The end of diversity

Diversity has a history. It is a history, at least in Canada, that is inextricably linked to the national state policy of official multiculturalism. 1 In forty plus years of Canadian multiculturalism, diversity has been largely discredited as a practice, idea, or process that can produce the kinds of social, cultural, political, and economic change and impact that would render the long terrible and brutal history of race and racism null and void. Indeed, in our current moment diversity has reemerged as a language for justice and inclusion, especially in major institutions, that belies a now forty- plus-year critique that argues against its usefulness (Walcott 2016; Bannerji 2000; Ng 1995). In the Canadian context by the middle to late 1980s, activists and scholars had moved on from the language and rhetoric of diversity to the language and rhetoric of antiracism (Haque 2012; James 1992; Dei 1996; Lee 1985; Ng 1995; Bannerji 2000). In the move from diversity and multiculturalism, to antiracism and equity, the state made necessary adjustments in its own operation of diversity as a marker of potential equality and adopted in some areas the language of antiracism and equity. Nonetheless diversity and multiculturalism remained the foundational discourse of difference, making the return of the rhetoric of diversity one that makes sense to the state and other major institutions of the national formation. In making those adjustments the state was forced to acknowledge the stalled nonperformativity of diversity to produce the kind of justice its rhetoric sought to suggest was possible.