Racism in Canada

[pellucid]

Over the weekend and today, The Globe and Mail (Canada's major national newspaper) had a series of articles related to race and racism. And it seems that it's all the same old story, only perhaps politer than in the US.

Background: Race issues operate rather differently in Canada than in the States in some ways. In Canada, multiculturalism is the

Comments

[sweetiemissy]

I heard about that, never got to read it, I don't get the globe and mail, I can only grab it at my university and it was closed all weekend

[pellucid]

The Globe is quite handily online; that's how I read it 90+% of the time.

The problem with the ideal of being "colorblind" is that race does matter in our society, whether we like it or not. When I white person says "but I don't see race" a person of color very often hears "I don't see you and the fact that race plays an important role in the way you and your ancestors are and have been treated by people who look like me." If racism had somehow magically disappeared, then maybe we could afford to be "colorblind" (though even then I'm not sure it's an ideal to which we should really aspire--very often it's a code word for wanting everyone to assimilate to white culture). But racism has not disappeared, and by claiming that it has, we in effect ignore it, and by ignoring it white people in effect say to people of color "we don't care that you're being discriminated against