Page 153 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

the exclusion of the Other to whom one attributes the fundamentalist
nationalism, etc.
(1993: 223)

This suggests that the cutting-edge problematic of ‘race relations’ in the context
of liberal-pluralist societies – such as ‘multicultural Australia’ – should be cast
analytically and politically in terms of the limits of the discourse of tolerance. As
both Zygmunt Bauman (1991) and Ghassan Hage (1994) have persuasively
argued, the structural hierarchy between majority (singular) and minorities (plural)
is not nullified by the very elevation of tolerance as a value: indeed, in the ideology
of tolerance the dominant majority is structurally placed in a position of power
inasmuch as it is granted the active power to tolerate, while minorities can only
be at the receiving end of tolerance, or, if they are for some reason (e.g. having the
‘wrong’ religion) considered beyond the realm of the tolerable, deemed unworthy
of being tolerated. This power-laden division between the tolerating and the
tolerated lies at the heart of Australian multiculturalism, a division which is all
the more pernicious as it generally remains unacknowledged and unrecognized. In
other words, while raw and direct expressions of racism are no longer condoned,
the attempt to eliminate such expressions by preaching tolerance paradoxically
perpetuates the self–other divide which is the epistemological basis of the very
possibility for racism in the first place.
For example, as Hage (1994) points out, while the presence of the minority
subject is valued in the discourse of multiculturalism for the ‘cultural enrichment’
s/he supposedly provides, precisely this function keeps her/him positioned in the
space of objectified otherness.

For the Anglo-Celtic Australian who accepts it, the discourse of enrich-
ment still positions him or her in the centre of the Australian cultural map.
. . . More importantly, this discourse assigns migrant cultures a different
mode of existence to Anglo-Celtic culture. While Anglo-Celtic culture
merely and unquestionably exists, migrant cultures exist for the latter.
(ibid.: 31–2; emphasis in original)
From this point of view, the new visibility of the Asian woman in representations
of Australian nationhood should be interpreted in more complex terms than in
those of a happy familial inclusion, because that inclusion comes at a cost.
Hage uses the provocative phrase ‘tolerant racism’ to refer to this relational
asymmetry. But I hesitate to use the word ‘racism’ here because of its strongly
moralistic negative connotations and, as such, its tendency to invite simplistic
political Manicheanism. Indeed, as the example of cultural enrichment indicates,
we should recognize the difficulty of determining where racism begins and ends,
and of establishing a clear dividing line between tolerance and intolerance in a
self-declared multicultural nation such as Australia. As Hage himself suggests,
the acceptance and enjoyment of ‘other cultures’ signalled in the idea of cultural

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