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diversity
discussion forum
background
The discussion titled diversity provided an opportunity
to present a range of ideas about cultural diversity, living
in a culturally diverse society and the future of race relations.
What are your ideas about cultural diversity? Here some
ideas about cultural diversity from others.
We must ensure that colour, race and gender become only
a God-given gift to each one of us and not an indelible mark
or attribute that accords a special status to any.
Nelson Mandela, In The Words of Nelson
Mandela, edited by Jennifer Crwys-Williams, Michael Joseph
Ltd, London, 1998, unpaginated
Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: [s]he is the hidden
face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the
time in which understanding and affinity founder.
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves,
trans. Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, New York,
1991, p 1
If we all pretend that racism does not exist, that we do
not know what it is or how to change it - it never has to
go away.
bell hooks, Killing Rage Ending Racism,
Penguin, London, 1995, p 4
The question is no longer how to get rid of the strangers
and the strange, but how to live with them daily and permanently.
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics,
Blackwell, London, 1996, p 12
There is an inextricable link between the imaginings of
'home' and the mechanism of hatred used to define its borders
... Provocative and contentious discourses of hatred cannot
be separated from the political, historical, economic and
religious contexts within which people hate. It is here that
hatred is most often articulated in reference to contested
lands and human and civil rights, fuelled by emotional and
needs for a place to call 'home' - a place to feel 'at home'
... Implicit in the desire for home is hatred for anyone who
threatens its realisation.
Mitzi Goldman, 'The fine line between
'hatred' and 'home'', Communal/Plural, No 5, 1997, University
of Western Sydney, p 153-154
Because of colonization, the question of who defines what
is Native, and even who is defined as Native, has been taken
away from Native peoples by Western-trained scholars, government
officials, and other technicians ... [Native Hawaiians inhabit]
a hostage economy where tourist industry employment means
active participation in their own degradation.
Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter:
colonialism and sovereignty in Hawai'i, Common Courage Press,
1993
At the moment young people inherit the world like a straitjacket
- a tight, restrictive place that must be fitted into, conformed
to and perpetuated. A place whose presumptions, values, goals
and processes are given and not questioned. A world that comes
to them on terms that are so embedded that they seem to be
part of the way things are. Of course the terms are not. They
are a result of human decisions and values. They have been
chosen. And the human that will choose them is no different
to the human that can change them.
Tan Le, 'How the young can free us
from our straitjacket', The Age, Friday 12 March 1999
In Australia, there has been an almost comprehensive rejection
of the idea that Aboriginal peoples might be self-governing
within the limits of Australian law. The exceptions are minor
such as the right to practise narrowly interpreted 'traditions
and customs' on Aboriginal land in some demarcated areas,
some limited rights under local governance statutes, and the
narrow recognition of native title under 'traditional laws
and customs' as pertaining only to the internal incidents
of native title in the Native Title Act of 1994. The Australian
Law Reform Commission recommended a limited means of recognition
by amending some statutes, but the recommendations have largely
been ignored. In a limited way, the judiciary has adopted
its advice on the relevance of customary law in evidence and
sentencing.
Dr Marcia Langton, Inaugural Chair
of Australian Indigenous Studies, Inaugural Professorial Lecture,
University Of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia http://www.indigenous.unimelb.edu.au/lecture1.html
Despite the regular presence of Asians in contemporary Australia
and despite recurrent official rhetoric that Australia is
part of Asia, Asianness remains solidly defined as external
to the symbolic space of Australianness, in contrast with
Aboriginality which - certainly since Mabo - has now been
accepted by white Australia, albeit relectuantly, as occupying
an undeniable place, however fraught by the injustices of
history, in the heart of Australian national identity.
Ien Ang, 'I'm a feminist but ... 'Other'
women and postcolonial feminism', Barbara Caine & Rosemary
Pringle (eds), Transitions: New Australian Feminists, Allen
and Unwin, 1995, p72
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