Multiculturalism or Cultural Pluralism of London - Essay Example

Multiculturalism Good people create a good society with help of good cultures. Debates about the moral order were very much a part of early social science, but they fell out of favor with the growth of positivism in the twentieth century. In recent decades, active public debate about moral issues has revived. Since the serious debates have emerged about morality - both public and private - in issues as diverse as abortion, corporate scandals. A number of social scientists have taken up questions about the good person and the good society, and they have addressed the issues in popular books reaching broad audiences. But this issue can not be addressed correctly unless the multicultural aspects of global societies are not considered. Multiculturalism or cultural pluralism, a term describing the coexistence of many cultures in a locality, without any one culture dominating the region. By making the broadest range of human differences acceptable to the largest number of people, multiculturalism seeks to overcome racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. 1 The great city of London is the best example of multiculturalism. One can see people from every part of the globe belonging to every caste creed and religion living and prospering in this generous city. The ethnographic accounts underscore the point, that people mediate their distinctive senses of honor in relation to other socially constructed boundaries besides class, for example ethnicity, gender, and geographic locale. As cultural studies have emphasized in recent years, while no one's social identity can be reduced to a theorized central dimension of stratification, nevertheless class, ethnicity, and gender remain important socially structured bases of inequality. People's situations inevitably involve multiple axes of identity, typically in flux because of changing social circumstances. For instance, that among the working class in Britain, class is mapped and remapped over time in relation to aspects of gender and ethnicity, with women struggling over domestic, occupational, and sexual issues while members of different ethnic groups contend over occupations and neighborhoods. It is interesting to explore how constructed understandings of ethnicity and gender undergo shifts for people when they migrate. Because people's social circumstances seem ever changing, a key question concerns the conditions under which people will try to organize collectively on the basis of any particular axis of social stratification - class, gender, or ethnicity. If they try to do so, they are confronted with how to handle other distinctions in relation to whichever one they seek to affirm as axial. Thus, there is a continuum in the ways that non-class bases of culture can be articulated with class and culture. At one extreme, gender or ethnicity or status-group culture may provide a wholly alternative basis of cultural solidarity that cuts across (and reduces the importance of) class distinctions. At the other extreme, non-class bases of culture may be structured wholly within classes. These alternatives can be explored briefly for gender and ethnicity as examples of social criteria that give rise to status groups. (Appadurai, 1996) Multi-Ethnic London If one goes in afternoon to roam around the city of London, in the familiar environment of a South London street, one would be surprised to find that 'almost everybody in sight had a colored skin. Colored men and women can be seen wherever you look, shopping, strolling, or gossiping on the sunny street-corners with an animation that most Londoners lost long ago. A conservative Englishman would be shocked to see the main shopping thoroughfare, down an innocuous side-street, bears witness to a new London community in its interstices and hitherto neglected locations. Its transformative potential is changed by the uses the newcomers make of urban space and turning the street-corners into sociable sites of community and communication that perhaps recall similar locations in Kingston, Bridgetown or Port of Spain. There is another London being created here, one which admits the times and places of overseas to the supposedly humdrum heart of the aged British Empire, creating a novel environment which also epitomizes the perpetually changing milieu of city living. (Batt, 1999) The cultural, social, political, aesthetic change is never easy, of course, and many of the changes to London have occurred in the midst of discouraging and difficult conditions. Black and Asian settlers from former British colonies have played the major part in creating London's multicultural society, but it is they who experience some of the highest levels of poverty and discrimination. The writing of Londoners often bears stark witness to the subaltern lives and fortunes of those rendered other or marginal in a frequently hostile and unwelcoming city where prejudices towards newcomers have been, and still can be, found within employment, housing, government and the Metropolitan Police. Yet as we shall see, their writing offers alternative and revisionary narratives of subaltern city spaces which do not easily succumb to the demands of authority. (Batt, 1999) Migrations after WWII Since the end of the Second World War, the urban and human geography of London has been irreversibly altered as a consequence of patterns of migration from countries with a history of colonialism, so that today a number of London's neighborhoods are known primarily in terms of the 'overseas' populations they have nurtured. Whitechapel and Tower Hamlets boast significant Bangladeshi communities; Brixton has long been associated with Jamaican, Trinidadian and Guyanese settlers; Southall has significant numbers of Indian and Pakistani peoples; Earl's Court is renowned for its Australians and New Zealanders; Hampstead is a centre for South Africans in London; Clapham and Balham are home to many with links from Ghana. It is estimated that 300 different languages are readily spoken within the boundaries of the British capital. Although this mapping of London makes tidy a number of different cultural constituencies whose members perpetually move through the city and interact with others, it none the less gives an indication of the patterns and histories of settlement which characterize London at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Multicultural London is explored critically and closely here some selected examples from which take as their subject the lives, struggles, disappointments, achievements, conflicts and creations of such peoples in the city since the 1950s. (Batt, 1999) Indeed, the presence in London of individuals and communities from overseas is as old as the city itself, and might be considered to constitute its definitive characteristic. In the early 1990s the Museum of London embarked upon a project titled 'The Peopling of London', the aim of which was to call attention to 15,000 years of settlement in the city. In contradistinction, notions of British culture have seemed more open to multicultural and transnational influences, yet in effect serve to protect the sanctity of Englishness from unwelcome interference. Britishness at stake Britishness can be understood in two ways which in effect keep English and British safely apart: 'One, is Anglo-centric, frequently conservative, backward-looking, and increasingly located in a frozen and largely stereotyped idea of the national, that is English, culture. The other is ex-centric, open-ended and multi-ethnic. In the postwar decades, the primary location of open-ended models of Britishness has been the city: the disruptive energies of British transcultural ex-centricity are deemed to be safely contained within the urban limits, beyond which conventional models of Englishness remain untouched. London proceeds in a loosely chronological fashion from the 1950s to the end of the century. These arrangement combined with other factors suggest something of the changes to London across the period, in terms both of the experiences of the city and of the kinds of representations made about it. Londoners have taken control not only of the spaces in which they have found themselves but also of the agency to make their own representations about the city and their experiences. But it would be wrong to conclude that London's postcolonial history generally proceeds happily from postwar exclusion and struggle to multicultural inclusion and millennial chic. Many immigrants are being killed or abused in different ways but the culprits are very rarely convicted. Let us be clear: much has been achieved, both socially and culturally, in combating the unacceptable social attitudes which have spoiled the experience of London for many newcomers and their descendants; yet there remains more to be done. Although change has occurred in London in the decades between the 1950s and the 1990s, often for the better, many problems, prejudices and conflicts remain. Clearly a racialized rhetoric of resistance sits uneasily among the multicultural gathering provoked by the arrest. Yet it is not clear why the organizers' 'attempt to borrow' the strategies of analogous resistance initiatives is so quickly dismissed. It is more than a little peculiar that, as we have seen previously Many books offer a version of London in which the depressingly familiar social conflicts of previous decades are no longer primarily determining the formation of character and fortunes of plot. Such books describe identity crisis or divided ethnic consciousness, than in the quotidian period details of nineties North London and in a ready acceptance of the decentred mentalities of the now thoroughly decentred capital city. This 'ready acceptance' might be thought of not so much as an avoidance of crises of identity or ethnicity but as an important and strategic cultural reaction to the social problems which continued to mount throughout the 1990s, epitomized by the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in Eltham, South London, on 22 April 1993. After a considerable outcry about the inadequacy of the police and judicial system in responding to the killing specifically of a black Londoner, a public inquiry led to the publication in 1999 of the McPherson Report, in which the police and other organs of the state were found to be institutionally racist. We might regard these novel as well as its advocacy by Alibhai-Brown, Caryl Phillips and others alongside other celebratory events, such as the 1998 fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the SS Empire Windrush, as vital cultural rejoinders to London's enduring social problems of racialization and discrimination. White Britons, especially in the metropolitan areas, started developing conflicting attitudes to the changes in the society. They opened up their stomachs and their sensory organs, but not, on the whole, their heads and hearts. Subtle moments, light racism flutter in and out of your face so often you barely notice. The evidence of prevailing discrimination, racial violence and abuse piles up daily. The staunchly optimistic representations of London which gather at the end of the 1990s may be legitimately considered as cheerful and politically vital declarations of tenure and change - ones which stubbornly reminded reactionary mentalities in London that their attempts to shore up the divisive borders of race, culture and ethnicity had spectacularly failed. The depiction of the youthful narrators of such books and writeups cleaning the water underlines general quest for purity while also positioning them at odds with London's contemporaneity. If the messy waterway symbolizes London's multicultural and multiracial legacy, the narrator's attempt to clean the water may be read as symptomatic of his agonized Naipaulain quest for cultural and national purity, epitomized by their study of canonical English literature at Oxford. The quest for purity is impossible in London, however, the waters of which are always muddied. Colored people living in London People from Guyana, Jamaica, India, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, and Trinidad live in London. Their visions of London, which delineate the oppressive obligations of place as well as the creative and resistant revisionings of space, collectively constitute a heterogeneous series of layers, a body of texts which tell no single story but instead bear witness to the different routes through the city, and their consequences. London's postcolonial settlers and their children - from Sam Selvon's spatial creolization of London's unwelcoming streets to Bernardine Evaristo's transcultural heroine Lara, whose hybrid identity offers a particularly educative mirror for London's migrant history and multicultural contemporaneity. The frequent utopianism found in postcolonial London writing which dares to reinvent London in defiance of those who would deny the city's latest transformations is a measure of its political efficacy and predominant commitment to social change. Rather than glibly cheerleading cultural difference, the representations of London we have explored in these books invest centrally in the painful and at times violent fortunes of postwar London. In several texts, as we have seen London has emerged in those locations often forgotten or neglected by most Londoners - derelict streets, neglected neighborhoods, bomb-sites and ruins. In Colin MacInnes's City of Spades Johnny Fortune first meets Billy Whispers at a Brixton house which 'stood all by itself among ruins of what I suppose was wartime damages, much like one tooth left sticking in an old man's jaw and the Moorhen pub where Montgomery Pew hears Lord Alexander's calypso stands opposite the brick fence that lined the bombed-out site. Many books on the subject enable one to think critically about these spaces, and at times raise concerns over the difficult task of translating the progressive aspects of cultural endeavour into the social practices of everyday life - Emecheta's Adah struggles in Second-Class Citizen to establish a space for social autonomy through the imaginative transcultural travails which open new ways of thinking about her race and gender; and in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid Kureishi's community of kids is evicted from its caravan-site and forced to seek out new spaces in London. Looking beyond the city's limits, can representations of London offer transformative resources not only for the city's social conditions but also to the imagining of the nation-state within which it resides. Do the transcultural and transnational aspects of postcolonial London's facticity productively confront both the exclusionary consolidation of national culture and identity increasingly grounded in a notion of racialized whiteness and the cellular balkanization of the nation's multicultural communities. Imperial Mentality The traces of an imperial mentality are evident from the national culture, particularly those that involved seeing the white British as a superior. This mentality penetrated everyday life, popular culture and consciousness. It remains active in projected fantasies and fears about difference, and in racialised stereotypes of otherness. The unstated assumption remains that Britishness and whiteness go together, like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. There has been no collective working through of this imperial experience. The absence from the national curriculum of a rewritten history of Britain as an imperial force, involving dominance in Ireland as well as in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, is proving from this perspective to be an unmitigated disaster. (Eade, 2000) The task of reorienting the narration of the nation by recontextualizing culture and society in relation to Empire and its legacy, and challenging the projected fantasies of cultural otherness and apartness which have manifested themselves in institutionalized and popular racism at the levels of both state and street. It may well afford an opportunity for some to begin to work through the consequences of the end of Empire which only seems to have had minimal impact in the postwar decades. Multicultural Education in London The National Curriculum was developed in London after the Education Reform Act (ERA) of 1988. The setting up of separate subject groups and the decision that multicultural education was a cross-curricular dimension guaranteed that even multiculturalism did not inform the curriculum significantly. A more multicultural, multilingual, multi-faith London might have been recognized in the process. In the 1988 Act the government had taken, for the first time, direct responsibility for the curriculum and assessment. The National Curriculum Council decided not to issue formal guidance on the multicultural cross-curricular dimension. The Task Group set up for this purpose in 1989 was disbanded after 18 months amidst considerable controversy. The Council's publications did indirectly encourage schools to engage with the issues of racism, racial disadvantage, and discrimination, and to eradicate racism and prejudice within schools. The cultures, languages, and religions of ethnic minorities were to be treated with respect. Moral issues such as social justice and equality were to be considered by pupils. One might argue that official action had attempted to greatly reduce the multicultural dimension. Multicultural education is, one might suggest, simply good education. It is about higher standards and achievement—quality as well as equality. The Education Reforms led to the establishment of a highly prescriptive curriculum. There was also concern that the new national assessment procedures would in fact discriminate against bilingual pupils because they were not culturally or linguistically appropriate. There was an argument that the introduction of the market into education was similarly antipathetic to multicultural and anti-racist education because it was individualistic, competitive, and racist. Power was taken from the local education authorities, some of whom had been pacesetters in anti-racist developments, passed to the central government, and simultaneously devolved to schools where the atomized parent consumers tended to concentrate on examination results rather than broader social issues. The greater freedom for parents to opt out of the local education authorities was inevitably going to produce greater inequalities between schools. The National Curriculum was divided into subjects and therefore there was a danger that the interdisciplinary, collaborative work with more democratic and participatory teaching and learning styles would be lost. There were so many new initiatives that commitment to multicultural anti-racist education was in practice significantly reduced. (Acker 1988) There was considerable public controversy about many subjects, including history, mathematics, modern languages, and English. The history curriculum debate focused on the balance between British, European, and world history. The New Right asserted that this was central to British identity and demanded a much more central place for the traditional British culture and values. It was not just British history, but a particular interpretation of that history that was to be imposed. There should be significant emphasis on the zenith of Empire and its civilizing mission, and little exploration of the destructiveness of slavery and the undermining of the economies of Commonwealth countries. Mathematics was a site of particular controversy, seen to be unimaginative in its treatment of the multicultural dimension. The modern languages documents appeared to assert a hierarchy of languages with European languages given the highest status, and with little provision for the development and sustaining of heritage languages. The English debate was focused on the debate about forms of teaching but this spilled over into which books should be given priority. Religious education was not part of the national curriculum, though it was a statutory requirement. It had to be of a “broadly Christian nature” and the compulsory act of collective worship every day had to be “wholly or mainly Christian. ” The effect of the whole was to downgrade the significance of multicultural anti-racist education. The cross curricular themes (education for economic and industrial awareness; careers education and guidance; health education; education for citizenship; environmental education) and dimensions (countering racism in British education; personal and social education: a Black perspective; gender issues in education for citizenship; children with special educational needs; European community understanding; cultural differences and staff development; accountability and local management of schools were to be developed across the curriculum. The incessant changing of the curriculum and assessment has not led to significant improvements in quality because teachers were not able to plan due to changing policies and an incoherence in the curriculum model. There has been little opportunity to evaluate the National Curriculum and even the one major review that affirmed that the National Curriculum and assessment and testing is the key to raising educational standards stated, five years after teachers had said so, that urgent action was needed to (a) simplify and clarify the programs of study, (b) reduce the volume of material to be taught, and (c) reduce prescription so as to give more scope for professional judgment. We are aware of the turbulent environment and the pace of change but the mess of the implementation of the National Curriculum was due to sheer bad planning. (Acker 1988) The Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED), the Government's Office for inspecting schools, published a report in 1996 called Recent Research on the Achievements of Ethnic Minority Pupils. A major issue in London has been educational performance in relation to race, class, and gender. The OFSTED research shows that if ethnic diversity is ignored and if differences in educational achievement and experience are not examined, then considerable injustices will be sanctioned and enormous potential wasted. Social class and gender both clearly affect school performance, but when these are controlled for African Caribbean pupils, both sexes achieve below the level of other groups, the boys in particular. There have been significant improvements nationally in the last 10 years, but in some parts of the country the achievement of African Caribbean boys has worsened. Asian pupils achieve better than Whites of the same class and gender, with those of Indian origin achieving more highly than those of Bangladeshi origin. There is evidence that some secondary schools are more effective for certain ethnic minority groups in achieving high performance in school. This is measured against anticipated performance that takes account of socioeconomic factors. However, in schools that are effective in achieving high measured performance above expectations, not all pupils benefit equally. South Asian pupils suffer harassment in greater degree than other groups, but Black Afro-Caribbean boys are six times more likely to be excluded from school than White boys. Qualitative research indicated a relatively high level of conflict between White teachers and African Caribbean children. There is a considerable gulf between the daily reality experienced by many Black pupils and the stated goal of equal opportunities for all. This analysis by a government agency deserves serious consideration. There is research on how schools achieve good interethnic relations. There is little that is unexpected. Teachers are creatively engaged in responding to cultural diversity. Schools are constantly focused in their determination to implement equal opportunities. They recruit, retain, and promote ethnic minority. (Acker 1988) Multiculturalism with Tourism & Business Opportunities The Tower of London has been sporting the same bright livery for more than 500 years. As flamboyant reminders of bygone age, they stand in solemn contrast to the busy, multicultural city now bustling all around them as Europe's most vibrant and dynamic capital. While tourists flock to the city for its historical charms, double-decker buses and quaint corner pubs, business is finding plenty of other reasons to set up in London. Many world's largest companies choose the city as their European base and it has become Europe's best city for business. London has capitalized on its long history as a major commercial centre to become the world's largest hub for financial services, accounting for a third of all global foreign exchange trading - more than the adrenalin-charged markets of New York and Tokyo combined. At the same time, the city has carved a niche for itself as Europe's media centre. If Disraeli was right when he called London "a nation, not a city", then this city-nation's economy now outranks that of entire countries such as Portugal, Poland, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. One of the keys to the city's astonishing resurgence over the last decade is its exceptional communications infrastructure, which is proving an irresistible lure for the growing number of businesses now seeking access to highly robust, 'big pipe' network capacity. For both companies, it's a solid partnership that makes sense. On the strength of its optical networking products, Nortel Networks has now won contracts to build 13 of the 17 major pan-European high-capacity networks - a development that has led to a strong commitment to the region and an impressive level of expertise. With the technologies to deliver tomorrow's speed-of-light services now being put in place throughout Europe and beyond, the only remaining stumbling blocks to rapid roll-out of new online services are to be found at the regulatory level. In some cases, it's a matter of creaky legislation failing to keep pace with developments in info-communications technology. In other areas, it comes down to a question of approach, with regulators now being called upon to take a more proactive role in resolving long-standing problems. Happily for London's telecoms users, most experts agree that UK regulator, Oftel, has succeeded in creating an equitable environment for the country's competitive operators, earning itself a reputation for deft handling of complex issues and a willingness to act quickly and decisively. If the organization is sometimes criticized for moving too slowly - as it was on the implementation of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology - many believe Oftel's more considered approach ultimately pays off in terms of better service quality on UK networks. Works Cited Acker, S. (1988). Teachers, gender, and resistance. British Journal of Sociology of Education, Apple, M. W. (Ed.). (1982). Cultural and economic reproduction in education. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Alexander, Jeffrey, ed. 1988. Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies . New York: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey, and Philip Smith. 1993. "The discourse of civil society: a new proposal for cultural studies." Theory and Society 22: 152-207. Alvarez, Sonia, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds. 1998. 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