the illuminati's secret agenda: white world domination
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Introduced in the 1970s under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, multiculturalism was seen as a celebration of cultural diversity that would somehow fix Canada's historical issues of racialization and colonialism. Throughout her work, Thobani argues that multiculturalism policies in Canada do not confront racism and inequality but merely portray white Canadian society as tolerant. "Statist multiculturalism has proved to be more than simply a mode of reflecting cultural difference and managing it; it has actively constituted such difference as the most significant aspect of the nation’s relations with its (internal) Others" (145). By reimagining race in terms of culture, the government could manage diversity without fully dealing with systemic racial inequality.
By shifting race into culture, multiculturalism repositioned the focus from biological/physical traits that are associated with race to cultural practices and values. This change allowed the state to create political identities for racialized people based on their cultural heritage. This made it so racial minorities were not individuals with complex identities, but as fixed culturally groups that the government can easily categorize, manage, and enforce racial boundaries under the guise of inclusivity. Thobani states that "Multiculturalism has sought to constitute people of colour as politically identifiable by their cultural backgrounds. With this move, race became reconfigured as culture and cultural identity became crystallized as political identity, with the core of the nation continuing to be defined as bilingual and bicultural (that is, white)" (145). This quote further suggests that Canada's policies places the political identity of racial minorities into fixed boxes, which supports the idea that the inclusion of people of color is conditional on their cultural conformity in Canadian society. With all of this being said, although Canada "retained" this idea of multiculturalist and progressive identity, its actual national identity is tied to its bilingualism and biculturalism (white English-French origin), which shows that Canada's cultural norms still reflect the dominance of white societal norms.