Vanderbilt Library Open Journals

Fang, Dan

Phil Ryan. Multicultiphobia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. 279 pp.; ISBN 
1442641460. 
 
The April 18th, 2011, issue of TIME Magazine, which celebrated the 150th Anniversary of the 
Civil War, has as its cover a photo of Abraham Lincoln shedding a very large tear. The article is 
entitled: “Why We’re Still Fighting the Civil War: The Endless Battle over the War’s True 
Cause would Make Lincoln Weep.” David Von Drehle, its author, accuses Americans—from 
students to the general public to, yes, even historians and politicians—of engaging in a studied 
effort to forget that, at its base, the Civil War was about slavery, the oppression of one race of 
people by a nation. In the 150 years since Fort Sumter, Von Drehle claims (rightly, if not 
comprehensively) that the Civil War has become, for both North and South, a celebration of a 
romantic “Lost Cause,” a national enactment of “leaving things unsaid in the pursuit of 
harmony” (48). Hence, the Jim Crow laws; hence, the Civil Rights Movement a century after the 
Emancipation Proclamation; hence, the divisions in American society that still persists to this 
day. “At its best,” Von Drehle says, “Americanism is about tearing [borders] down” (51); it’s 
time to achieve the true goals of the War. 
 What Von Drehle documents is a series of rhetorical feints that focuses public attention 
on the Civil War itself—which indeed was a devastating event—on its soldiers, its victims 
(including both plantation owners and slaves), on the self-image of the American people. While 
these issues are important, an exclusive focus on them succeeds in leaving out issues of liberty, 
equality, tolerance, society. Phil Ryan’s Multicultiphobia—which sensationalizes anti-
Multicultural discourse from its onset (Douglas Todd of the Vancouver Sun describes, “Shocking 
yellow cover. Sensationalistic title. In-your-face graphics. The attention-grabbing design of this 
new book is like a blast of the exaggerated ‘yellow journalism’ it denounces”)—engages in the 
same sort of feints for the vast majority of the book. In the introduction, Ryan claims that “the 
label ‘multicultiphobia’ may seem to imply that the critics of multiculturalism are irrational, and 
their concerns can be dismissed. We should note, first, that not all criticism of multiculturalism is 
multicultiphobic. As can any policy, or ideology, or whatever it is…multiculturalism can be 
subject to cogent criticism. Even when a critique seems multicultiphobic, it would be 
counterproductive simply to dismiss it” (5). Despite this statement, however, Ryan goes on to 
systematically dismantle the critics of multicultiphobia. He analyzes the “four classics of 
multicultiphobic discourse”—Reginald Bibby’s Mosaic Madness, Neil Bissoondath’s Selling 
Illusions, Richard Gwyn’s Nationalism without Walls, and Jack Granatstein’s Who Killed 
Canadian History—and many instances of “multicultiphobia” in the media, both before and after 
9/11.  
Ryan’s criticism of the critics is highly logical and incredibly successful, which 
showcases the way in which he himself does not fall into the same traps of which he is accusing 
those critics. He dissects the way in which multicultiphobic discourse engages in a “primitive 
ontology,” which holds that “when any aspect of something changes, the thing has become 
something different” (44), and which also leads these critics to think that multicultural policy 
itself is an unchanging monolith and can be treated as “a single static phenomenon, rather than 
an evolving set of policies with potentially contradictory effects” (53). He also documents the 
way in which multicultiphobic discourse makes use of “tried-and-tested narrative strategies” of 
the fairy tale, setting up obvious—and irrefutable—good and evil, “once-upon-a-time narratives, 
powerful villains, and a clear gulf between malevolent forces and innocent victims” (61). So, 
whether the story is of the “native” Canadian who feels his values threatened by a relativist view 
of virtue and legality, or of the immigrant who feels forced by multicultural policy to remain in a 
cultural bubble, forever unintegrated, it is difficult disagree with the view of multiculturalism as 
the big bad wolf.  
 Ryan’s dissection of the logical and rhetorical problems inherent in multicultiphobic 
discourse is highly effective in dismantling the discourse; what it cannot seem to do, however, is 
to move out of the cycle of criticism and counter criticism. Even when he begins, in part three of 
the book, to ask, “What do we need to talk about?” the answer does not ever veer too far away 
from a criticism of the critics of multiculturalism. He spends a chapter dismantling the 
accusation that multiculturalism causes legal relativism, which he concludes either does not exist 
or arises from sources other than multiculturalism; yet the conclusion that one form of relativism 
“probably arises from a confused rejection of a problematic claim, that of cultural superiority” is 
quickly dismissed by the fact that “the complexity of cultures and civilizations rule out summary 
claims of either superiority or equality” (153), which avoids the fact that, despite the truth in the 
“incommensurable” nature of cultures, feelings of superiority and prejudice, of a “we” and a 
“they,” are still in existence and wide-spread.  
This is one reason why, as Ryan himself documents, there is a reluctance to ask the 
question, “Just who are we?” (158). What seems more important than a definition of 
multiculturalism, or even of culture itself (which he delineates quite thoroughly in his 
introduction), is a definition of Canadian, of the line where an immigrant becomes a citizen, an 
other becomes one of us. This line, as Ryan points out, is much harder to draw in Canada than in 
the United States, where dual citizenship is often not allowed and welfare benefits not extended. 
Yet, even as he points out the existence of this line, and of the need (however questionable) to 
define who is and who is not a legitimate part of Canadian society, he lets the issue drop: he calls 
out the critics of multiculturalism as unable to define Canadian identity and suggests “equality, 
democracy, and the rule of law” (159) as an instance of commonalities Canadians might hold 
essential.  
This is an easy way, I think, to skip over the question of culture, which has thus far been 
integral to the discussion. It may be right to found a society on equality, democracy, and the rule 
of law, but it is certainly not an accurate depiction of a society that believes in a Canadian 
culture—and the culture of immigrants—that is apart from these idealistic notions, that comes 
down to the nitty-gritty, to what one wears and eats, where one works and shops. In countering 
the notion that multiculturalism creates pockets of insular culture, Ryan notes how governmental 
funding of cultural activities would “over time erode the hold of particular traditions upon the 
integrated individual” (52) and cites reports of “a pattern of loosening contact with one’s former 
country, consistent with gradual integration into the new society” (176). In these moments, he 
presents integration unproblematically as the ultimate goal of immigrants, but this is clearly—
from the countless narratives extant of the cultural war between first-generation and second-
generation immigrants—not the case.  
Ryan hits the nail on the head—sadly only three pages from the end—when he declares 
that “multiculturalism should not be a state of affairs in which some groups of citizens enjoy the 
psychic certainty that Canada is theirs in some special way, that they constitute the ‘mainstream,’ 
that those without the ‘ideal Canadian face,’ or who speak with a different accent, or who 
practise a different religion, are part of some different ‘stream’ that moves alongside the 
mainstream” (215). He then says that the notion that immigrants are merely “house guests” in 
Canada is again not what multiculturalism should be (216). These notions are crucial, but what I 
want to ask at this juncture is, what should multiculturalism be? How can multiculturalism, 
whether in policy or in a more general notion, be fashioned so that there is an erosion of the idea 
of the other who is somehow less qualified to be a citizen? For it is not too far of a leap from 
calling someone “less a citizen” to calling someone “less a person,” the latter issue we in the 
United States have clearly not yet worked out. What we need, as Ryan points out again and 
again, is dialogue: but this dialogue must be a constructive one, for “the dismissal of one’s 
opponents as corrupt or slightly mad is hardly a promising start” (64). This same criticism that he 
lobs at “multicultiphobic” critics is one that haunts the pages of Multicultiphobia: one wonders 
how much more progress he might have made towards solving the problem of multiculturalism if 
fewer pages had been spent on detailing the logical failures of multicultiphobia and more on 
what multiculturalism could and should be. The dialogue, moreover, needs to extend beyond this 
book, in which Ryan has nevertheless achieved his purpose—to move us to discussion—to 
extend even beyond a single discipline; what I miss from the social scientific text is a discussion 
of first-person immigrant narratives, of the psychological underpinnings of inclusion and 
exclusion, of a historical figuration of post-colonial North America. This burden must rest not on 
the shoulders of Multicultiphobia, or even of Ryan, but on all of us; if we expect 
multiculturalism to work, we must enact multi-disciplinarity.  
 
Dan Fang 
Vanderbilt University 


English

Multicultiphobia

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