> Anecdotally -- a Turkish friend and a friend from India have both
> mentioned experiencing racism in Canada and choosing to live outside of
> Canada as a result. The main diff seems to be that the big cities in the
> U.S. are not racist; but the big cities in Canada still are. Haven't look
> at surveys or anything. I don't know how true these anecdotal reports are.
>
> Joanna
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> 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
--------------------------------------------
Of course, other American blacks and immigrants and tourists of colour will
tell you just the opposite - depending on their own experiences. Black
athlete and entertainers, for example, who came north testifed that they
were received more tolerantly than in the US - baseball was, of course,
first integrated in Montreal - but then again the few black hockey players
who have played at the professional or semi-pro level have been subjected to
racist taunts from players and fans. The truth of the matter is there is
racism in Montreal as in any other large Western city, the level of which
varies in relation to class, social conditions, velocity of immigration,
economic conditions, etc. The "French" have views about the "English" who
have views about the "Jews" who have views about the "Algerians" who have
views about the "Vietnamese" who have views about the "Haitians" pretty much
as they do anywhere else. Certainly, I've not seen a single report
indicating that Montreal has a special "race problem" that other cities do
not. That's never been my experience, and I grew up there. And the
statement that "big cities in the US are not racist" strikes me as
remarkable. Racism is not the special property of any single national group;
it is common to all, and how overt or covert it is depends on circumstance.
Is this a matter of dispute?
The then Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau did publicly and bitterly blame "the ethnic vote" for the narrow defeat of the yes forces in his concession speech on referendum night 1995. He was widely condemned for his remarks within Quebec and within the PQ. He resigned shortly thereafter, although it would be wrong to attribute this entirely or even mostly to his unfortunate comments which, the truth be told, were not wide of the mark. The anglophone and allophone vote was monolithically against sovereignty, and could not be deemed anything other than "anti-French". What else is new? Especially since the collapse of unifying socialism, the world's been plagued by these ethnic conflicts large and small.
MG