Multicultural to Antiracist: Our Vocabulary Advanced but Our Practices Didn’t.
Some thoughts on language and readiness
First, I want to say this clearly: I am deeply grateful for the people who have done the work, often at great personal cost, over the decades to move our collective thinking about race and culture forward.
The language itself tells a story.
In the 1980s and 90s, many of us were introduced to multiculturalism—an attempt to acknowledge difference, to name that multiple cultures exist, and to learn how to coexist with dignity. Over time, that language gave way to diversity, then diversity, equity, and inclusion, and later diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. More recently, anti-racism has emerged as the dominant term, naming not just inclusion but active resistance to systems that produce racial harm.
Each shift brought greater intellectual clarity and moral urgency. Each added nuance. Each tried to tell the truth more fully.
And yet, here’s the uncomfortable realization I can’t shake: our language evolved faster than our shared life together. This produced significant progress in some places and in some lives while others did not. That is not the fault of those practitioners and thinkers but the product of a country that has struggled with these ideas from its foundations.
Academia moved. Nonprofits moved. Corporations created initiatives. Governments issued statements and built some temporary structures. All of that mattered. But as a society, we didn’t move together from one framework to the next. We layered new words on top of old habits. We adopted advanced language without practicing its most basic demands. So many people did not have their hearts into it. So many others have continued to endure the consequences of our societal inability to grow.
I would even venture to say that, in many ways, we are still struggling with the most fundamental questions of the multicultural part:
· Can we recognize real differences in culture and history?
· Can we grant dignity across those differences?
· Can we actually live together?
· Do we want to?
· Should we want to?
· How are we connected?
Project 2045 was born out of a conversation with a dear friend and advisor who gathered a small group of us and said something that has stayed with me ever since:
“I believe the lie of our time is that we cannot flourish together.”
If she’s right and the defining falsehood of our age is the belief that shared flourishing is impossible, then it’s no wonder so many people want to declare the experiment of a multiracial democracy a failure. Some would have us believe we can’t even manage difference, let alone justice, repair, or belonging.
In that sense, it feels like we’re stuck—unable to move from multiculturalism to diversity, from diversity to equity, from equity to belonging, or from belonging to the active work of anti-racism. Not because the ideas themselves are flawed, but because of the critical mass of people uninterested, uninspired, unwilling, or incentivized to not want to engage. Our vocabulary advanced faster than our practices. Our aspirations outran our relationships.
One of the core convictions of Project 2045 is this, we cannot learn and unlearn what this moment requires through books, statements, diversity trainings, or corporate seminars alone.
This is embodied work. Relational work. Communal work. It happens with real people, in real places, across real differences. It happens when we practice living in a genuinely multicultural society—again and again—so that equity, inclusion, belonging, and anti-racism are not just concepts we affirm but capacities we develop.
I would love for us to be a society fluent in belonging. I would love for anti-racism to be more than a contested term and instead describe a practiced way of life. But if that feels out of reach right now, perhaps it’s not a step backward to return to the basics—not to abandon what we’ve learned, but to practice more honestly where we actually are.
What Practicing Multiculture Might Actually Look Like
If we’re honest that many of us are still learning the most basic skills of living together across cultural difference (multi-culture-al), then the question becomes less What do we believe? and more How do we live? I know white people who have done academic degrees in diversity but have few genuinely reciprocal relationships across culture and can’t keep People of Color on their professional teams
Practicing multicultural is not about celebrating food, festivals, or surface-level difference—though those can be entry points. It’s about forming the muscle memory required to live with dignity, curiosity, and humility in a shared society.
At its most basic, those practices might look like:
Learning to stay present across difference. Recognizing the feelings of discomfort, defensiveness, or misunderstanding as they come. Resisting the urge to exit when conversations about race, culture, or history become complicated or personal.
Practicing curiosity before judgment. Asking real questions about how someone else experiences the world—without immediately filtering their answer through our own assumptions, explanations, or rebuttals.
Developing literacy in engaging culture. Not as expertise, but as attentiveness: learning how history, geography, language, and power shape everyday life differently for different people and accepting that our own experience is not universal.
Holding stories without needing to fix them. Listening to stories of pain, exclusion, or injustice without rushing toward solutions, defensiveness, or declarations of innocence. Sometimes the work is simply to bear witness.
Practicing proximity. Choosing real relationships over abstract ideas. Allowing our lives, neighborhoods, institutions, and leadership tables to be shaped by people who are not like us.
Learning when to speak—and when not to. Understanding that participation does not always mean contribution, and that restraint can be a form of respect rather than withdrawal.
None of this is glamorous. None of it trends well. And none of it can be rushed.
But these are the kinds of practices that make equity imaginable, belonging possible, and anti-racism livable. Without them, our most advanced language remains aspirational at best—and hollow at worst.
If we want a future where we can flourish together, then this is where the work begins. Not with the perfect terminology, but with the slow, faithful practice of learning how to live together at all.
An Invitation
If these ideas resonate and you want structured support to practice them, Project 2045 is hosting Skill Building cohorts in 2026 that teaches the conversation skills white people need for this moment. It is a space to build capacity, deepen self-awareness, and strengthen the muscles required for a shared multiracial future.
Check out cohort details and apply here.
Conversation is how change begins.