Viewing page 46 of 56

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

FREEDOMWAYS                 SECOND QUARTER 1980

PREJUDICE AND RACISM IN CANADA

RACISM AND NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS. By Frederic Ivor Case. Plow-share Press, 1345 Davenport Road, Toronto, Canada. 102 pages. $3.95.

FRED CASE, a professor of languages at the University of Toron-to, is a super-sensitive observer of racism and prejudice in Canada. His impact on Toronto, Canada's largest city, through his frank public lectures on Canadian racism, has been as great as have his teachings in the classroom.

In this severe collection of seven essays, Case shatters the image of Canada as a country with a good record on human rights and race relations. What emerges is a country that was born in the denial of native peoples' humanity, that has a history of exclusion and expulsion of various groups on the basis of race, cultural and religious affiliation and economic and ideological classification.

For scores of years up to the present time, racial groups such as Chinese, Japanese, Jews, South Asians, Blacks and Latin Americans have been successively singled out by the Government of Canada for scapegoating and other dehumanizing treatment, including deportation and denial of various human rights. Even French Canadians, the country's largest minority, have not been able to escape ethnic humiliation. Canada remains unable to build a national conscious-ness because its various peoples' unawareness of a common history has led to a lack of empathy with each other's humanity. The coun-try is a model of colonial structures and attitudes. Because of the economic rivalry imposed on immigrants and the dispossessed, indi-viduals are driven into ethnocentric enclaves. Canada has always been held together essentially by force. Despite hypocritical words, there is no love between the provinces and no love between the federal government and the provinces.

As for the federal and provincial policy of "multiculturalism," it was invented to diffuse the situation produced by increasing demands from the French Canadians. In the exclusion and expulsions of black migrant workers. Pakistani families, Haitians and Latin American workers are revealed the hypocrisy and cynicism of present governmental multicultural programs which send Canadians off in their various folk corners but rarely bring them together to address common problems.

Case conducts his assessment of racism in Canada from a global and historical perspective, and the class aspects of discrimination underlie his commentary. There are many allusions to specific incidents of present and past oppression in Canada; however, Case is more concerned with analysis and observation than with the details

108

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 14:32:51