What kind of yarn? from color line to multicolored hammock

Abstract

"The nature of the debate was changing, however. Few people openly advocated racial discrimination of the phenotypical variety, and in the new global environment, the very concepts of race and racial relations were undergoing transformation. As immigrant communities mushroomed in the industrial states, perceived biological distinctions meshed with recognized cultural differences. In some countries, race relations became a code word for relations between culturally differentiated communities. Human rights defenders were now no longer advocating just general equality (which seemed to many to be unattainable), but a new concept: the right to be different. States were expected to become less assimilationist and more pluralistic. Cultural differences were not to be abolished, but respected and celebrated. The always elusive melting-pot was to be replaced by a spicy multi-cultural salad bowl. The debate now shifted to culture. The extreme right pounced on the concept of the right to be different and appropriated it. Indeed, they said, if everybody else has a right to be different, so do we: the authentic national element, the true bearers of national identity. And so, successively, the right to be different has become an argument for closing borders, forcing assimilation, eliminating bilingual education, excluding the undesirable , the unassimilable from the truly national. Taken to its extreme, this argument leads to ethnic cleansing, the current face of genocide. Ethnicity has now replaced racialism, and ethnic discrimination is the new face of racism in today s globalised multicultural world. In a more subtle vein ethnic discrimination finds intellectual support in liberal arguments concerning democracy and development. While it is no longer respectable to blame so-called inferior races for their own misfortunes, some academics, harking back to fashionable theories of the nineteen forties and fifties, have rediscovered culture as the real culprit of economic backwardness and authoritarian political regimes. Forget the legacy of slavery and colonialism and the functioning of the international capitalist system. It now turns out, we are told [by Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington and his colleagues], that the value systems of certain cultures and civilisations are favorable to progress and democracy as understood in the West, whereas other cultures (in Africa, the Arab world, Latin America and some Asian countries) contain value systems that are decidedly inimical to progress and democracy. Therefore, if there is to be any development here at all, these peoples will have to change their value systems, or we , meaning the West, will have to do it for them. Is there much difference in this approach from the civilising mission that colonialism attributed to itself a century or so ago?6 Colonialism like racism is a creature of many faces, and even though we are now said to live in a post-colonial era, and have developed post-colonial languages and discourses to account for this transition, a closer look at the contested spaces of those imagined communities we like to call nations, reveals patterns of domination and exploitation, often accompanied by multiple forms of racism, which we may refer to as internal colonialism. Indeed, the perennial victims of internal colonialism in many parts of the world have been the indigenous peoples, and their assertive emergence in recent decades expresses their accumulated hurts and frustrations, as well as their age-old aspirations and dreams. The rights of indigenous peoples are central to the latest developments in the international struggle against racism, having received increasing attention in an emerging field of international law, as documented in current United Nations covenants, declarations and resolutions."(pg 5)