Page 117 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West
P. 117

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

        ‘race’ is excessively salient. In the USA, individuals are routinely asked, in
        application forms, questionnaires, etc., to slot themselves into one of the five
        ethno-racial categories of white (or Euro-American), African American, Asian
        American, Hispanic or Native American (Hollinger 1995). As a result, Americans
        are always officially reminded of ‘race’ as a primary marker of differentiation among
        themselves.
          Not so in the Australian context, at least in the case of non-indigenous
        Australians. Here, the erasure of racial categorization from official discourse has
        constructed an equivalence between disparate groups such as the Vietnamese and
        the Dutch, the Chinese and the Italians. Since the introduction of multiculturalism,
        all these groups have the same categorical status as ‘ethnic communities’. In the
        past they would have been racially differentiated – as either white/European or not
        – and considered qualitatively, absolutely distinct from each other because of their
        purported racial differences, but today these racial differences are, at least in the
        official language, made irrelevant. As a result, there was no vocabulary any longer
        to describe the real changes in the social and cultural landscape, as new migrant
        groups whose entry into Australia was made possible by the formal ending of
        the White Australia policy, and who would previously have been described as
        ‘non-white’, ‘non-European’, ‘coloured’ or by any other racial term, began to fill
        the streets. The officially colour-blind discourse of multiculturalism could not
        appropriately address the bewildering cultural heterogeneity produced by the
        settlement of these new groups within the social life of the nation, especially in
        the large cities. We must remember, as we have noted earlier, that the way in which
        multicultural policy – i.e. the recognition of ‘cultural diversity’ – in Australia implied
        some degree of commonality, some affinity or family resemblance between the
        cultures concerned, signalled by the term ‘European’. No similar implication was
        there for the cultures of later ‘non-white’ migrant groups, most prominently those
        from ‘Asia’.
          It is as if the extension of the cultural diversity sanctioned by official multicul-
        turalism to groups other than those classified as white/European, was accompanied
        by a tacit denial, or an embarrassed silence, that these groups were previously not
        allowed to enter the country precisely because of their ‘racial’ difference. In other
        words, a kind of disavowal is at stake here. But it is not this disavowal as such that
        is problematic. What is problematic is its effects on the national imaginary, on how
        it robs the nation of an effective and acceptable way of narrating the national self
        anew in the context of these changes. That is, by simply silencing this history of
        exclusionism the official discourse also represses the more general and more
        significant fact that ‘race’ has been of crucial constitutive importance for the very
        creation of the Australian national identity. There was virtually no attempt to
        reconcile the fact that the admission of many people from Asian countries
        represented a qualitative turnaround of magnificent proportions, an historical shift
        which completely overturned Australia’s crucial and long-standing self-definition
        as a ‘white nation’ (Hage 1998). From one moment to the next, as it were, ordinary
        people were forced, without much positive explanation, to ditch the way they have


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