Multiculturalism

Once upon a time, a girl I worked with made a slightly racist remark. I said to her, "You have brown eyes. You're not white."A lot of people in the Ku Klux Klan have brown eyes. I'm "whiter" than they are. I suspect that some day the Klan will include black people who hate whomever the enemy of the moment is.Edited by ringo, : Changed 'whoever' to 'whomever'.

There is no "the answer". We need multi-answers.

I don't see multiculturalism as an "answer" or a strategy. I see it as a fact of life. Transportation has become fairly cheap and readily available so multiculturalism is inevitable.Xenophobia is a philosophy which ignores the inevitable. "Melting pot" is a philosophy which aims to assimilate and homogenize, which might take centuries.I do think that accepting the inevitable multiculturalism is the way to go rather than trying to "do something about it".

Eating pizza and drinking Budweiser while watching Africans play football.

I agree. I view any political ideology with suspicion. Note the situation here in Canada where we have BI-lingualism promoted nationally (and French supremacy promoted militantly in Quebec). My grandparents spoke neither official language and got no help whatsoever in preserving their cultural heritage. I have no problem with diluting the host culture. Let it evolve naturally. Social engineering gives me the creeps, whether it's national policy or just part of the host culture.

In Quebec the French sign on your Chinese restaurant has to be bigger than the Chinese sign, even if all of your customers are Chinese who don't speak a word of French.Edited by ringo, : Fixed English spelling of "Chinese". (Almost got it wrong again here.)

What would be accomplished by enforcing the start time? Our culture could probably benefit from a less anal devotion to timeliness.I once worked with a woman who was habitually five minutes "late" for work but she got as much done when she was there as anybody else. Our manager, though, in her infinite wisdom, spent more time chastening such "offenders" than the time they "wasted" by being late.

Well, your point is pointy on both ends. While I don't approve of pointing society in the direction "we" want it to go, allowing groups to pracitice their culture may well have unanticipated benefits.Forcing "us" to let "them" do what they do is not the same as forcing us to do something.

To some extent we need to adjust to our society and to some extent it needs to adjust to us.Attempting to enforce monculturalism in Quebec is probably doing them more harm than good. You might be willing to learn French "if you were moving there" but thousands have left because they are not.

But it isn't multiculturalism; it's monoculturalism.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road? A: Because it's standard procedure in the Chicken Intelligence Agency when you're being sequited.

The roots go back to 1759 when the British defeated the French in war but wanted to hedge their bets in peace. French was recognized because the British recognized that assimilation wouldn't work. There was no way to force a bunch of French people to stop being French. Trying to force them to be British would just have made them more loyal to France. Society would have been less cohesive, not more.

Who said "always"? I gave a specific example in reply to a specific question. I would support that. Maybe we could do it now and let the French language die - but that was not a viable option at the time for the reasons I mentioned. What do we have laws for except to protect parts of society from other parts of society? I don't have a problem with forced tolerance of other cultures.

What's your point?

The British decided it was; trying to force the English language, the British legal system and the Church of England on the people of Quebec would have given them a French enemy in their back yard (their front yard at the time being the colonies which became the United States). That's exactly what we're talking about. You seem to be complaining about laws forcing multiculturalism on you (though you're a little thin on concrete examples). I'm saying that the reason we have laws is to protect the majority (e.g. "law-biding people") from the minority (criminals) and to protect minorities from the majority. We do need laws to prevent you from putting up signs that say "No Irish" or "Whites Only". Unfortunately, we can also get laws that say, "You must speak French," which nobody here is in favour of, as far as I know.