By Jagdeesh Mann,
Executive Editor
Bad luck.
Sunday shopping in Richmond’s Asian malls isn’t going to get any easier.
Earlier this year, the municipality’s City Council and 4-time incumbent Mayor Malcolm Brodie were not moved by the best efforts of over 1,000 of the city’s residents who insisted that all businesses in the city also display signs in English – one of Canada’s two official languages.
The decision by Council to turn down their petition flummoxed this vocal minority of taxpayers. Though 99% of these mostly white residents are unlikely to ever slurp down a bowl of bird’s nest soup or seek out dried reishi mushrooms, that didn’t curb their protests.
Many asserted they were the targets of the latest social evil: ‘reverse racism’.
If it isn’t obvious, in North America that’s when White people are the victims instead of the perpetrators.
It’s plain our racial compasses need re-calibrating when bad service in Asian restaurants become the cross-burnings of the 21st century – the galloping Klansman upstaged by the viciously indifferent Chinese dim sum chef.
Welcome to Vancouver, a city that doesn’t have the over-arching race problems of most American cities but has a complex wondering if it has a race problem.
This bi-polar disorder is revealed by our city’s veneer of racial calm that is often belied by its residents making typically dumb racial comments, usually at private dinner parties or in ultimate anonymity on the web.
We are still a generation or two away from losing a generation or two of residents – from across all ethnic groups –who haven’t unlearned the myths of their own racial superiority.
As a result, day to day social issues become diametrically opposite binaries with underlying racial undertones: English versus non-English signage, larger versus smaller houses, or even how communal park space is used.
But these are today’s thin end of the funnel - the roots of this BC’s racial neurosis are more understandable given its not-so-distant history.
Periscope back a few decades and the landscape is scarred by the Komogata Maru incident, Japanese internment, and Chinese Head Tax policy. It was only a decade before Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march on Washington that Chinese, Japanese, First Nations and Indian heritage residents in BC were legally permitted to vote in provincial elections.
And until the 1970’s, First Nations children were still being wrenched from their homes and sealed away into residential schools because of a pervasive belief among White-Anglo Canadians that killing their languages and cultures would ‘take the Indian out of the Indian’.
Immigration policy only shifted in 1968 from its racial ‘quota’ structure to the current merit based system.
As BC’s former Attorney General Wally Oppal states, “acts of racism often increase where there is a significant change in the population makeup.” In the 1970’s and 80’s, previous generation white immigrants targeted newer Asian immigrants through horrible acts of racism, often using the rhetoric of job losses and rising house prices to justify their violence.
Slowly each decade brought change, however, as minorities in the 90’s suffered less injury than previous generations.
As diversity has flourished, racism has waned. Census statisticians predict that by 2031 Canadians of Europeans heritage will be the minority in the Lower Mainland when compared to the total residents of Chinese, Indian, and Filipino heritage.
In another decade or two, no one group will dominate in terms of size over another. This numeric parity also extends to the economic sphere. Unlike the US, where vast inner cities are occupied by Blacks and Hispanics from lower socio-economic rungs, minorities in Vancouver are relatively affluent and sometimes more affluent than multi-generational Canadians.
Richmond is now composed of a population that is 60% of Chinese heritage. Almost every municipality across the Lower Mainland has a significantly diverse population.
Change is easier for some to grow into and some older generation Canadians feel overwhelmed by the rapid demographic shifts.
It’s no secret that many older residents in Richmond feel marginalised in a city which has outgrown them through its rapid makeover over the past 20 years. Asian businesses, restaurants and malls have not helped themselves in deflating the perception of being indifferent towards catering to English-speaking Canadians.
The signage debate is just another indicator of this aloofness. In the end however, it is just a ruthless business decision, like any other. Chinese merchants do not display English language signs for the same reason steakhouses do not advertise vegan options: neither is their intended target market.
Allowing signs in Chinese-only is bad social policy, but it is not racism.
Good old fashioned racism was clear cut. There were minorities with funny accents with pungent food. It was easy for a homogenous majority to identify, and bully people who were different.
That just isn’t the case anymore. There is increasing cross-over in the people we marry, in the food we eat, and even in the languages we speak.
Vancouver is at a crossroads. We are unable to go back to a world where the purported idea of races created boundaries and imagined hierarchies. On the other hand, we are unsteady on our feet stepping forward into a race-less world where we are all ‘beige’.
If racism was born out of an over-active imagination, it lingers today due to a lack of one. The universe hasn’t revealed a new paradigm for discrimination that will satisfy our yet burning desire to create social hierarchies and groups.
So racism which keeps talking about going away, keeps stumbling back into our conversations.
The implications are both tragic and comedic: people are still turned away from nightclubs like Langley’s Shark Club because of their skin colour, meanwhile we turn up in the thousands to hear comics like Russell Peters do a bang-on Chinese accent.
Yet only comedians from a minority background can get away with making racial jokes. Because racism is still a two-headed beast that invokes laughter and pain, a white comedian cannot make the same jokes.
And when that day comes that they can, they just won’t be worth the draw anymore.
But for now, being a Vancouver resident is slowly becoming being a colourless experience, and in that is progress.
At some level it’s possible to relate to Chris Rock’s response at transcending his race: “Yeah, I love being famous. It's almost like being white, y'know?”
An abridged form of this article was published in the recent Province newspaper series Racism in Paradise. Twitter: @jagdeeshmann.
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