American establishment has designated certain African-American neighborhoods and
indeed identity “as inherently pathological, and likewise beyond help” (379) in order to
justify whatever social displacement and ghettoization that befall them. He therefore
concludes in a manner that speaks unambiguously to the naked truth: “one explanation
for the congruence of urban triage and literary multiculturalism is that the latter was a
feint, a bone tossed to a few elite cultural workers and their multiracial middle-class
constituencies in order to affirm liberal faith in individual upward mobility while leaving
systemic racism largely undisturbed” (379).
So while an average African-American community struggles against the hypocrisy of the
establishment and testifies against the awry morality of multiculturalism because of its
legitimization of double-standards, the promise that the banding together of the
postcolonial African exile and the African-American cannot but be cosmetic where
survival is tricky, if not treacherous. In other words, apart from the fleeting moments of
conviviality that do more to serve as an opium from a traumatic reality of survival in a
diaspora that, for the African-American, has become home, owing to long centuries of
severance from Africa, there may not really be much for the African exile to gain from
such alliance.
On the other hand, for the postcolonial African exile whose solace lies in the
magnanimity of multiculturalism, the perceived escape from the dystopian condition of
home may require a critical look. On this score Bhabha (1998:44) contends that for the
postcolonial figures that remain taken by the ideals of multiculturalism, the attraction
stems from the smokescreen of a hegemonic hue: “we shouldn’t forget the hegemonic
potential of the minority as an economic elite, or versions of diaspora which dramatise
border-crossing and ‘hybridity’ as privilege rather than deprivation, the privilege of
mobility associated with economic and cultural capital.” It then follows that those that are
united by the sense of minoritarian community that is built on the basis of the
multicultural persuasion, have, wittingly or unwittingly, allowed themselves to be
employed in the mission of preventing critical social evaluation, which is grand
altogether and morally inflected on a global scale, if granted space.