The question should not be “Why can’t we all just get along?” It should be “How can we afford not to?”
In a rapidly shrinking world made even smaller by the import of foreign workers, offshoring, trade agreements, globalization, and refugees, multiculturalism is under renewed attack. Although there’s significant help from the more racist elements of White America and from the Tea Party, hostility to multiculturalism is shared by the German Chancellor; a majority of House Republicans; Black Americans like Louis Farrakhan, Herman Cain and Allen West; Christians like Pat Robertson and Andreas Breivik; Jews like Ayn Rand, Pamela Geller and David Horowitz; Indians like Dinesh DiSouza; Muslims like the late Osama bin Laden; the heads of state of nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia; pundits like Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh; and conspiracy theorists like Orly Taitz and The Donald. Pardon me if I missed a few million.
What all these examples show, though, is that there will always be people who can’t play nice with others. They also serve to remind us that one person’s victim can quickly become another’s tormenter. Being persecuted yourself does not automatically guarantee compassion for others. Sadly, it often has the opposite effect.
But changes in demographics are virtually impossible to roll back. Large-scale Jewish resettlement of Israel began half a century ago. Palestinians were there for centuries. But nobody’s going anywhere. American descendants of slaves have no African home to return to. Many Latinos living in Texas are the descendants of those who were there when the United States took it from Mexico. To Native Americans the arrival of Europeans was not a welcome development, but where are the voices calling for 200 million Europeans to return to the Old Country? The descendants of South African white settlers are still trying to figure out their place in a post-Apartheid nation. Indian and Chinese merchants have old, established communities on almost every continent. The fingerprints of British, French, and Portuguese colonialism are all over Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The handiwork of Spanish colonialism is seen all over most of the Americas. The least and most recent of these global changes has been an influx of Muslims into Europe, whether resulting from French colonialism or the German Gastarbeiter program. Yet, apparently, there are those who believe they can just roll back the clock on all this change.
What’s done is done.
Multiculturalism encompasses more than ethnicity and language. It has certainly been a shock to many American fundamentalists and conservatives to discover that we have Gay culture, Green culture, liberal culture, conservative culture, religious culture, secular culture, and a bewildering assortment of others. Amazingly, not all families look like June and Ward Cleaver’s, and this has been difficult for many to accept in an economic system where White Protestantism was once dominant and automatically conferred economic and social advantages on its members over all others.
Faced with the reality of change, the only sensible approach is to accept reality. Fundamentalism, racism, ignorance, fear, or self-interest blinds people to what is rational. Their first impulse is to try to make unwelcome interlopers or the new competition pick up and leave. We see this in the Zionist state, where Arabs are hounded from their homes and villages, even in Israel proper. We see this in a variety of Muslim states where Shi’ites, Alawites, Copts, Sufis, and others are persecuted or driven out. We see this in a dozen American states which have instituted laws for ostensibly preventing illegal immigration but whose real function is to harass and send the message to Latinos: you don’t belong here. We see it in new voter registration laws that attempt to disenfranchise minority, poor, and immigrant voters. It’s no coincidence that many of these same states had Jim Crow laws not so long ago.
Resistance to all this change is futile. But why embrace multiculturalism?
First, the world is the way it is because we have changed it. We have to live with the reality and the consequences of how we’ve changed it. Cross burnings and lynchings or the demonization of people who are, for better or worse, now our neighbors doesn’t unravel reality. It only serves to criminalize and destabilize society, to trivialize the meaning of our Constitution, and to divide communities. Embracing reality is really the only sane option. We can’t move forward if we don’t think rationally.
Second, we strengthen democracy by being inclusive, not by building walls. What does it say about our so-called democracy, in the 21st Century, when gays still do not have all the legal protections of any other class of citizens? If we are truly so concerned about the institution of marriage, why is there such a preoccupation with keeping the fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, and Muslim ideal of heterosexual marriage the standard, and so little interest in keeping families together or raising healthy, well-educated children? Inclusivity focuses on what we all have in common, rather than attempting to preserve some advantage for just our own group or foisting our own religious views on the rest of society.
On those rare occasions in which Americans have been attacked we have felt a remarkable connection to each other, regardless of culture or religion. In the first days after 9/11, there we were — giving blood, saying prayers, just helping each other. But within days we needed to find someone to blame — and the nativists chose Muslims, Sikhs, Indians, or brown-skinned people whom they thought were Muslims. They weren’t picky. Any number of people were beaten, stabbed, shot, and that was just the beginning. These acts of hate may have sufficed to unite xenophobes, but it did not united the rest of society. Faced with economic hardship, the nativist looks accusingly at the undocumented worker. Faced with doubts about the nation’s future, he grasps at straws, believing that simpler times, simpler rules, a simpler mix of people will make everything all right.
But we can create a sense of shared values, compassion, and true connections to teach other by welcoming multiculturalism.
We are blessed with a vibrant mix of people here in the United States. We’ve got just about every language spoken on earth. Go to Washington DC and you’ll often hear Amharic on your cab driver’s radio — at least until the next wave of immigrants replaces the Ethiopians in the taxi business. We’ve got Spanglish. We’ve got Yiddish. We’ve got Creole. Different Creoles. We’ve got tortillas and spaghetti, Swedish meatballs and sushi, baba ganoush and blintzes, hot dogs and crepes, kale soup and cornbread. And there’s the fusion of all these. Instead of a bright white light, we have a dazzling prism of color in film, music, art, theater, and literature. Every religion is here, every spiritual dialect used to talk to God.
Besides the incredible, beautiful, variety within our society, new Americans are a credit, not a debit in demographic and economic terms. While European population growth is flat, ours is growing. This means that the future generation will be large enough to buoy economic growth, even when many of us today are long retired.
Our strength has always been new citizens bringing new strength to an old democracy-in-progress. In every case new Americans have adopted the national story as passionately as each previous group. Multiculturalism is the celebration and the embrace of this ongoing change. The alternative is stagnation, hate, and the erosion of our democratic principles.
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