ABSTRACT
Multiculturalism strives to celebrate and appreciate diverse cultures, races, and ethnicities. It is a social movement, an ideology, and a battleground for cultural ideas within legal, political, and national discourses. Multiculturalism in the United States is not an official government policy; it emerged from “below,” out of the struggle for civil rights and on the back of the racial/ethnic “power” movements to gain equal representation and rights for people of color. For example, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a result of this “bottom-up” process. Although multiculturalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, there have been heated debates about its efficacy as both an ideal and a policy in modern society. In the US, these debates-which address issues such as political correctness, reverse discrimination, colorblindness, etc.—are so heated because multiculturalism embodies a tension between the ideals of liberal equality, the autonomy of individuals/ groups, and notions of inclusion in the national whole. This essay briefly outlines the theories of multiculturalism in the US and applies them to international examples to see if multiculturalism plays out similarly in other parts of the world. I give examples of countries employing different models of multiculturalism-assimilationist (Japan), liberal (UK, Ireland), and cosmopolitan/social (France, Germany, and Sweden). To build upon the concept of “multiculturality”—which has been defined as the lived
experiences of cultural integration in various cultural contexts such as Hawaii (Finney 1963) and Germany (Zank 1998)—I then proceed to analyze an example of mixed-race people and the “problem” they pose to racial categorization in the US Census. Although multiculturalism signifies the coexistence of two or more preexisting cultures that are mutually exclusive, multiculturality implies a new cultural formation based on racial/ ethnic integration. Below, I draw on the concept to illustrate how mixed-race people are challenging state notions of “race” and “culture” in order to gain acknowledgment of multiplicity. I also seek to expand the concept of multiculturality in order to shift its application from personal cultural experience to cultural movements aimed at the state. Analysis along such lines shows how the agency of social actors transforms deeply embedded notions of culture (e.g. that racial identity is singular) in the state via
the census. Through this example, we can see how cultural interaction redefines the idea of ethnic and racial communities, how specific processes shape both individual and interactional levels of identity, and how contact across groups (through multiracial people) can change the form and content of those groups.
