The Violence of Tolerance in a Multicultural Workplace: Examples from Nursing

With the acceleration of the global movement of people in the later part of the twentieth Century, many countries have used policies and community-based approaches such as multiculturalism to ease the incorporation of migrants into their societies. This movement of migrants was fuelled by the speed of development in western societies post Second World War and led to an increased need for migrant workers, both skilled and unskilled, to meet these needs. Multicultural policies associated with social practices of tolerance dominate the landscape of such governmental responses both more widely in society but also in specific locations such as the workplace. However, recent forms of analysis seek to problematize the discursive constitution of multiculturalism and attempt to racialize the whiteness of the Australian workplace. We acknowledge that such a position is one amongst many positions available (Ganley 2003: 13) but view it as necessary to expose the effects of racialization in a dominantly white workplace. To do this we draw on data from our research on the experiences of skilled black African migrant nurses working in the Australian health care system to expose how within the health care workplace, the ideologies of tolerance within multiculturalism constitute a context of violence. Our intention in this chapter is to 'unpack tolerance' (King 1998: 9), that is, we analyse and challenge the notion of tolerance in so far as it is practised and applied in multicultural nursing workplaces. Therefore, the question guiding our analyses is: what purpose does the rhetoric of tolerance serve in a workplace celebrated as multicultural, yet where social interactions are marked by ambivalence and (racial) discrimination?