Mary E. Thomas, Multicultural Girlhood: Racism, Sexuality and the Conflicted Spaces of American Education, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2011, 216 pages, $75.50 cloth, $24.95 paper, $24.95 E-book ISBN 978-1-439-90731-3 (cloth), 978-1-439-90732-0 (paper), 978-1-439-90733-7 (E-book).

The setting of this book is the aftermath of a fight at a San Fernando Valley high school in Los Angeles, in 2005.  Because the rioters were (male) students from groups described as ‘Armenian’ and ‘Latino’, and due to the escalation of the event, this event earned the label of ‘race riot’.  Hundreds of students took part, furniture and food was hurled about.  The resulting moral panic occurred, in part, because of a rise in what have been described as ‘campus hate crimes’.  Of course, Los Angeles has a history of racialised rioting, which now appears to be seeping from the streets onto school campuses.

In Multicultural Girlhood: Racism, Sexuality and the conflicted spaces of American education, Mary Thomas has asked a straight forward but often ignored question about the role of young women in these situations.  This book is an in-depth analysis of the engagements of young women (school girls) with the expectations of prescribed multiculturalism and in this case, riotous behaviours.  For these young women, much of their girlhood appears to be spent in observation of highly masculinised behaviours.  We are, however, treated to a far more complex story.  Thomas has provided a fine-grained analysis of this criss-crossing of gender with racialisation in contemporary North America in contexts that primarily focus on ‘race’ in populist accounts.

As Thomas points out race and gender are not the only cleavages of difference.  She refers also to the complexity of the operation of class as a measure of economic prosperity.  The young women at the centre of this book are classed by location – as ‘working class’ by national, state and city measures, but also as affluent within their own ‘migrant’ worlds.  This is a salient complication because of the nature of riotous behaviours that are so often the focus of moral panics that swiftly hone in on a location.  Once identified as ‘problematic’ – poor and racialised – such locations are stigmatised by such events and too often reduced to those terms by external observers (particularly via the mass media).  Thomas problematises these assumptions by taking the reader into a world located by these sorts of descriptors.

This account unpacks how ideas and subsequent multiculturalism policies are playing out in the United States (with application elsewhere).  It details how the identities of the young women in this story have been shaped and reshaped by this version of multiculturalism and other less banal socialisations.  Yet, within their various and multiple subjectivities, discussions of the masculinised schoolyard fight – the riot – come to rest on an apparent contradiction.  The girls’ wish, to ‘just get along’, contrasts with expressions of deeply imbued antagonisms towards difference.  A banal version of multiculturalism is revealed for its superficial skate through the very real and difficult tensions of living with difference.  Its mechanism for avoidance of deeper issues, of racialised/classed and gendered differences, is to focus on simple expressions of happiness about what difference offers, such as cuisine or other cultural performances.  The state has devised this form of multiculturalism and incorporated it via agencies of educational policy provision.  Ultimately, multiculturalism has been rendered ineffective beyond superficial tolerance.

The book comes to grips with whether or not a little happy multiculturalism is better than none.  Can this ‘banal (version of) multiculturalism’ have any impact of violence in schools, and by extension, wider societies?  Clearly the answer is no.  The book exemplifies why these sorts of multiculturalism are more than inadequate.  The apparent goal of societal harmony sits on a foundation of assimilationist integration.  Indeed, such versions of multiculturalisms can be viewed as part of a wider neoliberal project, as Ghassan Hage (1998) emphatically observed in the Australian context where he identified some of the workings of ‘white multiculturalism’.

In Australia, policies of multiculturalism hark back to the early 1970s, as they do in Canada.  Lauded as a panacea to the previous ‘white Australia policy’ (which also ignored Indigenous Australians who tend to regard all postcolonial arrivals and their decedents as migrants), multiculturalism has dramatically shifted the composition of Australian society, since that time.  We pride ourselves on the cosmopolitan character of our society, our general acceptance of diversity, and all the wonderful cuisine now on offer.  Consumption (of multicultural offerings) is a foundation of banal multiculturalism (cf Hage, 1993).  Beyond this superficial posturing, moments of racialised rioting, such as the infamous Cronulla and Redfern riots, suggest that banal multiculturalism is a thin veil indeed.

To delve beyond the façade, Thomas encounters the deeper individualised responses that are part of a greater shared psychology.  This has manifested in cultures of anxiety, fear, distrust and general unacceptance of others. Along with others, my own accounts of riotous Sydney have gestured to, but only skirted around the psycho-cultural aspects of such events (Shaw, 2009). Thomas resists the seductive images of masculine violence that so often capture our research attention.  Such imaginings are clearly present but backgrounded to the voices of the young women who were offered spaces in which they felt able to speak about their sometimes-confronting sensitivities.  Women are often present at riotous events, sometimes participate in them, and at times ignite them. Multicultural Girlhood reminds us of the pitfalls of forgetting the importance of gender, particularly in the context of racialisation.

It is heartening also to read an analysis that grounds the efficacy of psychoanalytic methodologies in the detailed accounts of lives lived, but brought to the attention of researchers because of a riotous event.  As we read Multicultural girlhood, the riot fades in significance to the much more telling stories of the young women.  Their accounts reveal much more about their (less direct) involvement.  This use of psychoanalysis adds depth and richness to our understandings of socio-cultural processes that, to my mind and in the context of this school’s banal multiculturalism, reinforce this version of ‘white’ multiculturalism.

When reading Multicultural Girlhood “each chapter must all be taken together as proof of the spatial complexity of subjectivity, not as containers of social struggles” (page 32).  And as we take those, at times, uncomfortable steps into the inner worlds of others (to me, at least) it must be remembered that these are not always stories about nice happy young women.  This book peels away layers to reveal that although desires for the sort of happy multiculturalism (of getting along) ascribed by school curricula was mouthed, these girls have ultimately fallen in line with their underlying and heavily racialised identifications.  Although not overtly explicated in the book, the whitewashing effect of banal multiculturalism is demonstrated over and again.  The dangers of consumption and passive observation of multiculturalism are revealed, as demonstrated in:

“neither the moment of silence for Armenian genocide [during WW1] nor the Cinco de Mayo celebration [for the Mexican victory over the French as the Battle of Puebla, May 5, 1862] is accompanied by any educational content that details the historical or geographical significance of the events … issues of racial-ethnic pride, competition, or pain that these programmes may evoke, is simply not addressed” (page 29).

With this kind of exposure, and the somewhat understandable indifference to such events that cannot be related to by others, tensions are inevitable.  And this book teases out this pulled-apartness, of intentions (conscious, but often not), to be good multicultural citizens as determined by a set of principles learned at school, and enculturation more broadly.  A common set of codes is associated with hierarchies of migration.  Struggles for power often result in the most recent arrivals sitting firmly at the lower societal rungs.  A myth of privilege (cf Mickler, 1998) and consequent ‘wounded otherness’ creates resentment, which is then responded to – resentment is a double-edged sword.

Within the context of a Los Angeles high school the young women can only be as ‘good’ at a neo-liberal multicultural project as what is on offer.  Unless they learn a deeper appreciation of difference beyond the school context, these young people remain ‘subjects in the making’, reproducing the requirements of their own future struggles in a society that requires them to be de-collectivised.  Their struggles to ‘get on’ in society more broadly remain individualised, agency is competitive and racialised.  Ultimately, these young women want to be free of their ‘cultural’ binds, to be able to exact the liberties of being able ‘get ahead’, which is ultimately the hollow promise of banal multiculturalism.  This form of multiculturalism celebrates differences in token ways.  Yes, these young women are individuals, with agency and indeed certain empowerments – they are ‘liberated’, and desire, but come up against wider societal delineations, expectations and ultimately, racialisations.

Resistance is expressed as disappointment and frustration in an organisation (a school, and a society) that is ill-equipped to cope.  Frustration can lead to anger, and anger can ignite a fight, or even a riot.  As has happened elsewhere, the next riotous event might just be ignited by angry or vengeful (young) women.

The ultimate strength of Multicultural Girlhood is that it is an example of the best use of a case study – it does what a good case study, or what have been labelled as ‘new location studies’, should do; it fully contextualises its project as a ‘case in point’ of a wider politics, in this case, the politics of multiculturalism.  The project, to give voice to the young women who witnessed a schoolyard fight, or ‘riot’, has provided narratives that are rich and telling.  Although representationally fraught (and this kind of research has sent cowards like me to retreat into studying adult whiteness), my moments of concern about researcher/reader voyeurism were put to rest by the unfolding and enfolded analyses that accompanies the narratives of the young women that have been woven into much of the text.  The methods used to unpack these push ethnographic discourse analyses forward with freshness and rigour.  The ongoing acknowledgement of the wider power structures that is never far enough from the narratives that they could be set adrift, to be observed from a position of reader authority or consumed as (sometimes disturbing) entertainment, completes the analysis.

So as someone who struggles with ways to get at less conscious operations of racialisation (amongst other things), I take a leaf from this book, which I wholeheartedly and widely recommend. 

References

Hage G (1993) Anglo-Celtics Today: Cosmo-Multiculturalism and the Phase of the Fading Phallus. Communal/Plural 1: 41-77.

Hage G (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto Press.

Mickler S (1998) The Myth of Privilege: Aboriginal Status, Media Visions, Public Ideas. Fremantle WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

Shaw WS (2009) Riotous Sydney: Redfern, Macquarie Fields and (my) Cronulla. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 425-443.