Essay: Multicultural society

Walking the streets of New York City, you can see a variety of different people of diverse races and ethnicities, speaking different languages, and dressed in a multitude of ways. From Chinatown, to little Italy, to fifth avenue, one street might look wholly different from the next, with different cultures represented everywhere you look. This is multiculturalism. Multiculturalism can have many different definitions depending on the context in which it is used. The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions defines multiculturalism as “the co-existence of diverse cultures, where culture includes racial, religious, or cultural groups and is manifested in customary behaviors, cultural assumptions and values, patterns of thinking, and communicative styles” (Ifla.org, 2019). Multiculturalism in the context of this paper will represent not only the “coexistence of diverse cultures,” but also a situation in which these different cultures or racial groups have equal rights and opportunities and none are ignored or regarded as less important than another in their respective societies (Collinsdictionary.com, 2019). Aside from the Aboriginal people, all of today’s Australians are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants. However, for most of it’s history Australia maintained a discriminatory ‘White Australia Policy.’ While Australia has made much progress in recent years in becoming more ethnically and culturally diverse, and can be considered multicultural in its demographics, many Australian’s still face inequality and discrimination. This inequality would prevent Australia from being a considered successful multicultural nation. America the so-called “land of immigrants” has a surprisingly similar history to that of Australia and has followed similar patterns. Although America has made strides in the past in becoming a successful representation of multiculturalism, recently there has been resurgence in anti-immigrant sentiment, islamophobia, and feelings of white supremacy that, like Australia, would inhibit its classification as a successful multicultural nation.
Australia was founded largely on principles of discrimination and injustice towards its native people. Australia was established in 1788 as a penal colony, mainly as punishment for an excessive amount of British poor who committed minor crimes against the ruling class. These convicts were used for labor, to build up Australia before becoming respectable citizens themselves (Ramakrishna, 2013). In order to create a new Australia, the native Aboriginal people were displaced and their population decimated by both disease brought in by the Europeans and the weapons from which they had no protection (Ramakrishna, 2013). After arrival of the British and European migrants to the new continent in the nineteenth century, there was further mass destruction of the Native Aborigines so much so that the once flourishing people now constitute only a small proportion of the Australian population (Ramakrishna, 2013). Irish refugees were among the earliest migrants coming to Australia in 1841and soon after the Irish migrated, gold was found in Victoria. The 1851 Victorian gold rush spurred the immigration of more than half a million people from Italy, France, Poland, Germany, America, China and the British Isles to Melbourne (Ramakrishna, 2013). This mass migration triggered anti-immigrant sentiment, targeted largely at the non-white Chinese. There were anti-Chinese riots and state and national laws were enacted to keep Chinese out and discourage non-white European immigration (Ramakrishna, 2013). In 1901, the Immigration Restriction Act was passed as one of the first pieces of legislation introduced by the newly formed federal parliament. This act was specifically designed to limit non-British immigration to Australia and allowed for the deportation of ‘undesirable’ people who had settled in any Australian colony prior to federation. This represented the formal establishment of the ‘White Australia policy’ (Ghosh, 2018). The White Australian policy suffered a serious setback in 1959. Although the non-White ban on immigration was lifted, Europeans were preferred with a points system. By the 1970s waves of migrants came from other parts of the world due to international conflicts and civil wars in Lebanon, Cyprus and Chile (Ramakrishna, 2013). In 1973, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam of the Labour Party laid the foundations of multiculturalism policy and ended the White Australia Policy, which dropped all references to race (Ghosh, 2018). In 1975 the Racial Discrimination Act made discrimination based on race illegal. As new waves of migrants came and Australia evolved into a modern nation, multiculturalism was declared as its official policy.
The term “Multiculturalism” is said to have emerged in 1941 as an antidote to a form of nationalism that implied one nation’s superiority over others (Ghosh, 2018). However, it wasn’t used in public debate until 1973 when the Whitlam government’s minister for immigration, Al Grassby argued ‘that Australia needed to rethink its national image in response to the social and cultural changes that had resulted from post-war migration’ (van Krieken, 2012). In common usage multiculturalism generally refers to equal respect of all cultures in a society, thereby maintaining their cultural distinctiveness (Ghosh, 2018). To say that a society is multicultural is to recognize the diversity of that society—but what makes it diverse may be differing ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, religions, sexes, ages, classes, and so on. A variety of differences become the basis for inequality in each society and this inequality based on differences is discrimination (Ghosh, 2018). In Australia, multiculturalism is most often understood as relating to the white majority and immigrants (Pruitt, 2015). Migrants are positioned in particular ways in relation to the white majority and Indigenous peoples. This comparison to the dominant white culture is disadvantageous for both Indigenous people and immigrants as it results in an Australian national identity that simply tolerates other cultures and only really accepts and celebrates them when they allow their cultures to assimilate into the broader Australian white culture (Pruitt, 2015). Moreover, official attempts at multiculturalism have usually focused on surface level cultural changes without seriously addressing structural racism (Pruitt, 2015). Although Australian politicians may like to think that they have dealt with this problem, racism and discriminations are still huge issues faced by Australians everyday. While violent racist incidents previously tended to be isolated attacks by individuals or small groups, recently there have been more widespread expressions of racism involving large numbers of people, particularly young males, such as the Cronulla race riots (El-Leissy, 2007). Although politicians maintain that underlying racism does not exist in Australia, young people from diverse cultural backgrounds regularly report experiencing racism (El-Leissy, 2007). Likewise, research with university students, found that white interviewees placed a strong value on being seen as tolerant in the context of cultural diversity and yet, showed evidence of passive racism and surface tensions, with an assumption that assimilation is needed (Grafton and Lye, 2000). Furthermore, one in every ten Australians is said to be a White Supremacist (Ghosh, 2018). It can be argued that whiteness has been constructed as a crucial component of being Australian and so has been associated with cultural dominance. Challenging this white privilege, or the perceived centrality of whiteness to what it means to be Australian is a difficult, yet crucial task in pursuing multiculturalism.
In 1963, Martin Luther King Junior pointed out that although legislation cannot change the hearts of people, it can restrain the heartless. Giving equal status to all cultures and groups would be a major shift from the political norm, where power traditionally rests with the dominant group. It would imply a change in power relations that would address the inequalities in society (Ghosh, 2018). However, this is easier said than done. One profession that is supposed to fight to represent minorities and address the inequalities they face is social work. However, Monani argues that the profession of social work is reluctant to embrace the multicultural face of Australia and lacks both the means to respond to diversity. She offers the description of Australian social workers as “jargonistic white witchdoctors, involved in social control and personal career aggrandizement” (Monani, 2018).
She reviews a 2011 study that reveals that the majority of social work professionals recognized their clients as the ‘other’ (Monani, 2018). This can be problematic because when professionals such as social workers downplay the effects of racism and don’t recognize its prevalence, it becomes even more difficult to combat these issues in the communities that they serve. This becomes further complicated due to the fact that the majority of social work academics, heads of social work departments in Australian hospitals, Australian charities and managers of human services are predominantly white or of British descent (Monani, 2018). This positioning of ‘white privilege’ in social work practice is precarious because it creates a disparity between the social workers and the populations that they serve. One example how this manifests in practice is that white social workers tend not to accept black foster parents as acceptable options to care for children (Monani, 2018). In order to be representative of a multicultural society, it is important that we address this disparity and start educating practitioners on the importance of cultural acceptance and help them to stop resisting necessary change.
There are two distinct populations in need of equality and cultural acceptance in order for Australia to become a successful multicultural nation—the Aboriginal people and immigrants. Australia’s history in relation to the Aboriginal people consists of multiple horrible injustices. Originally, when the British began to colonize Australia, the goal of the British administrators of New South Wales was to absorb the Aboriginal population into white society, an ambition that was reliant on their conversion to Christianity (van Krieken, 2012). By the late nineteenth century this ambition was exchanged for the notion that the Aboriginals were a ‘dying race,’ so that the primary focus of organized attention to them as a population group would be to ‘protect’ them in the period of their final decline, to ‘smooth the dying man’s pillow’ (van Krieken, 2012). Instead of dying out however, the Aboriginals began to have children with white Australians. These children were known by state administrators as the ‘half caste problem’ and were considered ‘a dangerous and disgusting racial hybridity’ (van Krieken, 2012). These children, who may have looked European, were thought to need rescue from the ‘barbarism and moral depravity’ of the aboriginals (van Krieken, 2012). Due to this notion, these children were removed from their homes and families to be placed in foster care. In 2008, the Australian Government formally recognized its past injustice toward and mistreatment of Australia’s Indigenous peoples, including forcible removal of children from families. However, although Australian law denies it, ‘Indigenous sovereignty has never been ceded’; thus colonization remains an everyday, living process (van Krieken, 2012). While many government actions in the last few decades have aimed to improve the lives of Aboriginal people, exclusion and comparative disadvantage persist. Aboriginal people and issues remain largely socially invisible. And although there have been efforts in the past few decades to decolonize and recognize the aboriginal people’s rights to land and self-determination, between 1996 and 2007 the Liberal-National Party government, led by John Howard, did all it could to revive Hasluck’s conception of ‘assimilation as absorption’ (van Krieken, 2012). This constituted trying to contain the effects of the High Court cases supporting Aboriginal interests in land and refusing to recognize that there was anything problematic about the policies of removal of Aboriginal children from their families (van Krieken, 2012). Today it is fair to say that both models continue to co-exist alongside, and in on-going tension with, each other.
Australia is a clear example of a country of immigration; in 1890 over 30 per cent of the population was born overseas declining to just less than10 percent in 1945, and then steadily climbing to 27 per cent in 2010 (van Krieken, 2012). Until the 1960s the goal was to absorb immigrants into ‘the Australian way of life,’ but without any clear mechanisms for achieving it. Between 1901 and 1973, the Australian model of integration in relation to immigrants was organized around what became known as the ‘White Australia Policy’ (van Krieken, 2012). From 1947-1966, the Australian policy was to assimilate immigrants into the white culture, having the discard their original culture in favor of the Australian culture. Thus, the focus shifted to the issue of entry—who was to be allowed into Australia. Although there remained a concern to keep Australia ‘white,’ after the Second World War an increasing population became necessary for the economy, and the pursuit of new migrants forced Australia from exclusive British immigration to include Southern Europe and the Baltic region (van Krieken, 2012). This however, does not mean that they were treated equally. Immigrants from British and Northern-Europe were given assisted passage and full citizenship upon arrival while those from Southern and Eastern Europe had trouble with passage and were often treated as second-class citizens (van Krieken, 2012). This allowance of further immigration was not a shift towards multiculturalism, but rather the expectation was that migrants would simply forget their background and become ‘just like us’ with the mere passage of time van Krieken, 2012). The problem with assimilation was simply that it did not work so the policy changed from 1966-1972 to a policy of integration, allowing immigrants to keep their own culture within the larger Australian culture (van Krieken, 2012). Although the white Australia policy was ended in 1973, and the Racial Discrimination Act was passed in 1975, the issue of racial and cultural discrimination remains in Australia. In her article, Pruitt tells of a young immigrant woman who never felt that she belonged and as a white migrant from a European non-English speaking background, this young woman had attempted to ‘pass’ for what she understood to be authentically Australian – a white, native English speaker – throughout her childhood (Pruitt, 2015). Moreover, a survey taken in 2013 revealed a notable increase in reported experience of discrimination based on ethnic origin, skin color, and religion, with the highest reported levels since annual surveys began in 2007 (Pruitt, 2015). It is important that the underlying issues of anti-immigration sentiment and racism be addressed in order for Australia to be considered a multicultural society.