Just when I thought my degree and university career wasn’t quite mixed-up and diverse enough, I decided to pick a topic for my personal project on multiculturalism. That sound you don’t hear is the squeaking open of the top on a ginormous can of worms! Our class got an extension on our individual projects. It is now, again, the day before it is due, and I have still got nary a clue on how I’m going to tackle, in 1500 words, my narrative about:
- diversity
- dialogue
- sustainability
- …local food – right, that’s kind of important.
I’m reading a journal article about an incident a few years back in Richmond (the “new” Chinatown in Vancouver) where a group wanted to move its addiction recovery centre near a residential neighbourhood at Odlin Road. The NIMBYism flew fast and furious. The author sheds some light for me on some of the problems of multiculturalism that I haven’t thought a lot about before:
[M]ulticulturalist discourse is not likely to lead us any closer to a society founded on principles of social justice. Instead, what it leaves us with is a new hierarchy by which political claims can be treated, a hierarchy that simply reorders inequalities without addressing them (see Pavlich 2001). First, multiculturalism can lend moral weight to unjust demands — in the instant case, demands for exclusion based on unfounded claims. Where opposing claims are rooted in economic, gender and other forms of social inequality, such a policy does little to advance social justice, but rather creates and exacerbates fissures between potential allies. Second, despite its presence in the political firmament of Canada, we still remain some distance from achieving the erasure of racism and discrimination. (Huey, Laura (2003). Canadian Journal of Sociology, 28(3))
Is culture a valid excuse for not striving to be compassionate? No, but definitions of compassion run amok. This also reminds me of how the original Chinatown in Vancouver, at one point, was also very vocal in its opposition to Insite, the safe injection site in the downtown east side of Vancouver, intended to give injection drug addicts a safe place to shoot up, seek help and emergency care if necessary.
My uncertainty stems in the fact that this is a new community to me that I have never, ever made an attempt to reach out to; and now I maybe kinda sorta might want to? This is messy, messy stuff for me. My parents are not big on community, which probably says an awful lot about why I want to be, and study it sometimes.
Why can’t I ever just write a paper? Why does it have to be perfect and turn up all sorts of unresolved issues? Every once in a while I do, but that usually means I don’t strongly identify with the subject matter. (Hello, English papers!) The other mental stumbling block is that the I took the feedback from my instructor really, really personally – “crying in the classroom”-kind of personally, when I started really thinking about my paper again on one of our off-days. I look at the first draft and I can’t feel anything but hatred towards it, and it instinctively feels like I’ve been told that the topic doesn’t matter, which I hate because I know that that is the last thing my instructor is thinking. (Although the “no evidence of research” bit kind of stung.)
…maybe I’ll just continue reading back issues of Ricepaper until something clicks for me.
