'Some nice Latin American music will be played by a tape player': anti-racist critique and the multicultural state

This article explores multicultural politics of 'anti-racism' through a detailed and contextualized study of the 1993 March 21 campaign in Canada's largest federal administrative tribunal, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB). I argue that multicultural state politics thw...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social identities 2020-09, Vol.26 (5), p.705-718
Main Author: Masoumi, Azar
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Campaigns
Canada
Celebrations
Civil service
Discourses
Dominance
Exploitation
Government employees
Immigration
institutional racism
IRB
Local politics
Meaning
multicultural policy
Multiculturalism & pluralism
Music
Politics
post-racialism
Racialization
Racism
Recycling
State multiculturalism
Systemic racism
Tribunals & commissions
Unpaid
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Summary:This article explores multicultural politics of 'anti-racism' through a detailed and contextualized study of the 1993 March 21 campaign in Canada's largest federal administrative tribunal, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB). I argue that multicultural state politics thwart serious engagement with anti-racist critique, and drastically reconfigure the meanings and consequences of anti-racism. Within multicultural state politics, anti-racism quickly devolves to apolitical recycling of diversity discourses, and benign celebrations of cultural festivities. As I will show, state multiculturalism is a cheap institutional production that heavily relies on the unpaid labour of racialized civil servants, and leaves the status quo largely intact. Ironically, multicultural celebrations of diversity produce novel opportunities for racialization and racial exploitation. While the celebrations go on, relations of racial dominance are reproduced and protected from critique.
ISSN:1350-4630
1363-0296
DOI:10.1080/13504630.2020.1787823