Unemployed? You fail at being Canadian.

Are you currently unemployed? According to the new Canadian citizenship guidebook for prospective immigrants, over 8.6% of unemployed Canadians are not fulfilling the Canadian responsibility of having a job, which now comes with the rights of having a Canadian citizenship.

The new Canadian citizenship guidebook was unveiled last week, redefining what it means to be Canadian. After all, new Canadian immigrants are more likely to be unemployed, which must mean—according to the authors of the guidebook—that their economic difficulties are a result of their failure adopt Canadian values. In addition, the new guidebook tells prospective immigrants, “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, “honour killings,” female genital mutilation, or other gender-based violence.”

White people think they know all about you from reading a book.

Sometimes a white person says something about people of colour that is untrue, and when you correct her, the white person will insist that she is right because she read it in a book.

You know that it is untrue because you do not (or somebody you know does not) fit into that generalization; thus, it is inaccurate to say that people of colour have that property, without qualifiers. For some reason, the white person believes that the written word should override the lived experiences of people of colour, even when that book is a fictional portrayal of, a study of, or an interpretation of our lived experiences.

Note that to give priority to one’s lived experience over a book in this case is not a case of anti-intellectualism. (However, it is probably often dismissed as anti-intellectualism by the white person, because of the assumption that people of colour are against book learnin’ and are opposed to something because it comes from a book.) Instead, disproving a universal claim by using one counterexample is an application of predicate logic.

To disprove the claim, “All X have property P,” all you need to do is to show, “There exists an X without property P.”

British employers racially discriminate against job applicants with African and Asian names.

Undercover job hunters reveal huge race bias in Britain’s workplaces (18 October 2009):

A government sting operation targeting hundreds of employers across Britain has uncovered widespread racial discrimination against workers with African and Asian names.

Researchers sent nearly 3,000 job applications under false identities in an attempt to discover if employers were discriminating against jobseekers with foreign names. Using names recognisably from three different communities – Nazia Mahmood, Mariam Namagembe and Alison Taylor – false identities were created with similar experience and qualifications. Every false applicant had British education and work histories.

They found that an applicant who appeared to be white would send nine applications before receiving a positive response of either an invitation to an interview or an encouraging telephone call. Minority candidates with the same qualifications and experience had to send 16 applications before receiving a similar response.

Chinese Canadians protested the perpetual foreigner stereotype in 1979.

In 1979, some White Canadians believed that Chinese Canadian university students were “foreign” students taking the places of “Canadians” in Canadian universities. They produced a program about it, called, Campus Giveaway, which aired on CTV’s W5.

However, in 1979 and 1980, a group of Chinese Canadians formed an ad hoc Council of Chinese Canadians, rallied and marched against the Campus Giveaway program, and took legal action against CTV. The protesters chanted, “Red, brown, black, yellow, and white! All Canadians must unite!” outside CTV’s offices.

Here is a transcript of Protesting racism on TV, a CBC News clip from 1980 covering the W5 incident:

Reporter: A protest movement is gaining momentum in metro against the CTV television network and its public affairs program, W5. Last September, W5 aired a program called Campus Giveaway, which focused on “foreign” students in Canadian universities. Protesters say the show implies that foreign students, and Chinese students in particular, are taking the places of “Canadian” students in universities, an implication they say “smacks of racism”.

“Easterners” are not collectivist automatons who are poor at analytical reasoning.

Figure 1. German (blue) versus Chinese (red) opinions, according to a German art exhibit. The piece was created by a German-educated Chinese woman named Yang Liu. Compare this symbolism with the term “Chinese fire drill”.

Excepted from East meets west: How the brain unites us all [HTML] [PDF] by Ed Yong (via MindHacks):

AS A SPECIES, we possess remarkably little genetic variation, yet we tend to overlook this homogeneity and focus instead on differences between groups and individuals. At its darkest, this tendency generates xenophobia and racism, but it also has a more benign manifestation – a fascination with the exotic.

Nowhere is our love affair with otherness more romanticised than in our attitudes towards the cultures of east and west. Artists and travellers have long marvelled that on opposite sides of the globe, the world’s most ancient civilisations have developed distinct forms of language, writing, art, literature, music, cuisine and fashion. As advances in communications, transport and the internet shrink the modern world, some of these distinctions are breaking down. But one difference is getting more attention than ever: the notion that easterners and westerners have distinct world views.

Psychologists have conducted a wealth of experiments that seem to support popular notions that easterners have a holistic world view, rooted in philosophical and religious traditions such as Taoism and Confucianism, while westerners tend to think more analytically, as befits their philosophical heritage of reductionism, utilitarianism and so on. However, the most recent research suggests that these popular stereotypes are far too simplistic. It is becoming apparent that we are all capable of thinking both holistically and analytically – and we are starting to understand what makes individuals flip between the two modes of thought.