Multiculturalism is often viewed as a jumble of customs and thoughts, sometimes contrasting, confusing or conflicting. It's manifestation in various countries can be modeled as a melting pot, or as a salad bowl. So too were my thoughts on multiculturalism a jumbled mess. Openly obsessed with diversity, I have seen and lived the multicultural experience several times and have come out with a boatload of strong opinions and stories. Surprisingly, it was a summer spent working at the United States Bureau of the Census, exploring mathematical models, that helped to organize my thoughts into a comprehensive theory. I wasn't expecting to encounter very much outside of math while working in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology. However, I hadn't counted on the Census Bureau being a leading place for social and racial discussion. As I wind up my internship, I actually find myself coming out having unified advanced statistical theory with my approach to conceptualizing American and global society. All in all, I really can't imagine getting more out of an internship.
First off, I want to establish why we should care about multiculturalism. I've come to believe that culture is the most important defining aspect of who we are. Even if you'd rather define yourself by what you like or what you do, say as an outdoors enthusiast, or a painter, or a vegetarian, all that is inexorably tied to where you come from and how you grew up. This isn't fatalistic as there's obviously room for individuality, but the culture that surrounds us do more to shape our actions, thoughts, perspectives and even appearances, than we realize. Our culture is crucial to our self-identity; thus people who grow up without one easily identifiable culture (i.e. they moved around a lot) often struggle with figuring out who they are. Don't underestimate the significance, or flexibility, of self-identity. So when culture is so vital to who you are, it's important to understand its effects when interacting with someone from a different culture.
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| Too much confusion - bring back Confucian! |
Multiculturalism of some form has been well-woven into the fabric of the USA - it's permanent presence here is acknowledged. Even if it's questioned, dissected or hotly debated, I don't know of anybody campaigning to expunge America of its many cultures. But in Europe, this debate is at the forefront. An article by Kenan Malik this summer sharply critiques Europe's approach to multiculturalism. This year British PM David Cameron announced his belief that state multiculturalism has failed in the UK. And this was all BEFORE the terrorist attack in Norway by Anders Breivik, motivated by anti-multicultural sentiments, particularly against the perceived Islamization of Europe. While everyone rightfully denounced Breivik and didn't take his manifestos seriously, I thought that this should have been an opportunity for us to reflect on how to combat xenophobic sentiment in Europe. After all, if we have defense analysts all over the world studying Islam and the Jihadist movements it has spawned, shouldn't we have people studying European anti-multiculturalism and the terrorism that it is starting to spawn? Maybe Breivik is a unique case, a hateful anomaly, but I think there is certainly an underlying concern that influenced him, and it needs to be addressed. The politics of Dutch party leader Geert Wilders, largely founded on anti-Islamism, is further concern.
It seems easy to dismiss these people as intolerant and racist, especially coming from America. We're citizens of a country founded and continually refueled by immigrants, boasting a list of notable immigrants which includes Alexander Hamilton and Albert Einstein and immigrant children Colin Powell and Barack Obama. We almost want to cry out to the rest of the world, "It's not so bad!" But one needs to peer through the single-colored lens of other countries and understand where they're coming from. The very fundamental existence of most European nations arose from the concept of a nation-state as the political self-determination of people with shared ethnic identity. The concept of a German or an Italian people has not always existed - it took the establishment of a common identity to unite a group of people, distinguish themselves from others, and eventually lead to the boundaries that we know today. Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia etc are just some examples of European nations who are fundamentally linked to the traditional nation state concept. The necessary byproduct of a common identity is a sense of who you are not, the establishment of an other. This process is not as natural as it might appear. Today we have Spanish-speakers in Spain, French speakers in France and Polish speakers in Poland. However, we could easily have Leonese speakers in Leon, Occitan speakers in Occitania, and Silesian speakers in Silesia. Point is, the establishment of a nation state is generally a result of political forces, and ex post facto creates a national identity at the expense of regional ones.
Anyways let's look at a small village. Imagine everyone and their ancestors have lived in that village for as long as anyone can remember, and a villager will not only know every other villager, but who their parents were/are. The village shares an identity, which might not be of consequence when you're focusing on local gossip and news, but when compared against even the next town over, suddenly arises. A whole village sharing this much in common tends to be more trusting. The residents are likely very friendly, very sharing, don't lock doors, and rely on the communal accountability to take care of deviants. The inhabitants will likely all share pride over their village, their customs and their specialties that distinguish them from other villages.
And it's true, when you bring in outsiders, you disrupt this communal utopia. When people don't know what their neighbors believe in, when new arrivals don't understand or respect the history of their new homes, when people sharing the same space don't get along and don't realize why they can't get along.... well then you see some of the problems we've seen in these last few centuries. Then you get these villagers who see their town overrun with Chinese restaurants and Turkish gyro stands and sigh, "can't we go back to the old days?"
I think the answer is no. We can't go back and we shouldn't. We're more prepared now as a society than ever for multiculturalism but we still have a long way to go.
The thing I've learned this summer is that there is still so much we don't know about race and culture in our world. I can look up Census data and tell you that 18.5% of blacks never graduated high school, compared to the national average of 14.7% and have a mean household income of $33,632 compared to the nationwide $50,221. There is a lot of data that I can pull up to show that blacks in America are poorer, less educated, more likely to be incarcerated, more likely to be murdered. Yet still in 2011, I can't tell you why this is. We can't pinpoint what percentage of black impoverishment is due to racism (institutional or blatant), historical oppression stemming from slavery, African American culture, recent immigration or the-almost-tabooed genetics. We really can't. We don't understand race and society nearly as well as we think we do.
We don't even understand race as much as we think we do. How many "African-Americans" are descended from American slaves? How many of them are descended from Caribbean slaves? How many of them have more white ancestors but still identify as black? How many of them have more black ancestors but identify as white? How many of them are descended from African immigrants who have no slavery in their family history? How many look black but identify as Hispanic? How many are have immigrated from Europe, the Middle East or elsewhere and identify with those regions? How many people identify with multiple of these designations? Does it even make sense to group all these people together?
Race is already extremely complex and it's only going to become more so. No longer can we impute someone's language, culture and nationality from their race, or vice versa. The examples I listed in the previous paragraph are not theoretical cases, they are real growing demographics. In a generation or two, you may see significant amounts of African immigrants coming from China. Already we're seeing lots of Asians coming from Latin America who may identify as Asian, Hispanic or neither.
So the great theoretical light bulb that clicked on for me in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology was that it's not about the data. Statisticians who focus too much on the data, full of imperfections and uncertainty, tend to find imaginary correlations and develop models that overfit the data. The best approach is to develop a fundamentally sound model which can recreate data similar to the data that we observe. I think the way we understand race in our multicultural society needs to be the same way. When culture is so important to identity and race fundamentally separate from culture, an approach identifying people by their race is so immensely flawed. An approach that uses race as a contextualized component of our local culture goes much farther in explaining the way our country has evolved and where it is headed.
I think that accepting multiculturalism may be impossible to teach. We all learn in schools not to be prejudiced, not to avoid stereotypes, not to use certain words etc. before we know what any of that means. This early accepting education has failed created a country without racism. No, we need to experience multiculturalism in order to embrace it. We need to see a world where our political leaders come from all sorts of backgrounds and so much more. In this country we need to see more Blacks and Hispanics in higher education and operating fancy restaurants, more Asians in the media and in professional sports, more whites in the service industries. We need to see black people speaking Japanese, Hispanics speaking Swahili, white people eating with chopsticks, Arabs with long beards praying in front of a cross, a Chinese guy with a British accent hosting a water skiing show. We need to see all permutations of human origin and behavior so that we can see that all of that is possible. And that is where Europe is currently lagging. They haven't had the chance to see people of different genetic material become versed in their national cultures for multiple generations. Until they do, they will not realize how flawed the small-village model they have operating under has become.
Lastly, I think we can accomplish all of this without all out assimilation. I think culture is just like language, you can be fluent or conversant in multiple cultures. While many people have argued that immigrants and immigrant children will always have conflicting loyalties and identities, I steadfastly disagree based on my personal experience. I am 100% American. I was born and raised in the Boston area and went to college in the nation's capital. There is nothing significant about the American culture that I have seen around me that I don't get. Maybe when I was a little kid I'd ask my parents why the other white kids did this or that, but by now I get it. I love my Boston sports, I identified fully with my place among the DC yuppies and I will take off my hat and sing along to the Star-Spangled banner. In addition, I get a fair amount of Chinese culture and it has added enormously to my life. I will fly to Hong Kong in a few days and have a large meal with family members around a lazy Susan, where the youngest will incessantly check the teacups of everyone else and refill their cups, we'll start and end the meal with soup, and I will be in sync every step of the way. In DC, I hang about Chinatown and learn to buy giant boxes of delicious rice noodles for $4, find haircuts for $8 and learn that there are many Chinese descendants in Vietnam and Malaysia and that they speak Cantonese. Knowing all this just added an extra dimension to my life, it didn't take away from the American dimension already present. I'm so grateful and lucky to have this multicultural lifestyle. I just hope that with global political forces understanding, more and more people will also embrace their multicultural lives.
It seems easy to dismiss these people as intolerant and racist, especially coming from America. We're citizens of a country founded and continually refueled by immigrants, boasting a list of notable immigrants which includes Alexander Hamilton and Albert Einstein and immigrant children Colin Powell and Barack Obama. We almost want to cry out to the rest of the world, "It's not so bad!" But one needs to peer through the single-colored lens of other countries and understand where they're coming from. The very fundamental existence of most European nations arose from the concept of a nation-state as the political self-determination of people with shared ethnic identity. The concept of a German or an Italian people has not always existed - it took the establishment of a common identity to unite a group of people, distinguish themselves from others, and eventually lead to the boundaries that we know today. Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia etc are just some examples of European nations who are fundamentally linked to the traditional nation state concept. The necessary byproduct of a common identity is a sense of who you are not, the establishment of an other. This process is not as natural as it might appear. Today we have Spanish-speakers in Spain, French speakers in France and Polish speakers in Poland. However, we could easily have Leonese speakers in Leon, Occitan speakers in Occitania, and Silesian speakers in Silesia. Point is, the establishment of a nation state is generally a result of political forces, and ex post facto creates a national identity at the expense of regional ones.
And it's true, when you bring in outsiders, you disrupt this communal utopia. When people don't know what their neighbors believe in, when new arrivals don't understand or respect the history of their new homes, when people sharing the same space don't get along and don't realize why they can't get along.... well then you see some of the problems we've seen in these last few centuries. Then you get these villagers who see their town overrun with Chinese restaurants and Turkish gyro stands and sigh, "can't we go back to the old days?"
I think the answer is no. We can't go back and we shouldn't. We're more prepared now as a society than ever for multiculturalism but we still have a long way to go.
The thing I've learned this summer is that there is still so much we don't know about race and culture in our world. I can look up Census data and tell you that 18.5% of blacks never graduated high school, compared to the national average of 14.7% and have a mean household income of $33,632 compared to the nationwide $50,221. There is a lot of data that I can pull up to show that blacks in America are poorer, less educated, more likely to be incarcerated, more likely to be murdered. Yet still in 2011, I can't tell you why this is. We can't pinpoint what percentage of black impoverishment is due to racism (institutional or blatant), historical oppression stemming from slavery, African American culture, recent immigration or the-almost-tabooed genetics. We really can't. We don't understand race and society nearly as well as we think we do.
We don't even understand race as much as we think we do. How many "African-Americans" are descended from American slaves? How many of them are descended from Caribbean slaves? How many of them have more white ancestors but still identify as black? How many of them have more black ancestors but identify as white? How many of them are descended from African immigrants who have no slavery in their family history? How many look black but identify as Hispanic? How many are have immigrated from Europe, the Middle East or elsewhere and identify with those regions? How many people identify with multiple of these designations? Does it even make sense to group all these people together?
Race is already extremely complex and it's only going to become more so. No longer can we impute someone's language, culture and nationality from their race, or vice versa. The examples I listed in the previous paragraph are not theoretical cases, they are real growing demographics. In a generation or two, you may see significant amounts of African immigrants coming from China. Already we're seeing lots of Asians coming from Latin America who may identify as Asian, Hispanic or neither.
So the great theoretical light bulb that clicked on for me in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology was that it's not about the data. Statisticians who focus too much on the data, full of imperfections and uncertainty, tend to find imaginary correlations and develop models that overfit the data. The best approach is to develop a fundamentally sound model which can recreate data similar to the data that we observe. I think the way we understand race in our multicultural society needs to be the same way. When culture is so important to identity and race fundamentally separate from culture, an approach identifying people by their race is so immensely flawed. An approach that uses race as a contextualized component of our local culture goes much farther in explaining the way our country has evolved and where it is headed.
I think that accepting multiculturalism may be impossible to teach. We all learn in schools not to be prejudiced, not to avoid stereotypes, not to use certain words etc. before we know what any of that means. This early accepting education has failed created a country without racism. No, we need to experience multiculturalism in order to embrace it. We need to see a world where our political leaders come from all sorts of backgrounds and so much more. In this country we need to see more Blacks and Hispanics in higher education and operating fancy restaurants, more Asians in the media and in professional sports, more whites in the service industries. We need to see black people speaking Japanese, Hispanics speaking Swahili, white people eating with chopsticks, Arabs with long beards praying in front of a cross, a Chinese guy with a British accent hosting a water skiing show. We need to see all permutations of human origin and behavior so that we can see that all of that is possible. And that is where Europe is currently lagging. They haven't had the chance to see people of different genetic material become versed in their national cultures for multiple generations. Until they do, they will not realize how flawed the small-village model they have operating under has become.
Lastly, I think we can accomplish all of this without all out assimilation. I think culture is just like language, you can be fluent or conversant in multiple cultures. While many people have argued that immigrants and immigrant children will always have conflicting loyalties and identities, I steadfastly disagree based on my personal experience. I am 100% American. I was born and raised in the Boston area and went to college in the nation's capital. There is nothing significant about the American culture that I have seen around me that I don't get. Maybe when I was a little kid I'd ask my parents why the other white kids did this or that, but by now I get it. I love my Boston sports, I identified fully with my place among the DC yuppies and I will take off my hat and sing along to the Star-Spangled banner. In addition, I get a fair amount of Chinese culture and it has added enormously to my life. I will fly to Hong Kong in a few days and have a large meal with family members around a lazy Susan, where the youngest will incessantly check the teacups of everyone else and refill their cups, we'll start and end the meal with soup, and I will be in sync every step of the way. In DC, I hang about Chinatown and learn to buy giant boxes of delicious rice noodles for $4, find haircuts for $8 and learn that there are many Chinese descendants in Vietnam and Malaysia and that they speak Cantonese. Knowing all this just added an extra dimension to my life, it didn't take away from the American dimension already present. I'm so grateful and lucky to have this multicultural lifestyle. I just hope that with global political forces understanding, more and more people will also embrace their multicultural lives.
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