I have been living in Canada as a Permanent Resident since last 5 years. During this time, I have experienced discrimination first hand, both in offices of large banks and reputable consulting companies as well as in the daily walks of life. Discrimination and racism is rampant in Canada, sometimes overt and often covert. When its the latter, you have no recourse, because you can't point your finger at it and complain. You can only feel its impact but can't understand how it happened because the events leading upto the impact are engineered behind the scenes. Let me give you a few recent examples from my life in Canada.
I was at the GAP store at Eaton centre in Toronto one evening, during Christmas time last year, looking for a pair of jeans. Since I was on my way home from work, I was dressed in a suit and a tie. I had barely spent 3 minutes in the store, when one white girl approaches me and asks where the women's section is. I politely tell her that I am just a shopper like her and I don't know. Then, another white guy in his 20's approaches me and asks me about a certain kind of jeans. Again, I express my inability to help him. Then, another white woman in her 30's approaches me and asks me about some other kind of dress. All of this happened to me within a span of 10 minutes in rapid succession. I felt really disgusted and left the store. In the sub-conscious mind of caucasians, a visible minority is always seen as a worker, salesman or some kind of service provider. Why can't they think of me as another shopper just like them? This has happened to me many times in other stores as well, such as the HUDSON BAY store in Eaton centre. And invariably, the pattern is the same. I always have white people (its never another non-white person) coming upto me and mistaking me for a HUDSON BAY store employee. In the minds of many white middle class shoppers, visible minority equals worker class, who are meant to serve them.
And examples of white people being rude to me on the street are too many to cite. I have worked in 2 large, reputable banks (BMO, RBC) here in Toronto as a full time employee. At BMO, my position was eliminated along with dozens of others (mostly visible minorities) when a new CIO joined and wanted to bring in his own team. At RBC, my job was terminated after exactly one year because my manager said, I escalated about colleagues and thereby spoiled my relationship with them and hence I could not work with them anymore. In both cases, I had a white manager who did not like me. In both cases, my managers were less qualified than me, and had the same level of industry experience as myself and were my age. In both cases, I felt they were competing with me and felt insecure. In both banks, I faced rude, hostile and uncooperative behaviour from white employees who would gang up against me and snitch on my back to my white manager, who conveniently believed them. On the rare occasion that I complained about white employees, no one wanted to believe me. But when they complained about me, the effect was instantaneous. If you are working as a lower level employee at the clerical level or as an assistant, chances are, no one will bother you. But the moment you reach middle management, that's where the competition begins. I was shocked to see that all the employees at Senior Manager and above levels were white. I once had an opportunity to look at the trading floor in the capital markets division of BMO. It was a sea of white wherever I turned my head ! All well paying jobs in Canada are cornered by Caucasians, and they make no apologies about it. Most of the visible minorities are given lower paying jobs at lower rungs in operations (back office) or technology, and that's how banks are able to justify that they meet the employment equity standards. Visible minorities suffer from high levels of involuntary attrition, poor job satisfaction, get poor reviews in appraisals and don't have much career progression. Its quite common to see them stagnating at the same level for several decades, and if you asked them, they are actually grateful to even be able to keep their jobs in Canada, let alone get promoted. In many meetings inside those banks, I was often the only visible minority within the room, all other participants would be white. And when I enter into the room, often, no one would acknowledge my presence, as if I was a persona non-grata. When I make requests for information/resources etc, often white colleagues will procrastinate, delay or deny those requests; which was effectively a form of social ostracization.
Discrimination begins at the recruitment stage in Canada. Most visible minorities with non-Christian, foreign-sounding names don't even get invited for interviews. Most of the HR recruiters are white, so they tend to look for prospective employees who are like them. Even if a visible minority gets across those hoops, they tend to get eliminated at the interview stages, where they are invited just so that employers can demonstrate that they have been fair to everyone. But the hiring managers who usually tend to be white, eventually end up choosing a fellow white candidate. In one egregious case, a white female HR recruiter at CIBC interviewed me on phone on 3 different occasions, forgetting each time, that she spoke to me earlier. After each interview, the next day, she would email me saying that they have decided to move ahead with other candidates. I highly suspect that she was using me (a minority) as part of the pool, just to play safe, and satisfy employment equity rules. If you think, volunteering on boards of non-profits as a Director would be easy, where they don't pay anything, think again. Boards of large non-profits are like cozy private clubs for white Canadians. While non-profits don't pay anything, still they like to socialize with other people who are like them. So they hire only fellow whites for these unpaid board positions. After trying very hard, I got onto the board of one large non-profit (with 200+ employees) where all Board members are white. So I was essentially a "sympathy hire". When I attend any meetings with the Executive Director/CEO or other board members, I keep getting told how much Toronto has changed since last few decades in terms of demographics. They are nostalgic about the bygone era, and for what might have been. I keep quiet, nodding my head and smile nervously, just trying to play along. I don't know how else I could respond to such ackward comments. I think the underlying sub-text that they want to convey is, "you should be grateful that we let you in here, you don't really belong in such elite company".
Most white Canadians in banks say, that visible minorities have cultural adjustment challenges, a euphemism for being a visible minority and hence, not deserving of higher positions and nicer treatment. Friends, nothing has changed from the days of slave plantations in the US that were owned by white people. Visible minorities are still perceived as slaves, the worker class, who are meant to serve their white over-lords. In fact, those of you who read American history will know that Britishers in US (US was a British colony) rebelled against the ruling British government. They said, "no taxation without representation in British parliament". And then, a war broke out between the British rebels (now known as Americans) and the British government. The British government lost the war, the rebels won, with some help from the French government, and went on to declare independence from the British. Now, at that point in time, some British citizens living in USA were disgusted by the victory of rebels because they were still loyal to the British monarch. So they left the US in protest, and immigrated to Canada. Today's Anglo-Canada mostly comprises of those whose ancestors were loyal to the British monarch. When they came to Canada, they carried with them; the prejudices, negative attitudes, bias and the airs of being a landed aristocracy; and passed those attitudes and behaviours to successor generations. Back then, white British citizens were allowed to keep slaves. So at first, they harassed the aboriginals in Canada and tried to "civilize" them by imprisoning them in residential schools. Later, they found that they could import hard working Chinese people to work as labourers to build rail roads - hundreds of them died laying explosives to clear the hills and rocks. They met this fate, after paying a hefty head tax to the Canadian government for the privilege of being allowed to enter and work as labourers in Canada. Much later in the mid 1960's, they started importing all Asians, mainly to work in labour intensive industries. So the history of Asian immigration in Canada is very recent. A country whose composition was so homogenous for much of its history, suddenly finds it difficult to come to terms with this altered reality.
African slaves on cotton plantations have now been replaced with other visible minorities working in other enterprises. And cotton plantations have lost their relevance, because textile production no longer occurs in North America, that has shifted to Asian countries where yarn, fabric and finished products can be produced cheaply and quickly using local Asian labourers. The nature of the North American economy has also seen a radical shift from being a manufacturing economy to a services-oriented economy. As a result, apart from the lower level Asian labourers who are required to work in the labour-intensive industries (such as food and restaurant industry, agriculture, manufacturing etc) Canada has also been importing knowledge workers from Asia. These are highly qualified and skilled workers with university education and backgrounds in business, engineering, accounting, math, science etc. They are now being used to staff the bottom layers of the services economy. Often, they are under-paid and over-worked, and exploited. While I was employed with the Canadian banking industry, it was not uncommon to see Ph.D degree holders from Canadian universities, who were of Asian origin, working as low level Analysts or Programmers (entry level jobs), making way much lower than their true worth. And I also saw several white Canadians who were working as VPs, Directors and Senior Managers, with education no more than a Canadian high school diploma or a 2 year diploma from a Canadian college such as Seneca college, George Brown college etc. If some white employee had a BA degree in Philosophy from a little known institution like Athabasca University, that person would go on to scale the ladder like crazy and would be considered over-qualified and treated with great respect and deference due to his/her high education! Let me cite one specific example to prove that discrimination in Canada is all about skin pigmentation - not intellect, education, skills, cultural assimilation or any other factor. When it comes to visible minorities, white Canadian employers often proffer a plethora of lame excuses for not hiring them or even firing them. Some of these excuses revolve around visible minorities lacking Canadian work experience, lacking Canadian education/credentials, challenges with cultural assimilation etc. But white people who immigrate to Canada from South Africa get treated like royalty. I have seen several white men and women who immigrated from South Africa and despite having no Canadian education, no Canadian work experience and virtually no exposure to Canadian culture - face virtually no difficulty at all in finding well paying jobs. Indeed, many of them occupy top positions in various Canadian corporations. The experience of Caucasian immigrants from Australia, NZ, US, Europe, Russia and even African countries such as Zimbabwe (where a white minority once ruled that country) is very similar. In the end, the course of Canadian history, it appears, is being influenced by something as innocuous as melanin - the pigment that is responsible for skin colouration. The more you have, the worse it gets. This is indeed a Bizarro World, devoid of any logic.
During the last 5 years, I have seen it all, and have been at the receiving end of many such bad experiences, which have taken a toll on me at an emotional, mental and psychological level. I often think, was it worth it? Living a life full of insults, dis-honour, having to be subservient and servile, living the life of an under-dog, not being able to speak freely, not being able to fight for your rights, being discriminated against everyday, not getting any recognition despite working like a dog, and being someone who is constantly despised/looked down upon/unwanted by majority of the population. After all, I was doing OK back home also, and I did not exactly come from a poverty-stricken country. Had I known all this before-hand, I often ponder whether my decision to immigrate to Canada have been different? We often talk about assimilation in Canada. But true assimilation happens only when the residents of a host country are receptive, welcoming and inclusive. In Canada, what I discovered is that white Canadians want exclusion at every level. They will invite you into their house to work as a Butler (inclusion), but won't invite you to sit at the dinner table with them as an equal (exclusion). As a minority, you are meant to serve them. We, the visible minorities are needed in Canada for work related reasons, but there is no social acceptance and inclusion. This is a very divisive society, much more than the United States. In US, discrimination is overt; the sort that involves white police officers shooting and tasering un-armed black people. Whenever that happens, there is a public outcry, civil and criminal lawsuits are filed, accountability is quickly fixed, remedial measures at put in place and everyone does just fine thereafter. I have lived in New York City for many years before immigrating to Canada and never experienced anything like this. NYC is probably one of the best places to live for minorities and is very heterogeneous and cosmopolitan. New York State was one of the very first in US to abolish slavery. The conservative faction and the liberal faction in US fought an entire war on the question of slavery and got over with it once and for all. In Canada, we never had a civil war (not that I wish) on the question of minority rights, so the problem continues to fester and intermittently manifest itself. Canada's race relations problem is much bigger than that of US. In Canada, discrimination against minorities is covert, its corrosive, and its harmful effects will be seen over the longer term.
I don't want to generalize and say that every white person is racist or is prone to discriminating against visible minorities. I have met many kind, gentle, liberal and fair white people. Some of them are even married to visible minorities and they have bi-racial children. They are few in number, but they do exist in Canada and their presence makes life tolerable, and offers a ray of hope in a society that is otherwise so polarized. I guess, its in human nature to discriminate. I can cite many examples of discrimination that occurs in Asian countries as well. In the middle east, Shia Muslims discriminate against Sunni Muslims, hundreds of thousands have died in these sectarian conflicts. 90% of the population of today's China originated from the Han race; and this group discriminates against the Uyghur Muslim minority there. In Egypt, the Muslim majority discriminates against Coptic Christians. In India, upper caste Hindus discriminate against fellow Hindus of lower caste. The entire African continent is rife with sectarian conflict. Many years ago, I saw a movie called, Hotel Rawanda that depicted the bloody ethnic conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. According to Wikipedia, "during the approximate 100-day period from April 7, 1994, to mid-July, an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 Rwandans were killed, constituting as much as 20% of the country's total population and 70% of the Tutsi then living in Rwanda". One of my arguments has always been that most countries in Asia, South America and Africa are under-developed or developing countries. They achieved independence from the colonists very recently and are now masters of their own destiny. It will take time for them to evolve into a mature democracy and an egalitarian society. Those societies are still unsettled because unlike western countries, they have still not resolved fundamental issues related to food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, clean drinking water and the like. But US and Canada are not like them. These countries have achieved political independence and economic stability much earlier, and have since led the way in terms of abolishing slavery, establishing UN, ending conflict, evolving into a mature democracy, establishing the rule of law and human rights etc. So immigrants from under-developed and developing countries actually look upto US and Canada as a beacon of hope and expect the situation to be different here in North America. Instead, when immigrants arrive here only to experience the same kind of discrimination that they confronted back home, they feel disillusioned in their misplaced trust.
Prior to the 1960's, visible minorities were not allowed to immigrate to Canada; so Caucasians of British origin discriminated against fellow Caucasians who originated from other European countries. During and after World War II, the Canadian government interned (segregated into a camp and closely guarded) all fellow Canadians of Italian origin because they suspected their loyalty to Canada. A former white Canadian colleague of German origin told me that in his childhood, the white anglo-Canadians would discriminate against him and even beat him up. When he went crying to his mom, she told him, "son, you better learn how to put up with this". She didn't go and fight with the Anglos. That, my friends, seems to be the best survival strategy in this society - have a thick skin, and learn to put up, don't react against every event. It is my understanding that few decades ago, white Canadians of British (Anglo) ancestry would look down and actively discriminate against the poor refugees from Italy, Ireland and eastern Europe. Now, visible minorities from Asian countries are the latest punching bag. And I guess it will never stop. We humans are such, we are braggarts, we love to discriminate against others, in a quest to show how superior we are !
I was at the GAP store at Eaton centre in Toronto one evening, during Christmas time last year, looking for a pair of jeans. Since I was on my way home from work, I was dressed in a suit and a tie. I had barely spent 3 minutes in the store, when one white girl approaches me and asks where the women's section is. I politely tell her that I am just a shopper like her and I don't know. Then, another white guy in his 20's approaches me and asks me about a certain kind of jeans. Again, I express my inability to help him. Then, another white woman in her 30's approaches me and asks me about some other kind of dress. All of this happened to me within a span of 10 minutes in rapid succession. I felt really disgusted and left the store. In the sub-conscious mind of caucasians, a visible minority is always seen as a worker, salesman or some kind of service provider. Why can't they think of me as another shopper just like them? This has happened to me many times in other stores as well, such as the HUDSON BAY store in Eaton centre. And invariably, the pattern is the same. I always have white people (its never another non-white person) coming upto me and mistaking me for a HUDSON BAY store employee. In the minds of many white middle class shoppers, visible minority equals worker class, who are meant to serve them.
And examples of white people being rude to me on the street are too many to cite. I have worked in 2 large, reputable banks (BMO, RBC) here in Toronto as a full time employee. At BMO, my position was eliminated along with dozens of others (mostly visible minorities) when a new CIO joined and wanted to bring in his own team. At RBC, my job was terminated after exactly one year because my manager said, I escalated about colleagues and thereby spoiled my relationship with them and hence I could not work with them anymore. In both cases, I had a white manager who did not like me. In both cases, my managers were less qualified than me, and had the same level of industry experience as myself and were my age. In both cases, I felt they were competing with me and felt insecure. In both banks, I faced rude, hostile and uncooperative behaviour from white employees who would gang up against me and snitch on my back to my white manager, who conveniently believed them. On the rare occasion that I complained about white employees, no one wanted to believe me. But when they complained about me, the effect was instantaneous. If you are working as a lower level employee at the clerical level or as an assistant, chances are, no one will bother you. But the moment you reach middle management, that's where the competition begins. I was shocked to see that all the employees at Senior Manager and above levels were white. I once had an opportunity to look at the trading floor in the capital markets division of BMO. It was a sea of white wherever I turned my head ! All well paying jobs in Canada are cornered by Caucasians, and they make no apologies about it. Most of the visible minorities are given lower paying jobs at lower rungs in operations (back office) or technology, and that's how banks are able to justify that they meet the employment equity standards. Visible minorities suffer from high levels of involuntary attrition, poor job satisfaction, get poor reviews in appraisals and don't have much career progression. Its quite common to see them stagnating at the same level for several decades, and if you asked them, they are actually grateful to even be able to keep their jobs in Canada, let alone get promoted. In many meetings inside those banks, I was often the only visible minority within the room, all other participants would be white. And when I enter into the room, often, no one would acknowledge my presence, as if I was a persona non-grata. When I make requests for information/resources etc, often white colleagues will procrastinate, delay or deny those requests; which was effectively a form of social ostracization.
Discrimination begins at the recruitment stage in Canada. Most visible minorities with non-Christian, foreign-sounding names don't even get invited for interviews. Most of the HR recruiters are white, so they tend to look for prospective employees who are like them. Even if a visible minority gets across those hoops, they tend to get eliminated at the interview stages, where they are invited just so that employers can demonstrate that they have been fair to everyone. But the hiring managers who usually tend to be white, eventually end up choosing a fellow white candidate. In one egregious case, a white female HR recruiter at CIBC interviewed me on phone on 3 different occasions, forgetting each time, that she spoke to me earlier. After each interview, the next day, she would email me saying that they have decided to move ahead with other candidates. I highly suspect that she was using me (a minority) as part of the pool, just to play safe, and satisfy employment equity rules. If you think, volunteering on boards of non-profits as a Director would be easy, where they don't pay anything, think again. Boards of large non-profits are like cozy private clubs for white Canadians. While non-profits don't pay anything, still they like to socialize with other people who are like them. So they hire only fellow whites for these unpaid board positions. After trying very hard, I got onto the board of one large non-profit (with 200+ employees) where all Board members are white. So I was essentially a "sympathy hire". When I attend any meetings with the Executive Director/CEO or other board members, I keep getting told how much Toronto has changed since last few decades in terms of demographics. They are nostalgic about the bygone era, and for what might have been. I keep quiet, nodding my head and smile nervously, just trying to play along. I don't know how else I could respond to such ackward comments. I think the underlying sub-text that they want to convey is, "you should be grateful that we let you in here, you don't really belong in such elite company".
Most white Canadians in banks say, that visible minorities have cultural adjustment challenges, a euphemism for being a visible minority and hence, not deserving of higher positions and nicer treatment. Friends, nothing has changed from the days of slave plantations in the US that were owned by white people. Visible minorities are still perceived as slaves, the worker class, who are meant to serve their white over-lords. In fact, those of you who read American history will know that Britishers in US (US was a British colony) rebelled against the ruling British government. They said, "no taxation without representation in British parliament". And then, a war broke out between the British rebels (now known as Americans) and the British government. The British government lost the war, the rebels won, with some help from the French government, and went on to declare independence from the British. Now, at that point in time, some British citizens living in USA were disgusted by the victory of rebels because they were still loyal to the British monarch. So they left the US in protest, and immigrated to Canada. Today's Anglo-Canada mostly comprises of those whose ancestors were loyal to the British monarch. When they came to Canada, they carried with them; the prejudices, negative attitudes, bias and the airs of being a landed aristocracy; and passed those attitudes and behaviours to successor generations. Back then, white British citizens were allowed to keep slaves. So at first, they harassed the aboriginals in Canada and tried to "civilize" them by imprisoning them in residential schools. Later, they found that they could import hard working Chinese people to work as labourers to build rail roads - hundreds of them died laying explosives to clear the hills and rocks. They met this fate, after paying a hefty head tax to the Canadian government for the privilege of being allowed to enter and work as labourers in Canada. Much later in the mid 1960's, they started importing all Asians, mainly to work in labour intensive industries. So the history of Asian immigration in Canada is very recent. A country whose composition was so homogenous for much of its history, suddenly finds it difficult to come to terms with this altered reality.
African slaves on cotton plantations have now been replaced with other visible minorities working in other enterprises. And cotton plantations have lost their relevance, because textile production no longer occurs in North America, that has shifted to Asian countries where yarn, fabric and finished products can be produced cheaply and quickly using local Asian labourers. The nature of the North American economy has also seen a radical shift from being a manufacturing economy to a services-oriented economy. As a result, apart from the lower level Asian labourers who are required to work in the labour-intensive industries (such as food and restaurant industry, agriculture, manufacturing etc) Canada has also been importing knowledge workers from Asia. These are highly qualified and skilled workers with university education and backgrounds in business, engineering, accounting, math, science etc. They are now being used to staff the bottom layers of the services economy. Often, they are under-paid and over-worked, and exploited. While I was employed with the Canadian banking industry, it was not uncommon to see Ph.D degree holders from Canadian universities, who were of Asian origin, working as low level Analysts or Programmers (entry level jobs), making way much lower than their true worth. And I also saw several white Canadians who were working as VPs, Directors and Senior Managers, with education no more than a Canadian high school diploma or a 2 year diploma from a Canadian college such as Seneca college, George Brown college etc. If some white employee had a BA degree in Philosophy from a little known institution like Athabasca University, that person would go on to scale the ladder like crazy and would be considered over-qualified and treated with great respect and deference due to his/her high education! Let me cite one specific example to prove that discrimination in Canada is all about skin pigmentation - not intellect, education, skills, cultural assimilation or any other factor. When it comes to visible minorities, white Canadian employers often proffer a plethora of lame excuses for not hiring them or even firing them. Some of these excuses revolve around visible minorities lacking Canadian work experience, lacking Canadian education/credentials, challenges with cultural assimilation etc. But white people who immigrate to Canada from South Africa get treated like royalty. I have seen several white men and women who immigrated from South Africa and despite having no Canadian education, no Canadian work experience and virtually no exposure to Canadian culture - face virtually no difficulty at all in finding well paying jobs. Indeed, many of them occupy top positions in various Canadian corporations. The experience of Caucasian immigrants from Australia, NZ, US, Europe, Russia and even African countries such as Zimbabwe (where a white minority once ruled that country) is very similar. In the end, the course of Canadian history, it appears, is being influenced by something as innocuous as melanin - the pigment that is responsible for skin colouration. The more you have, the worse it gets. This is indeed a Bizarro World, devoid of any logic.
During the last 5 years, I have seen it all, and have been at the receiving end of many such bad experiences, which have taken a toll on me at an emotional, mental and psychological level. I often think, was it worth it? Living a life full of insults, dis-honour, having to be subservient and servile, living the life of an under-dog, not being able to speak freely, not being able to fight for your rights, being discriminated against everyday, not getting any recognition despite working like a dog, and being someone who is constantly despised/looked down upon/unwanted by majority of the population. After all, I was doing OK back home also, and I did not exactly come from a poverty-stricken country. Had I known all this before-hand, I often ponder whether my decision to immigrate to Canada have been different? We often talk about assimilation in Canada. But true assimilation happens only when the residents of a host country are receptive, welcoming and inclusive. In Canada, what I discovered is that white Canadians want exclusion at every level. They will invite you into their house to work as a Butler (inclusion), but won't invite you to sit at the dinner table with them as an equal (exclusion). As a minority, you are meant to serve them. We, the visible minorities are needed in Canada for work related reasons, but there is no social acceptance and inclusion. This is a very divisive society, much more than the United States. In US, discrimination is overt; the sort that involves white police officers shooting and tasering un-armed black people. Whenever that happens, there is a public outcry, civil and criminal lawsuits are filed, accountability is quickly fixed, remedial measures at put in place and everyone does just fine thereafter. I have lived in New York City for many years before immigrating to Canada and never experienced anything like this. NYC is probably one of the best places to live for minorities and is very heterogeneous and cosmopolitan. New York State was one of the very first in US to abolish slavery. The conservative faction and the liberal faction in US fought an entire war on the question of slavery and got over with it once and for all. In Canada, we never had a civil war (not that I wish) on the question of minority rights, so the problem continues to fester and intermittently manifest itself. Canada's race relations problem is much bigger than that of US. In Canada, discrimination against minorities is covert, its corrosive, and its harmful effects will be seen over the longer term.
I don't want to generalize and say that every white person is racist or is prone to discriminating against visible minorities. I have met many kind, gentle, liberal and fair white people. Some of them are even married to visible minorities and they have bi-racial children. They are few in number, but they do exist in Canada and their presence makes life tolerable, and offers a ray of hope in a society that is otherwise so polarized. I guess, its in human nature to discriminate. I can cite many examples of discrimination that occurs in Asian countries as well. In the middle east, Shia Muslims discriminate against Sunni Muslims, hundreds of thousands have died in these sectarian conflicts. 90% of the population of today's China originated from the Han race; and this group discriminates against the Uyghur Muslim minority there. In Egypt, the Muslim majority discriminates against Coptic Christians. In India, upper caste Hindus discriminate against fellow Hindus of lower caste. The entire African continent is rife with sectarian conflict. Many years ago, I saw a movie called, Hotel Rawanda that depicted the bloody ethnic conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. According to Wikipedia, "during the approximate 100-day period from April 7, 1994, to mid-July, an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 Rwandans were killed, constituting as much as 20% of the country's total population and 70% of the Tutsi then living in Rwanda". One of my arguments has always been that most countries in Asia, South America and Africa are under-developed or developing countries. They achieved independence from the colonists very recently and are now masters of their own destiny. It will take time for them to evolve into a mature democracy and an egalitarian society. Those societies are still unsettled because unlike western countries, they have still not resolved fundamental issues related to food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, clean drinking water and the like. But US and Canada are not like them. These countries have achieved political independence and economic stability much earlier, and have since led the way in terms of abolishing slavery, establishing UN, ending conflict, evolving into a mature democracy, establishing the rule of law and human rights etc. So immigrants from under-developed and developing countries actually look upto US and Canada as a beacon of hope and expect the situation to be different here in North America. Instead, when immigrants arrive here only to experience the same kind of discrimination that they confronted back home, they feel disillusioned in their misplaced trust.
Prior to the 1960's, visible minorities were not allowed to immigrate to Canada; so Caucasians of British origin discriminated against fellow Caucasians who originated from other European countries. During and after World War II, the Canadian government interned (segregated into a camp and closely guarded) all fellow Canadians of Italian origin because they suspected their loyalty to Canada. A former white Canadian colleague of German origin told me that in his childhood, the white anglo-Canadians would discriminate against him and even beat him up. When he went crying to his mom, she told him, "son, you better learn how to put up with this". She didn't go and fight with the Anglos. That, my friends, seems to be the best survival strategy in this society - have a thick skin, and learn to put up, don't react against every event. It is my understanding that few decades ago, white Canadians of British (Anglo) ancestry would look down and actively discriminate against the poor refugees from Italy, Ireland and eastern Europe. Now, visible minorities from Asian countries are the latest punching bag. And I guess it will never stop. We humans are such, we are braggarts, we love to discriminate against others, in a quest to show how superior we are !
