Further Musings on Multiculturalism

I love all the responses I've had to my last post! I was going to reply one by one, but I realized that there were still a few more general things I wanted to say.

One is that part of my aggravation with my Mississauga customer and others like him (and yes, I'm thinking of you, Raph) is that I truly, honestly DO NOT understand what the problem is. Maybe it's that I always considered my exceedingly white, WASP family to be profoundly boring. In fact, when I heard an old family rumour from an uncle that one of our ancestors might have been Jewish, I was thrilled and determined to prove it was true. Otherwise, we're just straight western European Protestants all the way down the line. Yech!

Part of it may be that I've always been the sort of person who wants to be part of the minority. I've always figured if I look or dress or act like most other people, I must be doing something wrong. But I suppose there are other people who like being in the majority. They prefer to be around people who look and dress and act just like them, and anything else makes them uncomfortable. Ok. I guess.

Me, I'm happy to see the hijabs and the turbans and the tunics at my son's school - and I'm even happier to see those kids walking down the street in groups and cliques together with plain old white bread 'Old Milton' kids. Some of their parents may prefer to live in little segregated enclaves within our sprawling new developments, but from what I've seen that attitude is not being transfered to the next generation.

Another thought: A video store is perhaps the perfect place from which to observe a community. I suspect that if I were to keep statistics on the customers who walk through our doors on a given night, I would have a perfect demographic profile of the town of Milton. So I can tell you that most of our new arrivals are South Asian in origin, but almost as many are Latino. And many of the construction workers in the new developments have come from Northern Ontario, often leaving their families behind to find work.

I can also tell you that a very high percentage - I would guess about a third - of non-white individuals who come through our doors are married or otherwise attached to someone of a different race. In fact, just on my own block I have a black man married to a white woman next door, and a French-Canadian fellow married to a Chinese woman from Sudbury a few doors down. In my own very WASP family I have one cousin who married a Filipino woman and anther who married a man of Pakistani descent. They've all got kids.

All of which makes me think of something John Ralston Saul said: We are a Métis Nation.

This is not 'mongrelization' or 'assimilation' or any other vulgar characterization. This is the natural tendency of a nation where, unique in all the world, French and English have co-existed for centuries without ever having truly succeeded in killing each other off. Where we originally respected and worked with and intermarried with the indigenous peoples of this land, before we got around to trying to assimilate and marginalize them. Where people still speak Gaelic on the east coast and Salish on the west coast, and that's all something to be celebrated.

Are the people of Newfoundland or Cape Breton hampered by clinging to their Gaelic heritage? Are the people of Manitoba less 'Canadian' because so many are blonde and make the best Pirogi in the country? Are the British-descended people of British Columbia being subsumed because some street signs are in Chinese, and the physical and cultural presence of the Haida and Salish and Nisga'a are all-pervasive?

What indeed is the difference between the current wave of black and brown immigrants from all the many tides that have swept across this nation for the past four centuries?

To those who feel uncomfortable with the number of non-WASP people who may be slowly filling their neighbourhoods - I'm sorry. I really am. But you have to understand, this is the way a lot of us like it. So maybe what you should be asking yourself is this: am I really experiencing a cultural discomfit or disconnect, or am I just going to have to admit at some point that it's simply a matter of race?

Musings on Multiculturalism: A Tale of Two Customers

Having spent most of my life in Toronto, I was always used to seeing and interacting with people of all races and cultures, and living in a city of ethnic neighbourhoods that manage to blend at the edges without too many ill effects. For instance, I used to live and work around Eglinton and Oakwood, which was a colourful, raucous intersection of Jamaican, Italian and Jewish neighbourhoods. There was an issue with street violence, but that were already starting to clear up by the time we left. By and large, everyone got along and interacted just fine, and when they didn't it was rarely because of one racial or ethnic group squaring off against another.

So it was quite the culture shock moving to Milton 15 years ago. I hadn't lived in a more homogeneously white, Christian area since I lived on tree-lined, WASP-ridden Cortleigh Boulevard as a little kid. Milton seemed to belong to the same era, preserved in its little 1970s development-moratorium bubble.

Since the 'Big Pipe' started bringing lake water and new residents eight years ago, I've watched this small town transform into an increasingly diverse, small suburban city. We now have much broader food choices, the music at our street festivals is considerably more varied, and I'm seeing more and more hijabs, turbans and tunics at my son's high school. For me, this has been a sort of normalization, but for others it's been... a bit of an adjustment.

This was made clear to me recently when I was signing up a new customer at the video store where I work. I noted the Mississauga address on his driver's license, and he mentioned that he had moved recently because it was getting "really bad there". At first I thought he was talking about the ugly subdivisions, but then he said `You know, I hate to say it, but with all these new people moving in..."

And I promptly changed the subject. Because the boss really doesn't like it when we hit the customers.

Unfortunately, he insisted on returning to the topic, complaining about all the crime in Mississauga (which continues to have the lowest crime rate of any city in Canada), and how there are hardly any "Canadians" there any more.

You have no idea how badly I wanted to punch him in the nose. Instead, I
pointed out that Milton was also seeing an increase in its immigrant population and that I considered this to be a good thing. "The place needed a little colour", I said. He shrugged and allowed as to how this might be so.

I was still fuming over this encounter when, about an hour later, a woman came in looking for Spanish language films. She taught ESL at the newcomer resource centre next door, as well as teaching Spanish at the Employment centre in the same mall, and she wanted the films for her class.

We got chatting. Turns out she was born in Mexico but moved to Milton many years ago. She originally planned to just be a 'traditional housewife', but decided to start teaching because she was constantly running into an undercurrent of anti-immigrant sentiment in town and she wanted to help both old and new Miltonians get over their ignorance and distrust of one another.

I told her a bit about my earlier encounter. This led to an even longer discussion about how racism in this country tends to use immigration issues as a cover.

As I was checking her out, I noticed a familiar last name on her account. "Oh," I said, "Your husband must be related to my former next-door neighbour". I told her the name and she said, "Of course, she was my mother-in-law!"

It turns out this lovely woman from Mexico was in fact a member of one of the founding families of Milton - a family that had lived here for well over 100 years. I immediately contrasted that with my previous customer on his flight westward in search of a place with 'real' Canadians, and thought about roots, and who was contributing more to the country and the community.

I also thought about something John Ralston Saul pointed out in "A Fair Country": that when the first waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean first came to this country, they were not only scorned - they were not even considered to be of the same race as those who had come earlier. Germans were similarly viewed, portrayed as 'Huns' and depicted as physically different from 'us'. As were the Irish years before.

We are so used to seeing racism through the American experience where it is so overwhelmingly defined as literally a black and white issue, that we almost become blind to it when it involves other groups. And because so many of our Chinese, South Asian, Latino, Caribbean, and other citizens of colour have only been here for a generation or two, the line between race and immigration issues becomes blurred.

Unfortunately, it seems to be becoming so blurred that some have started excusing racism as mere xenophobia. In this country, neither should be acceptable.