Max Jeganathan
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Donald Trump should meet my kids. His reluctance to acknowledge that someone can have parents of different ethnicities plays to a sad but common modern cultural illiteracy around mixed race families.
In a moment that took the US political landscape to new heights of absurdity, Trump – speaking at a convention for black journalists of all places, remarked, in reference to his opponent Kamala Harris, “I don’t know – Is she Indian? Or is she black?”
Harris has Jamaican and Indian-born parents. The answer to Trump’s question is pretty clear to anyone who understands human reproduction.
As someone with mixed race kids, I know I shouldn’t take Trump’s little pot-shot personally. It was clearly a political play targeted at the industrial swing states and undecided black voters. Trump was seeking to frame up Harris as a free-floating globalist outside of the cultural stable of white America and at the same time, not black enough to be America’s second black President. I’ve worked in politics. I get it.
But political dog whistles don’t happen in moral vacuums. They speak to something already alive in hearts and minds.
I’m a Sri-Lankan Tamil Australian and my wife is a fourth generation Anglo-Australian with ethnic roots in Scotland and England. Mixed race families like ours are increasingly common but Trump’s jab makes it clear that our kids are going to have deal with a new set of questions, and battles. The age-old debates around multiculturalism are about to be joined by new layers of confusion around ‘interculturalism.’
After the birth of one of our kids – born in Singapore – I remember a long, tedious and comical debate when registering her birth certificate. The system couldn’t comprehend a mixed-race child with Tamil-Aussie and Anglo-Aussie blood. I was told very clearly that I had to choose whether my daughter was black or white. When I pointed out that she was neither, I was told that the computer said no. I calmly suggested that something probably had to change – either the DNA of my daughter or the parameters in the computer. I don’t think it worked. Both remain as they are.
Once you get past the food-court options, multiculturalism is messy and complex. It’s also really difficult and for a lot of people, understandably confronting.
It’s so difficult that in human history, only a handful of countries have had a decent crack at it. The vast majority of the world remains deeply monocultural – either in its mindset and or in its immigration policies.
Maybe we should just wait a few generations and let the reality of love and inter-cultural hook-ups lead to what a comedian once told me was the inevitable reality – that our grandkids’ grandkids all are going to be a nicely bronzed shade of beige.
Or perhaps we don’t have to wait. In his award-winning book Dominion, historian Tom Holland links the multicultural project to Christian ideas and values. It’s not hard to see why. The Bible is peppered with examples of cultural identity being simultaneously recognised and transcended: The story of a Samaritan who helped a Jewish man who had been beaten up and left to die. A couple of hard-headed disciples of Jesus returning to help a foreign village that had previously hated and rejected them because of their ethnicity. The teaming up of a zealot and a tax-collector. These are the ancient equivalents of a Hamas operative and a member of Israel’s war cabinet collaborating in friendship.
How was it possible for them to imagine such a thing? Because they looked beyond themselves to understand themselves. They knew that cultural identities are an important part of who we are but not all of who we are. Regardless of one’s religious beliefs, these truths hold.
They speak to the reality that, culture is important, but we must look to it, and then past it, to make sense of one another.
This is how cultural diversity is respected and intercultural fusion is celebrated – because Australia can be a place where diversity is blended into beautiful shades of green and gold. Whether my kids run for political office or not, they should never be forced into the false choice between being black or white, when clearly they are both, and so much more.
Max Jeganathan is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. He served as an adviser in the Rudd-Gillard governments and is undertaking a PhD on the ethical foundations of liberalism.
This article was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
