Is Multiculturalism dead?

Though it was a good time to publish the first-ever post on this blog when we are having a national debate in the Australian media on whether ‘multiculturalism is dead’.

A great news topic since apparently both Britain and Germany have officially decided to bury multiculturalism.

That’s hilarious. Specially as this is what I know of multiculturalism in Britain: At the age of five, I had the misfortune of going to a primary school in East London where I learnt I wasn’t a human being but a colour – black.

The first words I understood of the English language were “Blackie”, “Nigger” and “Paki”. So I had a very multicultural understanding of how much I was hated in terms that were both multilingual (‘Nigger’ derived from ‘Negro’ is ‘black’ in another language) and multi-ethnic (‘Paki’ was short for ‘Pakistani’. Apparently they didn’t have a derogatory word for Sri Lankans back then).

I was five.

It took me years, actually decades, to understand that I was hated not because of anything I had done to the English but because my skin had melanin (an in-built sun-block for people living in hot, tropical zones). Imagine if now, as an adult, I went around yelling abuse at five-year-old white kids for wearing sun block?

So if Brit-multiculturalism in this form of expressing  hatred to non-white children is dead, I can only be grateful.

With regards to Germany, I’ve never been there but as an exchange student (Hamilton, Montana, US), I met a German student who was clever, kind and had a great sense of humour.

Before this what I’d known of Germany was that a desperate country, in my father’s lifetime, had voted in a psychopath called Adolf Hitler as leader.

Surely it takes more than a generation for people, who bought into Hitler’s extremely narrow world view, to broaden their minds.

Malcolm Fraser, one of the very few Liberal (i.e conservative) politicians I respect, said it best by asking how Germany’s multiculturalism policy can fail, when it never had one.

Anyway, asking if multiculturalism is dead is missing the point. The real question should be is the temporary European farce of ‘live and let live’ finally over? Seriously when was it ever alive?

Sri Lanka was colonised by three sets of Europeans – Portuguese, Dutch and British. And what was colonisation except a way for Europeans to say,  “if you do not look/speak/pray/eat/etcetera like us you don’t have rights to your land, your language, your culture, your religion, even your name. And we have guns to prove it.” 

If they had that attitude when they invaded our countries, are we really going to believe they had a change of conscience when we immigrated to theirs? 

Immigration minister Chris Bowen had the perfect description for multiculturalism when he compared it to a ‘marriage’. So true, though not in the context he meant with its many ups and downs. I too have considered multiculturalism as a marriage – two independent adults who have decided to live legally together.

For a harmonious marriage, the participants must enjoy getting to know each other, respect each other, learn to compromise, consider joint values for their children (the future of a nation) and avoid abusing each other physically or emotionally.

In deciding to get married, people who have chosen sensible, mature, non-sociopathic partners are not expected to wipe clean our past, cut off our families, deny our beliefs, change our names against our will and generally suffer memory loss of all the things that made us who we are.

 Of course we can only choose our partners wisely if they are honest about who they are. Like when Australia had it’s White Australia Policy. That was an honest way of saying Australia, which had been an Aboriginal country for at least 40,000 years, would only have room for Anglo, English-speaking Christians since the arrival/invasion of Captain Cook 200 years ago. Everyone else, out!

To now say those bigoted, insular policies are gone by law but should still be practised in stealth is dishonest and unfair to people who are looking to migrate to countries that are free and democratic.

The freedom we all seek is not the freedom to conform but the freedom to be individuals as nature intended with our own DNA, fingerprints and brains in self-contained spaces nullifying the need to operate like networked computers. Also the democracy we seek is not to agree with the masses but to disagree and still keep our lives, our jobs, our homes and our dignity.

I came to Australia in 2000 as a permanent resident. Not because I wanted to change from a Sinhala-speaking Sri Lankan Buddhist into an English-speaking Anglo Christian, but because of the diversity I experienced as an international student in Bathurst, New South Wales in 1991.

I met people from over 100 countries in the space of 4 years. I learnt about their cultures, their histories, their food, their jokes.

My Australian friends introduced me to Tuna Mornay, Spag bol, wine coolers and Cold Chisel while at the same time my Australian Lit lecturer knew more about Sri Lankan cricket than I did; a Turkish friend tried to teach me to ride a bicycle unsuccessfully; a New Zealand-Indian mentor showed me how to make rice-cooker biryani; a Chinese friend taught me to use chopsticks. 
I studied basic Japanese and Bahasa Indonesia with freebie tutorials from native-speaking friends; I shared weather jokes with a Nigerian friend, both of us wearing sweaters while our fellow Aussie students were walking around in T-shirts and shorts. 
I was introduced to new authors like Amy Tan and Paulo Coelho; had fun learning to dance the Nutbush; discussed the rebirth of cows with door-to-door Mormon preachers; and discovered how to make carrot flowers from my Hong Kong Chinese restaurant employer.

It was exhilarating.

To have this wonderful tapestry of difference changed to a monochromatic blanket of sameness would be tragic and stupid. 

In 2005, my sister became an Australian citizen and I was inspired by the then-Mayor's speech at the citizenship ceremony in Berwick, Victoria about welcoming and promoting cultural diversity. As we stood outside studying the native plant my sister had been given along with her citizenship certificate, the immigration official who’d also spoken at the ceremony, joked while walking past, ‘you do know that you’ll get deported if you kill [the plant]’.

We laughed.

In 2006 on Australia Day, January 26, I too became an Australian citizen, not because I wanted to give up my Sri Lankan identity (I don’t) but because I wanted to get more involved in my new home-away-from-home. I wanted to vote, I wanted to say who I was voting for and why. I wanted to say yes, I’m not white or a native-English speaker or a Christian but I am Australian (and who are you to demand otherwise).

So is multiculturalism dead? Of course not, it is alive and well just like our individuality. The only thing that needs reviving is the understanding by Anglo-Europeans that their identity, language and religion is not so fragile that it will spontaneously combust whenever a non-white, non-English-speaking, non Judeo-Christian pops up on the horizon.

Live and let live (in the real sense) and may multiculturalism stay strong and prosper.