who “look like us, cook like us, speak our language with the same accent we do,” and so on. Understanding national identity this way is perfectly natural. But is it the best way of thinking of national identity in today’s world?
Among other problems, the traditional answer runs the risk of confusing the important and the trivial. Multicultiphobia provides numerous examples of this confusion. When a Calgary newspaper reported, for example, that a seven-year-old child had been rebuked at school for eating “in the traditional Filipino manner,” with fork and spoon rather than knife and fork, it received an angry letter from a reader who declared that “ordinary Canadians are sick and tired of immigrants wanting us to give up our culture for theirs.” It is hard to believe that anyone could view this child’s innocent action as a “threat” to our culture, but when it comes to diversity, some people can get upset about almost anything. If we reject this absurdity, and don’t expect immigrants to mimic every last detail of our behavior, we need to ask: just what is really important to us? In what ways do we expect immigrants to adapt to our ways?
To reflect on this, it may help to come at the question “Who are we?” from a different angle. A fruitful question may be how best to fill in the following statement: “When people around the world think of [Canadians, or Koreans, or whomever], I want them to think of people who….” It makes little sense to fill in the blank on the basis of traditional understandings of national identity. To do so, in the Korean case, would leave one with a sentence such as “When people around the world think of Koreans, I want them to think of people who look the way most Koreans look.” Even an ardent defender of a narrow conception of nationality would have to admit that this is not a very inspiring aspiration. So what might be reasonable ways to fill in the sentence? One might answer in terms of certain human qualities —virtues, one might say— rooted in the nation’s current-day culture, yet to which anyone might aspire. That is, in this approach national identity becomes a set of qualities that anyone who comes to live in our countries might embrace, rather than a status from which they are forever excluded.
Approaching the question of national identity in this way inevitably brings us to two questions: What are the core values of our society? What do we want them to be? Both questions are vital: there is no reason for any society passively to endorse all values it has inherited from previous generations, and so reflection on what we want our core values to be is as important as identifying what they currently are. A society that can discuss this issue, and come to some consensus concerning its core values, can then afford to relax on matters unrelated to those core values. It will then discover that social diversity can be a rich experience: despite ongoing controversies in my country concerning multiculturalism and immigration policies, there are few Canadians who would want to return to an age when our urban populations were largely “monochrome.”
Some critics of multiculturalism, however, say that to “relax” is precisely what we must not do. They believe that a nation can only survive with a unified culture, and this must be protected. I believe, in fact, that this is true, but it is not true in the way that critics of multiculturalism assume. Multicultiphobia critiques the vision of cultures as “containers” for distinct groups of people, each person fitting inside one container or another. In this mistaken vision, a multicultural society cannot flourish, because it is not a true human community, but a set of isolated containers. In truth, no culture can fully “contain” a person, because each us inhabits multiple cultures. I am shaped by a culture by virtue of my nationality. But I am also shaped by a different culture on the basis of my religious beliefs, another culture because of my gender, and yet another by virtue of my social class. To grasp that each of us represents an “intersection” of several cultural influences, Multicultiphobia argues, helps us envision solutions to many of the issues that trouble multiculturalism’s critics.
From this perspective, a thriving nation does not require a unified culture that dictates how each person should eat, dress, worship, and so on. Rather, the unified culture we need is an overarching set of accepted beliefs and practices, an enveloping political culture that encourages respect for democracy, for social dialogue, and for one’s fellow citizens. Such an overarching culture is more than enough to bind a nation together, while allowing for a rich diversity of group cultures within the nation.
That, at least, is the core belief that shapes Multicultiphobia. I do not assume that those who oppose multiculturalism are foolish, even if some of their specific criticisms are mistaken. But I do believe that answers can be found to their legitimate concerns, answers that do not require the rejection of multicultural openness. Their concerns can be met without a retreat into a narrow conception of nationality. Such a conception causes much suffering to those excluded from the narrow definition and, in the long run, provides no true benefits to those included.