Why would non-white people have to be understood as intolerant and parochial?
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Who is a member of the nation? In the Canadian context, policies previously introduced by the P. E. Trudeau government declared that any person who “demonstrated a desire to contribute in the national project” is a full citizen and sought to define the “acquisition of French- and English-language skills as adequate to the task of enabling racial and cultural minorities full participation within society.” (Thobani 156) Yet, this rhetoric proved to be dissonant as the foundational claims of British and French descendants could not be balanced with the fair inclusion and recognition of other cultural groups. Thus, Canadian multiculturalism was born: a trojan horse that tricked the world into believing that the nation was “at the cutting edge of promoting racial and ethnic tolerance” (144) while conserving the essence of the white settler colonial state by reconstituting whiteness as ‘tolerant’ in the face of “non-white people [that] were instead constructed as perpetually and irremediably monocultural, in need of being taught the virtues of tolerance anc cosmopolitan under white supervision.” (148) Narayanan learned the hard way that “[to] be Québécois is widely interpreted as to be a descendant of the white French settlers who started arriving in the 16th and 17th centuries” (Narayanan, 3) and virtually no form of self-actualization would shield the immigrant from being Othered in the white imaginary.
To maintain the positionality of the ‘founding races,’ Canada deployed culturalist tropes, stereotypes and claims of cultural ‘excess’ to ossify immigrants as inherently different and deficient as opposed to the national. Their “excess of culture” (162) is framed as a barrier to integration rather than the strength of Canadian diversity (as we so often hear), while being cast as culturally deficient and “fossilized as living remnants of the past” (163) portray people of color as incapable of accomplishing happiness and modernity without the guidance of the Great White Nation, a rhetoric reminiscent of that of the East India Company. Non-white people must be understood as intolerant and parochial for Canadian multiculturalism to succeed because this framing places whiteness as the arbiter of “the virtues of tolerance and cosmopolitanism” (148). By insisting that all non-white communities are stuck in their own cultures, Canadian society places the blame on its minorities for its lesser participation and recognition while sustaining the white hegemony as the default successful (and ‘tolerant’) state design. In the end, this split upholds the nation’s image as progressive and liberal, even as it preserves systemic inequalities and racial (cultural) hierarchies.