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Polyculturalism.
Racism is alive. It slithers, retreats when pushed, only to resurface elsewhere with another skin. To celebrate its withdrawal is, of course, necessary, but such celebrations can only falsely soothe. When it reappears, it is often pointless to strike at it with old tools alone.
Racism has moved on. It has reshaped itself, created new weapons, and new words. To defeat it anew requires as much creativity as it did for its metamorphosis. Old racism, Jim Crow racism hated everything that came from the world of color. It saw our cultural worlds as devoid of anything worthwhile. We were nothing to it. For that reason, many of our best writers and thinkers championed our cultural forums. They wanted to make sure that our resources received consideration and respect. Our histories and our art, our developments and our sublime, these were some tokens of our dignity, now squashed down by the barbarism of white supremacy.
The Civil Rights Movement broke the back of Jim Crow racism, that form retreated. It reappeared as colorblind racism, as a form of social power that claimed to be blind to race, when, in fact, it reproduced structures of oppression based on racism. As part of colorblind racism some groups were treated as models for others. Jews and Asians, for instance, became the exemplars, while blacks and Latinos became the special problem. “Why can't African Americans be more like Asians?” asked one colorblind racist commentator. The specific history of racialization was ignored. We continued to celebrate our cultural worth, this time, under the umbrella of multi-culturalism. But multiculturalism, in the context of colorblind racism, simply meant that the celebration of some people such as Jews and Asians was used as a rebuke against other people, such as blacks and Latinos.
Polyculturalism is a repudiation of both multiculturalism and its setting, colorblind racism. We believe that all cultures are inter-related, that they draw from each other. We believe that before we get too comfortable in our cultural resources, we need to take the ax of anti-racism to the stout tree of white supremacy. In our defiant schemes alone, we take on the racism of our time. |
