What is Multiculturalism, Really?
One of the questions I asked my interview subjects was: "How do you define multiculturalism?" and the mixture of answers that I received to that question could not have been more surprising. I hadn't realized that my own definition of multiculturalism gave me a preconceived notion of what others' answers would be. In my mind, multiculturalism was much like the definition my first subject gave--it was about having a mixture of different people with different backgrounds and exposure to different things and the place where all of those differences came into contact with one another. However, some subjects' definitions were narrower than that, and many definitions were dealing with individual perspectives and perceptions. For example, a couple of the international students ended up giving me a definition of a "multicultural person." In fact, I found that the international students were more likely to give that sort of individualist type of definition than those who identified as "American," who described more of a "multicultural environment." This again, goes back to the point that identity is incredibly complex and our backgrounds have profound influence over the lens through which we view the world. So, this was another problem I ran into: if my goal was to "redefine multiculturalism," that was meant to say that there was only one definition of multiculturalism, which proved to not be the case in my research, and in others' (Hunter). In my interview of a faculty member, I discovered that many in Europe even have qualms now with the term multiculturalism in the first place--it has even become kind of taboo. So then, perhaps what is to be redefined is not the term "multiculturalism," but how we think about this term. What I am suggested is a sort of metacognitive way of thinking about multiculturalism, meaning that we must be cautious of considering all perspectives when we use that term and refer to "multiculturalism," because if we do not, we limit our thinking to our experiences and narrow our lens to one that cannot be helpful in dealing with questions of tolerance and intolerance.
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