Multiculturalism as Second Reconstruction: The Continuing Quest for Fraternal Membership in North American Liberal Democracies

Abstract

Abstract:Even though, historically, the black population of Canada has been small, blackness has always been at the forefront of the Canadian imagination of who belongs. First, there was the ideal that Canada was to be a white man’s country, but that shattered in the wake of two major hemispheric developments. The first was the Haitian Revolution and the second was the American Civil War. To this day, the latter continues to cast a shadow over Canada’s ethno-racial relations and provincial affairs. I argue that official multiculturalism in Canada is neo-mythic blackness—the pragmatic realization that blacks and blackness are intrinsic to the Canadian imagination. I argue official multiculturalism results from a second “reconstruction” in North America, this time with Canada setting, as its ideal, the attainment of “a just society” marked by multicultural citizenship. Genuine multiculturalism as an ideal is the attempt by societies to incorporate ethnic and racial difference in a climate of freedom where no group is racialized as dominant and no group is positioned as inferior. Canadian multiculturalism is ethical and ontological blackness.