本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛Why Maclean’s and Racism Should No Longer Define our Nation
by Henry Yu
Thirty years after CTV aired its infamous W5 program “Campus Giveaway” insinuating that Canadian universities had too many “Asians” and therefore too many “foreigners,” Maclean’s magazine in its annual university rankings issue last week cynically again used racial stereotypes to invent a non-issue, asking why “white” Canadians think some of our top universities are “too Asian.” Buried amidst the article’s inflammatory racial profiling was an attempt at good reporting, which made Macleans’ appeal to “race” even more sad.
The journalists interviewed a wide array of people; however, rather than addressing the worry among our younger generation about how hard they need to work in school when so much of their future relies upon the grades and rankings they receive, the editors decided to bury any insights they had acquired underneath a racist logic of “Asian” versus “white.” They created the fearsome spectre of too many “Asian” students who were somehow both overachieving and tragically marred by social awkwardness. They then blamed these students for the lack of dialogue (and cross-racial partying) on campuses.
The title “Too Asian”? draws upon over a century of racist politics using the term “Asian” to flatten everyone who looks “Oriental” into a single category which is somehow threatening to “white” Canadians. Have we not advanced enough to recognize that people with black hair who do not look like their families came from Europe can still be “Canadian,” rather than the assumption of the writers that “Asian” is the opposite of “born in Canada”? Judging from the first 300 comments on Maclean’s’ online edition, almost every single one of which in dismissing the article as being pointless and inflammatory was more articulate and intelligent about the dangers of racial stereotyping than the authors, I see hope in a younger generation of Canadians who have enough sense to understand that an “open dialogue” about race requires first and foremost avoiding the easy analysis of lumping in a wide variety of people into simplistic categories such as “Asian” and “white.” Each day in my classes I hear intelligent and humane dialogues between students of every colour and from everywhere around the world, something that makes UBC and other Canadian universities special places that seemingly have better sense than the Maclean’s newsroom.
In referring to characterizations of Asian Americans in the United States as a “model minority” in the 1980s and 1990s and the ugly attempts in some private universities in the U.S. during that period to quietly cap enrolments of those considered “Asian,” the article implied this “American” solution to campuses being “too Asian” should be dismissed as un-Canadian and against our meritocratic admission policy. What the authors fail to realize is that they have accepted throughout their own article the fundamental racist premise that was being made in the U.S., the characterization of all “Asians” as overachievers who threaten “white” students. There are plenty of mediocre, hard drinking, unintelligent students out there, and there are a large number of hard working, ambitious, students worried about whether their investment in higher education will actually pay off after they graduate.
One of the issues the authors did not pick up from the debates in the United States was the underlying question of what characterized higher education as an engine of democracy and social mobility, and the crucial role of universities in creating the next generation of leaders. On many U.S. campuses, intelligent dialogues revolved not around whether there were “too many Asians” on campus, but more interesting and important questions such as how to produce doctors or lawyers who could serve the diverse needs of American society, or whether an arts education should be measured with the same financial logic of business school. If higher education is only a financial investment now for a higher income in the future, how impoverished as a society will we become?
We should be asking how our campus communities can be improved, and we should understand the diverse backgrounds of our students and how racial stereotypes continue to have salience. Racist questions obscure the important issues facing us. Talking about race involves seeing through the generalizations and understanding what is actually happening.
Until recently in its history, Canada had a history of white supremacy similar to South Africa and the American South, building its immigration policy around the racial category of “white Canada,” passing a wide array of discriminatory laws that disenfranchised those considered “non-whites,” and creating widespread racial segregation in jobs and housing. The category of “white” was used to glue together European migrants of many different backgrounds and as a political organizing tool, often using racial categories such as “Oriental,” “Asian,” “Jew,” or “Native” in contrast. We are still left with legacies of this history, including the unquestioned assumption that the term “Canadian” is interchangeable with “white Canadian.” Like a Molson Canadian television commercial, this lingering vision of Canada as uniformly white is so commonplace that we still think of it as the norm—we rarely ask whether a certain neighborhood or community or school might be “too white.” Why is there an issue of “race” only when a community or university is becoming “too Asian?”
Our society no longer looks like the beer-drinking, all-white camaraderie of a Molson Canadian commercial. Perhaps it never did, and white supremacy always needed to hide away into reservations and ghettoes all those who did not fit into the vision of “White Canada Forever,” which white supremacists sang a century ago. When large waves of European refugees came to Canada after World War II, they had little choice but to blend into a generic whiteness and an Anglo-conformity in language and manners that allowed them to be accepted as Canadian. All of the rewards of a still segregated society were available to those who would adapt, since Canada was still slowly dismantling laws that relegated “non-whites” to second-class citizenship.
We still live with many of the legacies of that slow dismantling of our own apartheid, and one of them is the racist presumption that the Maclean’s authors too easily accept, that the term “Asian” somehow captures a truth about people who have black hair and “Oriental” facial features. There are vast differences among “Asians,” and so the next time you see people with black hair in a group, realize that they might be learning a lot about the differences and similarities they have with each other, and rather than blaming them for “self-segregating,” go think a bit more about why you assume they are all the same.
Dr. Henry Yu is a professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is currently writing a book entitled “Pacific Canada,” which argues for a perspective on our society that recognizes the inequities of our past and rebuilds in a collaborative manner a new approach to our common history and future together.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
by Henry Yu
Thirty years after CTV aired its infamous W5 program “Campus Giveaway” insinuating that Canadian universities had too many “Asians” and therefore too many “foreigners,” Maclean’s magazine in its annual university rankings issue last week cynically again used racial stereotypes to invent a non-issue, asking why “white” Canadians think some of our top universities are “too Asian.” Buried amidst the article’s inflammatory racial profiling was an attempt at good reporting, which made Macleans’ appeal to “race” even more sad.
The journalists interviewed a wide array of people; however, rather than addressing the worry among our younger generation about how hard they need to work in school when so much of their future relies upon the grades and rankings they receive, the editors decided to bury any insights they had acquired underneath a racist logic of “Asian” versus “white.” They created the fearsome spectre of too many “Asian” students who were somehow both overachieving and tragically marred by social awkwardness. They then blamed these students for the lack of dialogue (and cross-racial partying) on campuses.
The title “Too Asian”? draws upon over a century of racist politics using the term “Asian” to flatten everyone who looks “Oriental” into a single category which is somehow threatening to “white” Canadians. Have we not advanced enough to recognize that people with black hair who do not look like their families came from Europe can still be “Canadian,” rather than the assumption of the writers that “Asian” is the opposite of “born in Canada”? Judging from the first 300 comments on Maclean’s’ online edition, almost every single one of which in dismissing the article as being pointless and inflammatory was more articulate and intelligent about the dangers of racial stereotyping than the authors, I see hope in a younger generation of Canadians who have enough sense to understand that an “open dialogue” about race requires first and foremost avoiding the easy analysis of lumping in a wide variety of people into simplistic categories such as “Asian” and “white.” Each day in my classes I hear intelligent and humane dialogues between students of every colour and from everywhere around the world, something that makes UBC and other Canadian universities special places that seemingly have better sense than the Maclean’s newsroom.
In referring to characterizations of Asian Americans in the United States as a “model minority” in the 1980s and 1990s and the ugly attempts in some private universities in the U.S. during that period to quietly cap enrolments of those considered “Asian,” the article implied this “American” solution to campuses being “too Asian” should be dismissed as un-Canadian and against our meritocratic admission policy. What the authors fail to realize is that they have accepted throughout their own article the fundamental racist premise that was being made in the U.S., the characterization of all “Asians” as overachievers who threaten “white” students. There are plenty of mediocre, hard drinking, unintelligent students out there, and there are a large number of hard working, ambitious, students worried about whether their investment in higher education will actually pay off after they graduate.
One of the issues the authors did not pick up from the debates in the United States was the underlying question of what characterized higher education as an engine of democracy and social mobility, and the crucial role of universities in creating the next generation of leaders. On many U.S. campuses, intelligent dialogues revolved not around whether there were “too many Asians” on campus, but more interesting and important questions such as how to produce doctors or lawyers who could serve the diverse needs of American society, or whether an arts education should be measured with the same financial logic of business school. If higher education is only a financial investment now for a higher income in the future, how impoverished as a society will we become?
We should be asking how our campus communities can be improved, and we should understand the diverse backgrounds of our students and how racial stereotypes continue to have salience. Racist questions obscure the important issues facing us. Talking about race involves seeing through the generalizations and understanding what is actually happening.
Until recently in its history, Canada had a history of white supremacy similar to South Africa and the American South, building its immigration policy around the racial category of “white Canada,” passing a wide array of discriminatory laws that disenfranchised those considered “non-whites,” and creating widespread racial segregation in jobs and housing. The category of “white” was used to glue together European migrants of many different backgrounds and as a political organizing tool, often using racial categories such as “Oriental,” “Asian,” “Jew,” or “Native” in contrast. We are still left with legacies of this history, including the unquestioned assumption that the term “Canadian” is interchangeable with “white Canadian.” Like a Molson Canadian television commercial, this lingering vision of Canada as uniformly white is so commonplace that we still think of it as the norm—we rarely ask whether a certain neighborhood or community or school might be “too white.” Why is there an issue of “race” only when a community or university is becoming “too Asian?”
Our society no longer looks like the beer-drinking, all-white camaraderie of a Molson Canadian commercial. Perhaps it never did, and white supremacy always needed to hide away into reservations and ghettoes all those who did not fit into the vision of “White Canada Forever,” which white supremacists sang a century ago. When large waves of European refugees came to Canada after World War II, they had little choice but to blend into a generic whiteness and an Anglo-conformity in language and manners that allowed them to be accepted as Canadian. All of the rewards of a still segregated society were available to those who would adapt, since Canada was still slowly dismantling laws that relegated “non-whites” to second-class citizenship.
We still live with many of the legacies of that slow dismantling of our own apartheid, and one of them is the racist presumption that the Maclean’s authors too easily accept, that the term “Asian” somehow captures a truth about people who have black hair and “Oriental” facial features. There are vast differences among “Asians,” and so the next time you see people with black hair in a group, realize that they might be learning a lot about the differences and similarities they have with each other, and rather than blaming them for “self-segregating,” go think a bit more about why you assume they are all the same.
Dr. Henry Yu is a professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is currently writing a book entitled “Pacific Canada,” which argues for a perspective on our society that recognizes the inequities of our past and rebuilds in a collaborative manner a new approach to our common history and future together.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net