Here's my final post from the "How soon is now" conference. I should have posted it last over a week ago but things got messy :) Anyway, it's been good to have a week to digest things.
When I first saw the title of this conference "How soon is now?" I immediately thought about Nina Simones song "Mississippi godamm". I thought about the part where she says "Desegregation" and the chorusgoes "too slow".
mass participation - too slow - unification - too slow
Then I thought that "How soon is now" sounded like another tune I've heard and I googled it and it turned out to be a Morrisey-tune. I went out there and read the lyrics a couple of times but I didn't really get the connection between the Morrisey-tune and the theme of the seminar so I had to ask Tomas Bokstad (one of the organizers) and he after a while he pointed me to the right line in there: "I'm human and I need to be loved."
And then that line from the Morrissey-tune pointed me back to a line in Nina Simones tune. "You don't need to live next to me, just give me my equality."
If you read both of them as saying something about the relationship between the majority population and a minority they point in quite different directions.
The Morrissey line says "please recognize my humanity" and give me your approval and it says it in a rather pleading way. Whoever is saying is quite vulnerable. At least that's the way I hear it.
The Simone line on the other hand is not pleading at all. It also calls for a recognition of the humanity of the minority but it doesn't say it in a pleading way. It demands it.
That is a shift is sort of reflected in how European cultural policy towards immigrants, or non-aryans has changed over the last ten years.
During the early 90-ies, when the extreme right was on the rise in Europe, EU policymakers started to think of racism as a destabilizing force and they decided that we need to tell the majority that the minorities are quite all right. So they initiated a lot of projects that dealt with racism and discrimination.
There was a pan European media project called "More color in the media" that was implemented in Sweden by our Public Service companies, that was basically all about convincing the white majority that black people (and others who have "more color") aren't that bad after all. The most troubling thing about these projects wasn't really the fact that the never targeted immigrants as an audience, but rather the way they recruited and treated the unemployed immigrant youth who where intended to provide all that extra color.
Since then policy have actually changed in a positive direction and Public Service media and publicly financed cultural institutions are today told that they need to cater to a heterogeneous audience.
I think that most projects that where represented during the conference reflected that change, even if there where a couple of troubling cases mixed in that still seemed stuck in the old mindset. Which I found a bit troubling.
An even more troubling thing was the fact that the conference was to such a large extent dominated by white Europeans. This observation is no way a critique of the white individuals who do engage, professionally and personally, in building a sustainable multicultural Europe. Rather it is a disheartening indicator of the status quo that even in a setting that is supposedly about "intercultural dialog" white people are still doing most of the talking.
Of course the conversation would've looked quite different if the racial/ethnic setup of the audience and presenters had been different. For instance I think that the relationship between cultural policy and other fields of policy (immigration, asylum law, aid and trade) would have been more in focus if more participants had had personal experience of fleeing war or persecution.
Every single day people of color die just trying to get into Europe. If you do a conference on intercultural dialog and fail to relate to that fact, you've done something wrong.
LabforCulture is a partner initiative of the European Cultural Foundation. LabforCulture is grateful for the support provided by its funders.
