[lbo-talk] Quebec separatism

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Aug 21 19:00:07 PDT 2005


tfast at yorku.ca wrote:


>Montreal is a fairly diverse city with old Jewish, Irish, Greek and Italian
>communities and more recently home to different ethnic groups from across the
>the francaphonie.

For someone from New York, it was striking how white service personnel were, however - hotel workers, cabdrivers, restaurants & bars.

A friend who just moved to Montreal from NYC told us that a friend of hers, a musician, said, "I like Montreal. But I couldn't live here - I'm black." I began spinning stories in my head about nationalism & xenophobia. But is that right? Is there anything to the musician's perception?

Didn't the separatists blame "outsiders" - which includes Jews, as I remember - for the failure of the '95 sovereignty referendum?

Doug



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list