Page 116 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

MULTICULTURALISM IN CRISIS

‘white’. That is, with the admission of non-British European migrants, racial
homogeneity (‘whiteness’) could no longer be equated with cultural homogeneity
(i.e. the British-based, Anglo-Celtic Australian culture). However, the pursuit of
a homogeneous national community remained government priority well into the
1960s. It was to ensure cultural homogenization that the new immigrants were
forced, officially, to adopt the existing ‘Australian way of life’ and assimilate into
the dominant culture, the notional core culture of ‘Anglo-Celtic’ Australia. In
other words, the policy of assimilationism was aimed at the maintenance of a
culturally homogeneous white Australia (Castles et al. 1990: 45).
The later introduction of the policy of multiculturalism has widely been seen
as a response to the failure of the policy of assimilationism. Indeed, the fact was that
non-British European migrants – Italians, Greeks, and so on – were simply not
divesting themselves of the cultural practices which they brought with them from
their national ‘homelands’ (for example, drinking coffee and wine rather than tea
and beer, and speaking their incomprehensible ‘national’ languages) and cloning
themselves into the Anglo-Celtic dominant culture as the assimilation policy
required. The shift toward a policy of multiculturalism in the 1970s implied
a recognition of this failure and an embrace of the notion of ‘cultural diversity’,
which the policy itself is aimed to ‘manage’. But it was a cultural diversity within
a single ‘white race’: it was ‘white’ multiculturalism, not multiracialism. In other
words, logically speaking there is no reason why multiculturalism should be race-
blind. The fact that it was tacitly assumed to be the case – i.e. that multiculturalism
was synonymous to an overcoming of racism – is a key element in the repression
of the discourse of ‘race’ from official and dominant rhetoric.
One important indication for the way ‘race’ has been repressed is the fore-
grounding of the term ‘ethnic communities’ in the discourse of multiculturalism
in Australia. The rhetorical shift from ‘race’ to ‘ethnicity’ signifies Australia’s local
contribution to the post-World War Two movement away from the biological
essentialism of classical racial discourse and the espousal of a more culturally-
oriented approach to human diversity (de Lepervanche 1980). Thus, when in the
decade after the fall of Saigon in 1975, some 80,000 Vietnamese were allowed into
Australia, their integration into Australian culture, supported by multicultural
policies, was never discussed openly in terms of their ‘racial’ difference. Officially,
the Vietnamese were simply added to the growing list of ‘ethnic groups’ making
up the increasingly heterogeneous multicultural mix in the nation. In the Australian
discourse of multiculturalism new migrant groups are designated an ethnic identity
(defined generally in terms of national origin), not a racial one. Thus, the Australian
census classifies people according to ‘birthplace’ and ‘language spoken at home’
and as such, distinguishes between people from ‘Vietnam’, ‘China’, ‘Malaysia’,
‘Lebanon’, ‘India’, ‘Fiji’, ‘Japan’, ‘Korea’, or ‘the Philippines, as well as ‘Britain’,
‘New Zealand’, ‘Italy’, or ‘Germany’, and so on. The racial term ‘Asian’ (or ‘white’
for that matter) does not officially appear at all: the bureaucratic imagination
does not, in Australia, make use of ‘race’ as a means of categorizing people. This
is in sharp contrast, for example, with the United States, where the discourse of

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