Non-white travellers’ Canadian citizenships angers White Canadians.

The perpetual foreigner stereotype strikes again. If you are Canadian and died while travelling abroad, being White instead of Asian will protect you from the anger of Canadians. These Canadians will not be angry about you dying, but they will be angry that you were legally Canadian. Here are some better CBC comments responding to the racism, via Chinese in Vancouver:

I bet if the victims in question were white Canadians, we wouldn’t hear so much as a single blip from those loudly croaking about “Canadians of convenience”.

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Why is it SOOOOO hard to believe that Chinese Canadians, might well have traveled during the summer holiday to Hong Kong to visit friends and relatives and then go over to Manila (a short 2 hour hop from Hong Kong) for a simple bus tour???

All the comments about “handing out” passports and Chinese Canadians should “stay in the country” are insane and touch on blatant racism!!!

Should Canadians of European descent also be restricted from traveling?

Commercials conflate whiteness with modernity.

In Romanticizing Ancient Chinese Wisdom at Sociological Images, Lisa Wade writes:

This 40-second commercial for HSBC bank, sent in by Michelle F., is an excellent example of the way that non-white and non-Western people are often portrayed as more deeply cultural, connected to the past, and closer to nature than their white, Western counterparts. Sometimes this is done in order to demonize a culture as “barbaric,” other times it is used to infantilize them as “primitive.” In this case, it romanticizes.

[…]

Running on both English and Chinese language channels, the commercial contrasts the wise Chinese man with the young, white man. The music, the boats, their clothing and hats, and their fishing methods all suggest that the Chinese are more connected to their own long-standing (ancient?) cultural traditions, ones that offered them an intimate and cooperative relationship to nature. Simultaneously, it erases Chinese modernity, fixing China somewhere back in time.

White people are different from people.

In Gutsell and Inzlicht’s study showing physical evidence that white people have difficulty empathizing with non-white people, the researchers studied only white people and made a generalization about “people”:

Our research suggests that people do not mentally simulate the actions of outgroups. That is, those neural networks underlying the simulation of actions and intentions—most likely part of the ‘‘mirror-neuron-system”—are less responsive to outgroup members than to ingroup members.

The Clark Doll Experiment showed that black children prefer white dolls to black dolls during the time of de jure racial segregation. If the researchers instead tested only white children as representative of “children” and found that white children preferred white dolls to black dolls, they might have concluded that all children during Jim Crow prefer dolls of their own race, which would have been completely wrong.

In studies on implicit race bias, white people unconsciously prefer white people to black people, even when they do not consider themselves racist. If the implicit race bias researchers tested only white participants, they might conclude that the preference is due to “people’s” ingroup bias. However, they would be completely wrong, since the same implicit race bias studies on blacks show that blacks prefer whites and blacks equally.

Black Coolness is higher-status than Asian Dorkiness.

The Racialicious post, Talking About The Things We Do To Each Other, is an important intra-POC conversation about tensions between black people and (East) Asian people (or rather between non-Asian black people and non-black Asian people). This is an incredibly complex topic, and I will have to respond to this issue through multiple posts.

Firstly, however, I must strongly disagree with Thea Lim’s characterization of East Asians:

I had a long convo with my friend L about this last week, where he said that East Asian students always gravitate towards white students, whereas African American students will usually stick together. The more we talked about it, the more I realised that he thought East Asian students do that because they aspire to whiteness, and because they can – economic privilege or light skin privilege allows them to do so. I was surprised to realise that he didn’t get it – East Asian students gravitate towards white students as a means of protection from the particular kind of racism that East Asians experience; where they are always made to feel as if they are from somewhere else.

Not only does this not apply to me as a (non-black) Chinese Canadian, but this whole situation does not apply to the schools I attended growing up. Perhaps it is a class difference and/or regional demographic difference, but the situation that Thea describes would be impossible at the public schools I attended.

Kyriarchy in Canada: where oppressions intersect

Complaints overwhelm human rights watchdog (Toronto Star):

Ontario’s newly streamlined human rights watchdog is swamped with allegations of sex, race and disability discrimination, the Star has found.

[…]

Tribunal decisions show that women, minorities and the disabled are most vulnerable to discrimination by employers, landlords and businesses. In some cases both the victim and the defendant belong to racial minorities but are from different backgrounds.

One complaint example is of a Chinese doughnut shop owner blatantly expressing her hatred of “Turkish” people and calling a customer a “gypsy”. Another is of a company policy banning three Muslim women from speaking French (which happens to be one of the official languages of our country), as well banning the microwaving of foods that fit the criteria of “You don’t know until you smell.”

Another example:

• A black couple received $5,000 and a letter of apology after they were ignored at a restaurant they had gone to as part of a corporate training session.

After arriving, the couple were asked several times by restaurant staff if they were aware they were standing in a private function area. The couple twice showed them their tickets – and finally propped the tickets on their table.

The waitress ignored them but served drinks to all the white people at the table. Finally, a white person had to order drinks for them. Later, the manager tried to apologize for his staff’s behaviour, saying the black couple was dressed better than the rest of the group and suggesting the woman looked like she could be a “lady of the night.”

At the end of the evening, the manager stopped the couple at the elevators and tried to give them some souvenir boxes, which he said would be good for storing drugs. They told him they didn’t use drugs. The manager insisted they take the boxes.