from Z-net

We learn much from how we present our heroes. A few years ago, on Martin Luther King. Day, I was interviewed on CNN. So was Rosa Parks, by phone from Los Angeles. “We’re very honored to have her,” said the host. “Rosa Parks was the woman who wouldn’t go to the back of the bus. She wouldn’t get up and give her seat in the white section to a white person. That set in motion the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery. It earned Rosa Parks the title of ‘mother of the Civil Rights movement.’” (Keep reading…)

May/June 2004

Remember Tolstoy’s “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”? Genocides and war are like that, too. They are each incomparable. As you surely know, millions of Jewish people like me (together with a substantial contingent of homosexuals, Communists, Roma and others) were cattle-carred to Nazi concentration camps, subjected to horrific medical experiments, labour to death, gassing and other inhuman ways to live and die. (Keep reading…)

January/February 2004 Issue

Racism continues to be manifest in various ways in Canadian society. It is not a distant “bad” memory, something that previous generations practiced and experienced. Many Canadians acknowledge some history of racial oppression and the need to address it. But efforts are often limited by the habitual contrast of Canadian racism with American racism in a way that encourages moral superiority, drawing on such artifacts as the underground railroad. The absence of the historical memory of the practice of slavery by members of the family compact in Upper and Lower Canada or the blatantly unequal wages paid to Blacks and Asians doing the same work as white workers, which provoked riots both in the Maritimes and in British Columbia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, helps sustain these myths and denials. The outcome is a troubling denial of contemporary racial oppression. (Keep reading…)

January/February 2004 Issue

A Thought Experiment

Historians like to engage in thought experiments with dates. One way to measure the change in racism in Canada over the past forty years is to put the question in the context of the previous forty-year period. If one was asked the same question in 1963, Canada would probably not have looked all that different from the Canada of 1923. In 1963, as in 1923, Canada was still a country in which nearly all citizens (with the exception of Aboriginal people) could either directly or indirectly trace their ancestry to Europe. Within government policy and many organizations, non-white immigrants and Aboriginal peoples were still regarded as groups who posed “racial” problems for the processes of nation building and state formation. (Keep reading…)

January/February 2004 Issue

As part of our plans to celebrate CD’s 40 years of publication, our Editorial Collective asked certain writers to reflect on racism in Canada and consider whether or not it has diminished over this forty-year time span. Their excellent contributions appear in this issue of Dimension. Around the time of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution of the mid-sixties, the Liberal Party of Canada took the strategic decision to promote multiculturalism both as a counterweight to Quebec nationalism and as a genuine means for “visible minorities” to identify with the dominant political project in the Canadian state. (Keep reading…)