immigration has been perceived as a challenge to those single national identities. Multiculturalism concerns “the general place of minorities, programs designed to foster equality, institutional structures created to provide better social services, and resources extended to ethnic minority organizations” (Vertovec, 1996, p. 222); these became the way to respond to cultural and religious differences.
The Canadian Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism is often credited with developing the modern political awareness of multiculturalism beginning with a preliminary report in 1965 (R. L. Jackson, 2010). Initially a policy to protect indigenous cultures, multiculturalism became an official Canadian policy in 1971; soon Australia and most member states of the European Union followed.
In the United States, the origins of multiculturalism date back as early as 1915 to philosopher Horace Kallen (1915, 1924/1970), who set forth the idea of cultural pluralism to describe the United States. He employed the metaphor of a symphony orchestra. Each instrument was an immigrant group that, together with other immigrant groups, created harmonious music. Kallen’s opponents included John Dewey (Westbrook, 1991), who warned that cultural pluralism supported rigid segregation lines between groups. Hollinger (1995) has described the issue as a two-sided confrontation between those who advocate a uniform culture grounded in Western civilization and those who promote diversity.
Several European heads of state have denounced multicultural policies: Former British prime minister David Cameron, German chancellor Angela Merkel, former Australian prime minister John Howard, former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, and former French president Nicolas Sarkozy have all challenged their country’s multicultural policies. Several European states—notably the Netherlands and Denmark—have returned to an official monoculturalism (Bissoondath, 2002). Chancellor Merkel, for example, announced that multiculturalism had “utterly failed” (Weaver, 2010).
The same concern that multiculturalism has failed exists in the United States. Increased immigration and international terrorism and domestic terrorism have led to renewed pressures against multiculturalism. In April 2013, 3 people were killed and 264 injured when two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon. The FBI identified two suspects, brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Although they had never lived in Chechnya, the brothers identified as Chechen. Their family emigrated in 2002 and applied for refugee status. Both spoke English well. Tamerlan enrolled in a community college and married a U.S. citizen. He was quoted as having said that he “didn’t understand” Americans and had not a single American friend (Weigel, 2013). Dzhokhar became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2012 and enrolled in a university program in marine biology. He was reported to be greatly influenced by his older brother. Some believe that the brothers were motivated by an anti-American, radical version of Islam that Tamerlan had learned in the Russian republic Dagestan or that they had learned in the United States.
Some columnists began to label the tragedy as an example of the failure of multiculturalism. Mike Gonzalez (2013), for example, asks how two refugee recipients of free education in the United States could not assimilate. Assimilation, Gonzalez asserts, does not connote coercion and loss of ancestral culture, but it does mean patriotism. (You’ll read more about assimilation in Chapters 10 and 11.)
Postethnic Cultures
You read earlier in this chapter that John Dewey criticized cultural pluralism as encouraging people to identify themselves as members of one group. If a person is born female in Texas of immigrant parents from Mexico and then becomes an attorney, a Republican, and a Baptist and currently lives in Minneapolis, who is she? In the United States, can she identify herself as any one of these? As all of these? Will others most likely identify her first as Hispanic?
A postethnic perspective recognizes that each of us, like the Minneapolis attorney, lives in many diverse groups and so we aren’t confined to only one group. Angela Davis (1992) used the image of “a rope attached to an anchor”: While we may be anchored in one community, our “ropes” should be long enough to permit us to move into other communities.
Hollinger (1995) describes a postethnic perspective as a challenge to the “right” of our grandparents to establish our primary identity. Postethnicity “prefers voluntary to prescribed affiliations, appreciates multiple identities, pushes for communities of wide scope, recognizes the constructed character of ethno-racial groups, and accepts the formation of new groups as a part of the normal life of a democratic society” (p. 116). Postethnicity recognizes that groups based on affiliations are as substantive and authentic as groups based on blood and history.
In one sense, postethnicity is an idealistic attempt to redefine groups rigidly based on ethnicity into groups based on voluntary interests. However, if viewed from the perspective of dominant U.S. cultural values—particularly individualism—postethnicity is a reaffirmation of individuals’ right to define themselves by individual interest and not by heritage. Postethnicity in the United States may be an extension of extreme individualism. A postethnic perspective does not assume that everyone is the same. Rather, it recognizes our interdependent future and stretches the boundaries of we. Using the rhetorical sensitivity theory, some will argue that postethnicity is an example of noble selves.
It’s important to recognize the criticism of postethnicity: that it is idealistic to assume that others will not continue to label some people as members of a group and communicate with them as members of that group and not as individuals.
Barriers to Intercultural Communication
LaRay M. Barna (1997) developed a list of six barriers to effective and appropriate intercultural communication: anxiety, assuming similarity instead of difference, ethnocentrism, stereotypes and prejudice, nonverbal misinterpretations, and language. Her categories of barriers are used here when discussing problems that can arise in intercultural encounters. The first four kinds of barriers are discussed in this chapter. Nonverbal misinterpretations and language are discussed separately in following chapters. Taking these common mistakes into account can help you improve your intercultural communication skills.
Anxiety
The first barrier is high Anxiety. When you are anxious due to not knowing what you are expected to do, it’s only natural to focus on that feeling and not be totally present in the communication transaction.
For example, you may have experienced anxiety on your very first day on a new college campus or in a new job. You may have been so conscious of being new—and out of place—and focused so much of your attention on that feeling that you made common mistakes and appeared awkward to others. Sugawara (1993) surveyed 168 Japanese employees of Japanese companies working in the United States and 135 of their U.S. coworkers. Only 8% of the U.S. coworkers felt impatient with the Japanese coworkers’ English. While 19% of the Japanese employees felt their spoken English was poor or very poor and 20% reported feeling nervous when speaking English with U.S. coworkers, 30% of the Japanese employees felt the U.S. coworkers were impatient with their accent. Almost 60% believed that language was the problem in communicating with the U.S. coworkers. For some, anxiety over speaking English properly contributed to avoiding interactions with the U.S. coworkers and limiting interactions both on and off the job.
The German sociologist Georg Simmel’s (1858–1918) concepts of “the stranger” and “social distance” were precursors to C. R. Berger and Calabrese’s (1975) anxiety/uncertainty reduction theory (Rogers, 1999). This theory assumes that during the initial phase of interaction with another person, your primary communication goal is to reduce your uncertainty about that person. Thus, you are attempting to discover information about the other person and to share information about yourself.
Gudykunst and his colleagues (see, e.g., Gudykunst,
