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Racial stereotyping echoes through British literature and culture almost to the present day. And for some time, assumptions of racial inferiority coloured mainstream British perception of non-white culture and art. The Notting Hill Street Carnival is the biggest street festival and a miracle of creativity with costumes that take months to sew and wonderful music and dance. But it is only recently that mainstream press has reported it as anything other than a law and order issue.
However, in recent years, people have begun to acknowledge the presence of non-white people in Britain in a positive way. And even to talk about Britain as a multi-racial Society. Although there are some people who would resist this description and pretend Britain's continuing ethnic diversity doesn't exit and insist on Britain being described as a European or white country. But although the phrase multi-racial society is used quite frequently, a genuinely multi-racial society with genuine parity of esteem is quite difficult to achieve. The Caribbean is often cited as a part of the world where you can find multi-racialism in action. The national motto of Jamaica for instance is "Out of Many, One People". However, it is noticeable that even in these supposed bastions of harmonious multi-racialism, tensions have arisen between different races. In Trinidad, for instance, the archetypal multi-racial island in the sun, there is bitter rivalry between the Asian and African-Caribbean community. The issue is equality. Where one ethnic group is demonstrably subordinate to another, it is idle to talk about multi-racialism because in reality one culture is dominant. Furthermore, the political attractions of playing the race card are often irresistible, multi-racialism just doesn't have the same visceral appeal to popular sentiment.
But multi-racialism is a tricky balance to achieve. On the one hand, there has to be a measure of economic equality and genuine parity of esteem. But on the other, it should not mean obliterating differences or pretending differences do not exist. Britain would be the poorer without its different races and their different cultural traditions. But it would also be a mistake to try and iron out these differences in the name of multi-racialism. Of course, a vexed question is of the relative merit of different cultures and cultural traditions. It is very difficult in these cases to distinguish where objective judgement starts and prejudice begins. In European societies, the bias tends to be that European culture and tradition are necessarily superior. But in the words of the American blues songs "It ain't necessarily so."
But with all the difficulties in practice, multi-racialism is still an ideal worth striving for. Because you can look around and see where ethnic tensions and rivalry can lead. The civil wars in Africa get plenty of coverage. One of the original ethnic conflicts was the Ibo insurrection in Biafra in Nigeria. But the fighting in Yugoslavia is just as much an ethnic conflict as any African bush war. And the prospects in Yugoslavia are a nightmare. Serbs, Croats and Muslims are so intermarried and intermixed that Yugoslavia seems destined to shatter into a multiplicity of mini-statelets. All ethically pure in themselves but in almost every other way, unsustainable as modern nation states. So a multi-racial society is not just a rosy and possibly unrealistic ideal. It is vital to understand how a multi-racial society can be made to work if we are going to avoid further turmoil across great swathes of Africa, Asia and Central Europe.
Реферат опубликован: 19/05/2007