Issues

Multiculturalism is Not the Enemy

Charlotte Higgins, in a recent look at Roman Britain and its legacy today (Under Another Sky, 2013) writes that, “with its cosmopolitan, Mediterranean-facing outlook, Roman Britain is…being claimed in some quarters as a kind of foundation myth for modern multiculturalism.” There is good reason for this, as people from all over the Roman world found themselves in Britain. And this would be true of any province in the Roman Empire you cared to name.

Why this is important to us today is that there is a lesson to be learned from Rome’s success. We can see that multiculturalism is not the bogeyman Republicans make it out to be. If it could work for the Romans, there is no reason it cannot work for more “enlightened” people 2000 years later.

The ethnic melting pot of Roman Britain included Germans from the Rhine – Batavians serving as Roman auxiliaries, who have left many revealing personal letters behind – and Syrians from Palmyra, also serving as Roman auxiliaries, as well as Spaniards, Gauls, Thracians (modern Bulgaria), Frisians (modern Holland), Pannonians (modern Hungary), Dalmatians (modern Croatia), Tungrians (modern Belgium), Sarmatians (modern Ukraine) and others.

And that doesn’t include the countless merchants who did business in the province. Some had light skin, some had dark skin. Some were from Europe, others from Asia or Africa. They worshiped all varieties of gods and practiced a variety of customs. What they all embraced was the idea of Romanitas, literally Roman-ness (or Romanism), and Clifford Ando tells us (Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, 2000) this was true whether they were citizens or not. The equivalent of Americanism, or the idea of America as opposed to the idea of Rome.

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According to Ando, “residents of the empire believed in the universality of certain political ceremonies and of the foundational beliefs that such ceremonies expressed.” Why should the United States be any different? The Romans knew you could be Roman no matter your skin color, no matter which gods you worshiped or customs you followed, thanks to a shared idea of Rome. Is the idea of America that much weaker and less compelling?

It is all too easy to make a comparison with America today, which since its very origins has been multicultural: with Englishmen, Frenchmen, Scots, Irish, Germans, Africans, Spaniards, Native Americans, and others. this is encouraging. Sadly, it is also all too easy for racists to point to a once-multicultural island and say, “if we were multicultural once and managed to reverse it, we can do it again.”

Yet it wasn’t multiculturalism that killed the Roman Empire. Needless to say, as in the United States, many of these ancient people settled down in Britain. They mixed with the local populace, intermarried, and had children of mixed ethnicity, like the Palmyrene who left an epithet for his Gaulish wife at the Roman fort of Arbeia in northern England. These are simple facts.

Yet conservatives in both Britain and the United States completely lost it over the idea of a dead Roman woman whose remains were found in 1901, when the use of more recent techniques revealed she was not British at all (i.e. not a white woman), but from Roman North Africa, known as the “ivory bangle lady” from her grave goods. And she wasn’t a slave, but part of Roman Britain’s 1 Percent.

Wired called her the “EO-GLOBALIZED sister of today’s global populations.” And the evidence is that Roman York was more diverse than modern York. Not what racists want to hear, and the unpalatable truth meant that the results of the tests had to be “multicultural lies.”

The Roman Empire was multicultural. That means its provinces were multicultural. And no, Romans didn’t care what your skin color was. They might have had odd ideas about what you were like based on your country of origin, but your skin color didn’t matter. The emperor Septimius Severus is shown in a painting to have dark skin. Another emperor is known to history as “Philip the Arab.” The Roman genius was their ability to be inclusive, not exclusive.

Septimius Severus and family

Contrary to the racist rants surrounding the “ivory bangle lady,” black people do not need to be rewritten into history. They were always part of it, and not always as slaves. Being black didn’t make you a slave in the Roman Empire. There were plenty of white slaves to go around. Anyone in the ancient world could wind up a slave.

Much as Republicans want to portray President Obama as un-American, he is quintessentially American, a product of the mixture of ethnicity that is so commonplace in this country. It is ironic that Romans of 2,000 years ago – Pagans – would have given Obama the welcome he is denied in 21st century Christian America.

Yet, conservatives bridle at the idea of multiculturalism being the norm. This is as true in Britain (and elsewhere in Europe) as in America. Never mind that Britain’s original Celtic inhabitants were suppressed or absorbed by the Italian Romans (and then increasingly multicultural Romans to follow), and then by Saxons and Vikings and Frenchified Normans, before we can find a modern Englishman.

As R Muse noted here Tuesday, the Texas GOP platform asserts,

“We favor strengthening our common American identity, which includes the assimilation of racial and ethnic groups. We encourage non-English speaking students to transition to English within one year to quickly assimilate and succeed in American society.”

Assimilation. The wholesale destruction of ethnic groups (the only racial group is human but Republicans…). This is termed “genocide.” And yes, genocide can be cultural too. You don’t have to kill the members of a culture to destroy that culture.

And unsurprisingly, the only ethnicity Republicans do not want assimilated into the greater whole, is white Anglo-Saxon culture. This is the dominant culture in Republican thinking. Demographically, it was the dominant culture from America’s founding. But demographics change.

None of this is surprising. As Gallup showed in 2013 (and it is as true today), Democrats are racially Diverse; Republicans are mostly white. It liberalism is not legitimate, as conservatives argue these days, how can its component parts be legitimate?

But multiculturalism is not the enemy here, whatever Republicans believe. And the only culture Americans ought to be thinking about is that great amalgam that is “American” culture, which takes its flavors from many different sources.

Remarkably, the Texas GOP, while endeavoring to control every aspect of our lives, claims that “climate change” is “a political agenda promoted to control every aspect of our lives,” when what really seems to be set on controlling our lives is a Republican agenda that would rather invent history than study it.

The idea of Romanitas persisted despite the inclusion of so many different cultures and languages. Republicans cry foul at the idea of Spanish but Rome survived quite nicely with two official languages, Latin in the West and Greek in the East, with many other languages besides.

There is no reason the idea of America cannot survive multiculturalism. Rome’s success was that it found strength in diversity. Rome did not last so long because there were more Italians than anybody else. It lasted so long because there were more Romans than Italians.

What will make America great is not that there are more white people, but that there are more Americans.

Photo: Islamophobia Today

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