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ELIZABETH TROTT
had to do with racism, low paying jobs, affordable housing and other problems
associated with settlement in a new country." Ihe nation state needed to
pay more attention not to cultural differences, but to the roots of growth and
development regardless of ones background. Efforts under way to develop and
promote the idea of Canada were overridden by the marketing ploys at work.
The topic for promotion was ‘multiculturalism’ and the market took note.
Capitalism purportedly offers a clean slate beyond the biases and cultural
specifics of multiculturalism. Surely an economic system should be able to
level the playing field. Race, gender, culture and whatever god you believe in
should not be factors in the markets. Labour and produce work according
to simple rules, supply and demand should offer equal chances of success
to those who participate. Only merit in performance should distinguish
participants. Or so we are led to believe. Colin Mooers argues otherwise.
An intense focus on multicultural difference objectifies difference in a way
that disguises racism and other social inequalities. As long as difference is
the focus, it masks the underlying reality of the individual’s life and culture.
Cultural activities, products, and indeed any marketable contributions,
perhaps playing on a team, or writing for a newspaper, become a focal point
of attention — a fetish, Mooers claims, of marketability. In short, marketing
‘multiculturalism’ as a visible and necessary component ofa healthy capitalist
society condemns a person to difference by celebrating the appearance, and
that celebration is considered to be sufficient recognition and status.
The reality is that members of cultures, now regarded as stereotyped
commodities, are denied the opportunity to seek similarities with those they
live with, but are reminded endlessly of their difference. Freedom of choice
regarding who to be and not to be is denied by the perpetual ploys of the
discourse of multiculturalism. Should one decide to see oneselfas a Canadian,
the hype surrounding difference makes that wish extremely forlorn. Should
one sense that the marketed form of multiculturalism is disguising racism
one is even less able to make a case:
Multiculturalism thus claims to have resolved the problem of ‘difference’ while,
like the neurotic, it represses its own terrible secret — that beneath the veil of
multicultural equality lies more systemic forms of racialization. The fetishism
of multiculturalism, as with that of the commodity, involves a forgetting of
origins; meanings are detached from their sources and hypostasized. Subjects
are invited to invest in and define themselves in terms of these reified forms. As
such, multiculturalism is an ideology of denial. It asks the oppressed to make an
affective investment in the reified ethnicities it establishes and to forget those
bodily memories of racism which rear up from everyday life but which now find no
4 Colin Mooers, Multiculturalism and the Fetishism of Difference, Socialist Studies, Vol. 1,
No. 2 (2005), 96.
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