That Was Then, This is Now

The other day I was in a hair salon, and I got to chatting with a woman who was accompanying her elderly mother to her weekly hair appointment. The woman mentioned that she was a math teacher at a high school not far from the one my daughters attend, a school with a similar upper-middle class demographic. Since the teaching of math is an interest of mine, and the PISA results had just been released, I tried to engage her in conversation about the so-called "math wars" and the post-PISA hand-wringing about math scores in the province. She seemed oddly uninterested (for a math teacher) in any of those issues. Instead, she wanted to know where my kids went to school, who their teachers were, etc. She then proceeded to tell me an anecdote that seemed designed to let me know how lucky my kids are to be attending their particular secondary school.

She had no children of her own, she said, but her sister has two kids, now in university. After divorcing her husband, her sister wanted desperately to get her kids out of their current catchment area, and into the one which includes my daughters' school. Post-divorce, her sister could not afford to buy a house in our area, so she rented an apartment—much smaller than the house from which she'd come, the woman noted—to ensure that her children could attend my daughters' high school, X Collegiate Institute.

Why, I asked her, was her sister so keen to move into our neighbourhood, given that the high school in her old area has an excellent reputation and very high EQAO scores? The woman lowered her voice and said, conspiratorially, "My niece and nephew didn't feel comfortable there. There were too many, you know, Asians and Jews." I looked at her blankly; my mouth may have fallen open. "Mainly the Asians," she added, apparently hedging her bets. 

"The kids were uncomfortable," I asked? "Or your sister?" 

"No, the kids, definitely. So they moved into the apartment and went to X Collegiate Institute; they both ended up getting into the university of their choice, and they're doing great now."

I was trying to think of something to say, but I was tongue-tied because I was in a kind of shock at this display of racism, unexpectedly blatant even for our neighbourhood, which is perhaps the last bastion of homogeneity in Toronto (though, even it is changing—for the better). 

In any case, the woman did not give me a chance; she continued with another shocker: "At first my sister was worried, because around that time, they had just enlarged the catchment area for X Collegiate Institute to include an area of public housing. So a lot of black kids and gangs started attending. But the numbers weren't enough to make a difference."

I mumbled something about how I think X Collegiate Institute needs more not less diversity, then hastily made my exit from the salon. 

There is so much that troubled—and continues to trouble—me about this incident that I hardly know where to start. This woman appeared to be my age, and she lives in one of the most diverse cities in North America. And she is a teacher. That is perhaps the most troubling aspect. It is disturbing, to say the least, to contemplate the preconceptions about kids of colour—about any kid who is not as bleached and blue-eyed as she is—that this teacher brings into the classroom every single day. 

The whole episode got me thinking about the expression of racism today, versus when I was a kid. Is it really so different now, despite all the current talk of post-racism or post-racial societies? A recent study shows that of 3200 books for children published in in the US in 2013, 93 were about black people. And then there are incidents like this one described by my Twitter friend Sarah Carmichael (@sarahcasm). Sadly, the kinds of racist inferences (and interference) by strangers that Sarah describes in her post are not anomalies in the lives of bi-racial families. 

A while ago, I wrote a post about the ways in which racism manifests itself in my daughters' world. More recently, I wrote an essay* for an online journal, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, about the forms racism took while I was growing up. Sadly, I think that when it comes to racism then and now, the only valid conclusion one can draw is "Plus ça change . . . ."

*I am not entirely comfortable with the title of this piece, which was suggested to me by a person who thought its very provocativeness was part of the point I was making. I'm still considering changing it, though my previous title "Do You Have Anything Else to Say?" is risibly lame.

That's So Racist: Irony, Kids and Racism in a (non-)Post-Racial Society

"That's so racist," I heard a friend of my tween daughters say not long ago. She was talking about another girl's preference for white over dark chocolate. Apparently these types of "jokes" are quite common among the girls and boys in my daughters' social circle, and they are uttered by white and minority kids alike. J and E claim not to make such comments (as J explained, "I like to stay safe on such issues"—on which, more later), but they have heard them, and reported them back to me often enough that it's clear they consider them "normal."

I confess I was initially taken aback by the seeming casualness of such remarks. But as I listened to the girls' anecdotes, I began to wonder if perhaps my white liberal, walking-on-eggshell attitude towards race was the problem. After-all, since 2008 when Obama was elected president, many seemingly intelligent people have argued that North America has become a post-racial society; it's not a stretch to believe that such a society would be one in which racial consciousness and any residual racism would be expressed—and undermined—through irony. In fact, I could see how the popularity of comics such as Russell Peters and Chris Rock, who draw heavily on ethnic stereotypes for their humour, could lend credence to the argument that the issue of racism carries less gravitas today than it did when I was a kid. At the very least the success of entertainers like Peters attests to the acceptability of a kind of ironized racist expression—albeit by people of colour themselves, in the context of comedy and entertainment.

So, I reasoned to myself, if we've entered a post-racial era, why probe my daughters about their views pertaining to race and racism? I had broached the issue of racism before of course, but trepidatiously and in an ad hoc manner because J and E seemed to be blissfully ignorant about racial stereotypes and epithets;  I wasn't convinced that I should be dredging up fraught concepts and words in a potentially unnecessary attempt at proactive anti-racist parenting.

But—big but: I simply don't buy that we are living in either a  post-racial society (that would be the utopia my Ismaili-Canadian friend jokingly envisions in which all people are a soothing shade of beige) or a post-racist one. The truth—less deniable than ever in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing in the US—is that ours is a culture in which subtle and overt racism is alive and well. And in fact, it didn't take all that much digging on my part to uncover a less innocuous vein of racist chicanery in the conversations that J and E overhear at school.

For instance, when I asked them if they thought anyone in their class was in fact racist, they hemmed and hawed, but finally said, yes, there was one boy who they thought might be racist. I asked what he said that made them think so, and they recounted how he frequently draws attention to certain kids' race—albeit, again, in what he thinks is a jokey way. They told me, for instance, that he'll often hold up a yellow object and say to an Asian-Canadian classmate: "Look, it's you." Or he'll hold up brown objects and say the same thing to kids of South Asian origin. I asked J and E what they thought of such comments. E said, "They're just stupid and annoying. But I think it would bother me if I were those kids." J added, "It would be as if I held up my carton of white milk and said, 'look O, it's you.'" Then, she added "I should do that! No, I shouldn't. Two wrongs don't make a right, right?" (Well, in this case, I'm not so sure...)

The irony is that this boy, though white, is not Christian and has (rightly) complained about the Christian orientation of school "holiday" parties (see here). What unnerved me about the situation (in addition to the simple, ignorant racism that it betokened) was the very real possibility that O's offensive actions and speech, and his seeming unawareness of his own contradictory position, stemmed from a lack of meaningful dialogue about race and racism in the home and classroom. I began to realize that J's attitude of "staying safe" about such issues—which she undoubtedly picked up from me—may be inoffensive, but it is not an effective way to promote interracial understanding or to combat racism. In a culture that is mutli-ethnic but clearly far from being either "colour-blind" or post-racial in any meaningful understanding of the term, is it not, I wondered, incumbent upon parents of all ethnicities to speak to their kids about race and racism in a manner that goes beyond the safety of mere tolerance and inoffensiveness?

I think the ethical answer is yes, but the question is, how does one go about it? I have told my daughters about my own history of growing up in a mixed (Jewish-Christian) family in a WASPy neighbourhood, where kids thought I was lying when I told them I wasn't baptized. But I have hesitated to tell them about the virulent racism against south Asians that I witnessed and was deeply affected by in high school. This was the era during which the epithet "Paki" (a slur which Russell Peters has referred to as "my N-word") was flung ignorantly and indiscriminately at anyone who was not white. It is that shameful era in Canadian history which prompted Clarke Blaise to remark: “Toronto has been a dark place. Vancouver has been a dark place.” But do I really want to teach my kids about a word they may never hear, one which is, one can only hope, dead and gone for ever? Perhaps not. Except, here's the problem: slurs have a way of re-surfacing. Not long ago, a man on our street—a father of two young kids—used the P-word in my husband's presence. (My husband was shocked into an embarrassed silence.) More recently, I came across an article in The Toronto Star describing a mother's reaction to hearing her mixed-race child use the word. "You're a Paki," the child said to his mother one day, having heard the term applied to himself at daycare. Post-racist culture, indeed.

Clearly, then, as parents, we cannot be vigilant or proactive enough when it comes to racism. The question is, what form should that vigilance take? I don't know the answer; I'm open to suggestions.