I saw this on CBC today. Why does this still occur in canada in 2009? Thoughts?


http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-col...me-arrest.html

I find what ohcanada80 said in the comments to be really disturbing, the fact that they will only be charged for assault. If we treated hate crimes as hate crimes instead of trying to hide what they actually are we could stop a lot of things like this from happening.

Sigh. To be honest, it shouldn't be surprising. Canada may seem like a really multicultural country, but for the most part, that's only in major cities like Toronto and Vancouver. Go up North, and you hardly see any minorities. People are still living in a world where they don't grow up experiencing different cultures and learning about different cultures. It's in a place where hatred and racism can and still is being passed down through older generations. Our generation is a little bit better obviously, but it's not gone and it won't be for a long time. Growing up in Toronto, I haven't had to experience racism much, but when it did, it hurt. And I hope that one day, no one has to anymore.

As Feona said, Canada isn't the happy little racism-free country everyone seems to think it is.

For example Canada was one the countries (along with the US, Australia and New Zealand) that flat-out refused to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People in 2007 because it didn't "agree" with the conditions.

that was in broad daylight too

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=oeuD2YH2Fy4

Here's the video, what's scary is that two out of the three guys were absolute pansies(I've see 14 year olds fight better) and what exactly would have happened if the Black guy wasn't big enough to stand his ground and the three guys weren't such pansies. I'm pretty sure this is a rare instance of it being captured on tape, I'm pretty sure this goes on in schools and streets against smaller opponents and we never get to hear about it in the media. But seriously a pickup truck and no shirts how stereotypically redneck is that? :S

We aren't as bad as the England yet(read Bradford riots and the whole Asian, Caribbean and Skin head clash and the knife culture) but the Canadian immigrant population is on the rise and this very soon could become a more serious issue. The reason I think this isn't that much of an issue in Ontario is that the GTA is and has been a centre of multiculturalism, it is the people up north and west that haven't experienced and are not used to foreign cultures and races, once the immigrants start moving away from the GTA into other places we might see more trouble. Even at Mac I've heard that people coming in here for the first time from Owen Sound, Barrie, Sarnia and other such comparitivley remote places in Ontario have been shown to be apprehensive and shocked about the level of multiculturalism at Mac.

I refrained from watching the video before, but now... man this is just disgusting.

I mean how ridiculously stupid can you get? You hate someone because their skin colour is different. I'm getting too upset to even talk about it anymore. I hate it, why should anyone be subjected to this?

I remember, I had a really good Portuguese friend in my last year of highschool. She and I went to the mall, and some guys and girls came over, they were her friends and friends of friends. They were all white, Portuguese it seemed like, but they didn't really notice I was sitting there. One guy pipes up, "Oh my god, black girls are so disgusting, why would anyone ever date them?" This guy is littered with pimples, is so ugly only his mother could love him, and he's sitting there trashing black girls in my face. Then he says, "Well I guess I could date a half-black girl, but only because of the nice body that they have - still I don't like half-breeds."

At that point, I just got up and left and couldn't say anything. I was too shocked to. I was even too shocked to feel anger at that moment. I mean, everyone is entitled to their opinion of who they want to date but it was really unnecessary. After that, I found it really hard to trust my friend because I wondered if they spoke like that all the time and she didn't try to stop them.

Why are racists proud of the way they make people feel? Why are they racist in the first place?

Racism is due mostly to ignorance. And yep, most racist people are proud of their attitudes, and thus their ignorance. It's a form of bullying I guess; put someone else down to feel better about yourself.

If you're really interested in racial politics take English/CSCT 3A03: Critical Race Studies.

Well another thing I've noticed in Canada is all these nationalities being rather proud of their heritage and dismissive of others(apart from the Polish who are normally depressive of it). All this Italians are this that, Portugese, Serbian superiority claims are often the root of racism here, I don't hang out with them alot but even the South Asians have this thing going(Indians vs Pakistanis vs Bangladeshis) but it is usually confined to themselves.

That Racial Politics class sounds very interesting - too bad it can't be taken as an elective. And yes, Italians/Portuguese are insanely proud of where they come from and tend to look down on other people. I'm not trying to generalize, but those are the sort of kids I went to school with. Funny though, the older generation is usually nicer in that instance. I guess it's more of an ethnic thing in that scenario.

There are actually discussions on racial politics in a lot of the CSCT/English crosslisted courses. Postcolonial Lit (3R06) covers the topic a lot, because colonization was a undoubtably racist. Depending no the prof and the interests it sometimes comes up in Countercultures (2MM3), Concepts of Culture (2M03), Gender and Sexuality (3AA3).

It is also prevelant in Indigenous Studies courses. It's been a topic in all of the classes I've taken so far (Indigenous Soverignty, Indigenous Resistance, Traditional Ecological Knowlege, Native Canadian Lit, Native American Lit), and presumably in the ones I'm enrolled in next year.

It likely appears in a Poli Sci and History courses too.

Originally Posted by feonateresa

That Racial Politics class sounds very interesting - too bad it can't be taken as an elective. And yes, Italians/Portuguese are insanely proud of where they come from and tend to look down on other people. I'm not trying to generalize, but those are the sort of kids I went to school with. Funny though, the older generation is usually nicer in that instance. I guess it's more of an ethnic thing in that scenario.

I think that's probably because they are growing up(compared to the older generation I presume) in much more multicultural school systems where all sorts of nationalities who are physically and culturally different from each other clash. The pride is probably a social mechanism to differentiate and somehow make themselves superior to the other nationalities(Isn't superiority the ultimate goal of any highschool student?)

I've actually found it to be the opposite.

The baby boomers (and their parents) and Gen Xers tend to be much more racist than Gen Y. And often make references to 'the old country'.

The people in the video: look like they're from Gen X more than Gen Y

In my brother's grade (grade 6) a kid turned to a Jewish boy and expressed that it was a shame that Hitler didn't finish the job.

It makes me very very angry when I hear about people saying that Canada is a hate free country where you're entitled to all your rights and privileges.
It's not so, and trivalises the struggle of all the little immigrant kids who were called fobs and picked on cause they didn't fit in and people in bigger struggles, such as the Aboriginal youth up North who suffer from depression and are at high risk for suicide.

I hope people understand the gravity of the situation. The basis of hate crimes (prejudice, ignore and hate) extend beyond one act of violence or a rude message of graffitti. They infiltrate people's lives and the way they think, and the saddest occurence of racial prejudice that I have witnessed or heard of has to be what's happening in my family of schools, where young children are expressing such disgusting things and nobody is correcting them. (I.e. If you attended Rick Hansen (just an example) and a neighbouring middle school, that middle school is considered to be part of the Rick Hansen family)

When we don't speak out about these acts, especially in public, kids growing up don't learn that this is wrong.

Not saying it's right is not as good as it's saying it's wrong.
So to answer your question, Davey, I don't think enough people are saying it's wrong.
When I hear some older immigrants talk about Canada, they don't always discuss their victimisation and struggle and I think people fall under this misconception that we're this perfect, accepting land, when in fact we have a lot more progress to make. (Look at how we treat the Aboriginals and how just recently, some communities were denied hand sanitizers and precautionary materials against the onset of the swine flu because some government officials believed the people on reserves would consume them.)

When people don't hear about the problems, they're not going to know that there's anything to fix, and they only perpetrate this wrong impression they have of the society around them. Then when something like this happens, we're shocked and stunned, but the truth is that it likely happens in several communities without us ever knowing.

I think that's another big deal, that we don't know about some of horrific things that victims of racism undergo. And when we do hear about them, in my personal experience, I've found too many people defend rather than accept.

What I mean by that a lot of people have had positive experiences here and when they hear about such things, they say "That's one case" rather than admitting that perhaps it could be symptomic of a huge underlyign problem of covert racism and discrimination.

Originally Posted by huzaifa47

Well another thing I've noticed in Canada is all these nationalities being rather proud of their heritage and dismissive of others(apart from the Polish who are normally depressive of it). All this Italians are this that, Portugese, Serbian superiority claims are often the root of racism here, I don't hang out with them alot but even the South Asians have this thing going(Indians vs Pakistanis vs Bangladeshis) but it is usually confined to themselves.

The divide in the South Asian community is horrific and disgusting.
I'm often very ashamed of what my culture has become and embarassed that our progress is hindered by our uninterrupted focus on trivial and meaningless issues.

Instead of getting mad about cricket and "INDIA ZINDABAD" or "PAKISTAN JHEET GAYA" we should focus on the fact that some Hindus and Muslims are being burned alive. That children are being sold into marriage when they're so young. And we need to focus on the fact that the amount of domestic abuse and rape is astronomical, but we don't.

We don't unite to fight our problems, we divide and in our own communities, magnify and enhance the horror.


I do not think that there is much racism among South Asians in Canada because we're grouped into one big cluster but there is a lot of cultural intolerance between the different sects of people and that's intolerable because it leads to awful things.


Oh God, I could go on about this for days.