Vancouver newspaper The Province is running a 15-day series on racism in Canada starting today: Monday, October 7th. As a researcher interested in immigration and a second-generation immigrant, I am always interested in dialogues about multiculturalism, immigration policy, and immigrants’ integration. Many of my readers have been directed to my website from web searches. One post in particular, “Modern racism in the most multicultural city in the world”, has drawn a higher number of views and comments than others. Since it was published in 2009, it has gotten about 8,000 views–last month alone it had 635 views. Susan Lazaruk of The Province asked to reference the post in the paper’s 15-day series.
In the interest of journalistic accuracy, I will summarize my answers to Susan’s questions here. As a Canadian researcher, I frequently present my work in the US and am astounded at the role that race continues to play in issues such as housing location, the distance people travel to school or work, and employment opportunities. As Canadians we compare ourselves to other countries, including the US, and I think most people would agree that immigrants and visible minorities in Canada are much more socially and spatially integrated and suffer from less societal and institutional racism than they do in other countries. There has been considerable research on the lower rates of residential segregation, for example. However, racism is like sexism; it is entrenched and will likely always be with us, though it diminishes over time. Admitting that modern racism still exists in Canada is not to say that it’s a terrible place to live. Canada only began to accept immigrants from non-European countries in the 1950s, and this was highly regulated until 1967 when the numbers of visible minorities began to increase at a considerable pace. So it’s remarkable that we’ve progressed from quite overt institutional racism (including a quota on immigrants from India) to the much more subtler forms of modern racism in just 60 years.
It’s very interesting living in Amsterdam as an immigrant. I’ve faced all the challenges many of the immigrants to Canada face, including not speaking the language of the country and being singled out by my ethnic identity (“Canadian” doesn’t seem to be enough to satisfy questions!) I live in a neighbourhood with a high concentration of other immigrants. While my job requires no knowledge of Dutch, it is difficult to find work in other industry sectors without the language and tough for immigrants to build professional networks.
Given the level of interest in modern racism in Canada indicated by the response to my blog post, I encourage readers to check out The Province in the next two weeks. I imagine that this series will spur all kinds of debate and commentary, which is a good thing.
