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