How do we create an inclusive & egalitarian society in which diversity is not merely tolerated or managed but fully harnessed as a thriving lived experience for enrichment of everyone involved & benefit of the society as a whole?

 

Despite progress made over the last decades, MULTICULTURALISM still remains an enduring challenge, all the more urgent as we stand at the junction of retrogressing to the homogeneous & hierarchical past rather than progressing towards egalitarian, inclusive & plural ideals.

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A SOCIETY FULL OF MULTICULTURAL INDIVIDUALS, a collection of 24 critical & personal essays by writer Jayon You, uses her own experience of immigration to America at the age of thirteen as a critical frame for inserting analytic insight on HOW we can rise up to the challenges of creating a multicultural democracy in the 21C.

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She introduces a thrilling concept of 'multicultural individual', which not only gave her a resolution on her own dilemmas of belonging, identity, relationship between cultures upon her immigration to America, but how she sees the concept holding the key in moving us beyond where we stand now towards creating a truly multicultural society in which diversity is not merely tolerated or managed but fully harnessed as a thriving lived experience for enrichment of everyone involved & benefit of the society as a whole.

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In the process, she clarifies some of the most urgent questions of our time: ​what facilitates integration of immigrants & what we mean by 'integration' anyway; HOW a society could embrace diversity without losing culture, identity & solidarity of the nation & HOW the 'values' of a host nation & the 'values' that immigrants bring can be harmoniously reconciled, HOW the vision of a multicultural society for an immigrant nation from its inception vs. an ethnic nation with a growing diversity might differ/similar from each other.