Shared celebration is how a culture stops being foreign to the people around it

The argument

A second argument concerns what celebration does between communities rather than within one. Proponents observe that unfamiliarity is what makes a population easy to treat as alien, and that the ordinary cure for unfamiliarity is contact: eating the food, hearing the music, learning a few words, standing in the same street as people whose families came from somewhere else. A public occasion creates that contact at scale and without anyone having to seek it out. Proponents argue that the mechanism is participation rather than information. A lecture on Mexican history reaches those already interested; a street festival reaches the neighbour who came for the food and leaves having spent an afternoon among people he would otherwise never meet. Over time this is how a culture moves from foreign to familiar in a receiving society, and proponents note that the observances of earlier immigrant communities followed exactly this path, from suspicion through curiosity to a day the whole country now treats as its own. The position does not claim that every celebration is respectful. Proponents accept that participation can be shallow and that costume and cliche are real risks. Their argument is that these are faults in how the day is kept rather than reasons to stop keeping it, and that the remedy is for the community itself to lead the observance and for others to follow its lead. Abolishing the occasion, on this account, would not remove the caricature; it would remove the one regular opportunity the wider public has to encounter the culture at first hand, leaving the caricature with nothing to correct it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue that contact of this kind produces familiarity with a costume rather than with a people. On their account an afternoon of food and music conveys no understanding of a community's history or circumstances, and may actively substitute for it, leaving participants with the comfortable sense of having engaged while the stereotypes remain untouched. They add that the remedy proposed, community leadership of the day, describes a situation that does not obtain, since the occasion's prominence is set by what sells and not by what the community chooses.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Treating a population as alien is driven by economic and political interest as much as by ignorance, so contact does not address the cause. [Rejecting P2] First hand contact with food and music is contact with a presentation rather than with a people, and can substitute for understanding rather than producing it. [Rejecting P3] If the observance's form is in practice set by commercial promotion rather than by the community, then community leadership is not an available remedy and the faults are not incidental. [Rejecting C] The premises at most support some occasion for cross cultural contact, not this occasion in its present form.