Henry
Yu is a professor in the History Department at UBC, where he researches
and lectures on the history of migration, racism, and early colonial
relations on the West Coast. The following is a version of a speech
delivered by Henry at The Mainlander’s Myth of Foreign Investment panel in 2013.
—Editors
The main thing I would like to do
today is to concentrate on the question of where the history of racial
scapegoating in Vancouver originated. To do that it’s important to begin
from the beginning.
One thing that I find helpful in these conversations is to think
about the question, “Who belongs here?” – “here” meaning where we are in
Vancouver, but also in Canada in general. Many of you have probably
heard that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States are
settler colonies that were built around white supremacy as a way
determining who does and does not belong.
When I say white supremacy a lot of people think I’m calling people
Nazis, but white supremacy is a lot more complicated than that. In its
most basic form, it is an overt structuring of society that gives
privileged access to resources to those who could be considered white,
starting with European migrants. In reality the process was very uneven,
so for a long time if you were from Italy, you weren’t actually white.
If you were Catholic, you weren’t white; if you were Jewish, you weren’t
white; and, if you were Armenian, you weren’t white.
This phenomenon touched all aspects
of society, including the labour movement. If you go back to 1907, the
people who were forming unions used white supremacy as one of their key
rallying cries. One of the most popular bar songs in 1907 for example –
the year of a big anti-Asian riot in Vancouver, organized around
anti-Chinese, anti-Punjabi, and anti-Japanese agitation – was called
“White Canada Forever.”
Apologists for the past
Today there are a lot of people
attempting to apologize for the past, and there are also apologists for
the past – but those are two different things. It’s one thing to say we
had a racist past and to ask how we can work through the legacies of the
history of white supremacy. It’s another thing to say that racism
didn’t really exist.
As a historian I have no time for the apologists, because the people
who were organizing white supremacy didn’t try to hide it. There was a
Ku Klux Klan in Shaughnessy, they didn’t try to hide it. There were also
anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Chinese groups and groups against
people who were “Oriental or Asiatic.” There were a lot of things they
didn’t like: they didn’t like Native or Aboriginal peoples, and they
didn’t like Blacks. It’s very hard today to swallow the position that
white supremacist racism didn’t exist then.
We have to always remember that this land is unceded. While violent
tactics were certainly used, there was no Battle of Vancouver, Battle of
Burnaby or Battle of Chilliwack where the British definitively defeated
the Coast Salish peoples and then took their land. And secondly, there
were no treaties (except for a few signed on Vancouver Island by the
first Governor James Douglas – about 2% of BC), which is the other
approach that was bypassed. There was no process where a deal was made:
“You give us this and we’ll give you something in return.” So neither of
those things happened. By our own laws, by anyone else’s laws, by any
moral or legal accountability, this land remains unceded. This land is
indigenous land. That’s why 98% of BC is unceded territory and there’s
no way around that.
One of the things I think is crucial to consider is, in light of this
history, what is the norm here in Vancouver today? One of my friends
from university grew up in the Interior of BC and then moved to the
Lower Mainland. He looked around at different communities in the region
and picked North Vancouver. I said “Why North Vancouver? It’s a heck of a
commute downtown over the bridge and all that,” and he said, “Oh,
because it’s like how British Columbia used to be.” We’ve been friends
for a long time, so I didn’t say, “What the fuck do you mean by that?”
But the little guy in the back of my head was going, “What the fuck do
you mean by that?” I didn’t press him, but if I had the question would
be, “Do you mean it’s overwhelmingly white?”
Building the colonial myth
I’ll throw in another anecdote that I
think is important. My kids went to Carnarvon School, it’s an
elementary school on 16th and Blenheim. One of the things that they
taught my third grader, my eight year old, was about how Canada
initially had “free land.” All the kids made posters with, “Canada, free
land, free axes, free horses, come to Canada!” This exercise was
supposed to be their history lesson about who populated Canada.
I tried to explain to my 8 year old, “Well, it’s free for some
people, because at the same time you’re taking it away from the people
already here, so it’s kind of stolen land given away as a free gift. I’m
not sure I would celebrate this ‘free land’ in this way since it was
someone else’s, and especially given that so many other people weren’t
allowed to come because of anti-Asian exclusion. So it was only free for
some people.” Even though she was 8 at the time, my kid understood the
concept of why it was easy to give something away for free if it has
been dispossessed from someone else. The idea we still have of Canadian
land as “free land” – that’s an example of the legacy of white
supremacy.
Remember that 98% of British Columbia
has neither been ceded by treaty by the Indigenous peoples who have
lived here for over 10,000 years. The unilateral declaration that all of
British Columbia is “Crown Land,” as if it was all owned by the King of
Britain just because he said so, is a myth which recent Supreme Court
cases have fortunately no longer been able to fully uphold. We are
beginning to see the legal system consider the legal flimsiness of the
colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and that all of this land
was taken from someone else. Yet myths about “free” land still remain
dominant.
The reason I bring these stories up
is to point to the ways in which white supremacy has become so
normalized in the mythic history of Canada. It is this process of
myth-making that has made it so hard for people to even think about what
white supremacy is and what it means.
Anti-Asian racism and the rewriting of history
For another example, why did the
Chinese build the railroad? The answer that is usually given is because
they were “cheap.” But what does that mean? On the one hand, Chinese
workers were cheaper because of racism – because they were seen as more
expendable. But there is another factor that often gets overlooked.
Chinese labour was cheaper because they were already here, and because
it cost less to get to the West coast by water by crossing the Pacific Ocean.
The irony is that from California, to
Oregon, to Washington State, to British Columbia, the Chinese built the
railroads. In both Canada and the US, the western ends of the railroads
were built with Chinese labour. It was only after the railroads were
finished that it became cheaper and easier to get to the West coast by
land, by riding the same railroads that the Chinese helped build. It’s
ironic because as soon as settlers started to come en masse along the
cheap transportation that the Chinese had just built, people getting off
the trains looked around and said, “What are all these Chinese and
Natives doing here? Let’s get rid of them.” And they did, or at least
they tried to.
Every time you think of the railroad,
remember that the Chinese built it because they were already here to
build it. Why that’s important is because it takes a massive amount of
narrative violence to change the whole story of British Columbia and
Canada. Right from the early years the narrative was changed to, “the
Chinese are latecomers who are trying to undercut us and take our jobs
away.”
The truth is the exact opposite. Unionization in San Francisco and
Vancouver was based on taking jobs away from Chinese and Japanese
workers who had arrived from across the Pacific. That’s crucial to
understand because it’s one of the ways that we still accept the
normalcy of the world that white supremacy built.
What’s wrong with Kitsilano?
I wrote an op-ed piece once asking
what’s wrong with Kitsilano? What’s wrong with North Vancouver? What’s
wrong with any neighbourhood that is “overwhelmingly white” in a census?
People attacked me, asking “What do you have against Kits?” I said,
“Nothing, my kids go to school in Kits, my best friends are from Kits.”
What’s wrong with Kits is that there is nothing wrong with Kits. If you
have a century and a half of white supremacy, you get Kits.
And then when the neighborhood shifts residents go, “Oh shit, there’s
non-white people coming in.” When you’ve built a place around white
supremacy, anything that destabilizes the status quo becomes abnormal
and threatening. What’s wrong with Kitsilano? Nothing, it’s normal.
That’s what is wrong. That’s the work that white supremacy did, and
continues to do.
In the 1990s, after a wave of
immigration from Hong Kong anticipating the transfer of its sovereignty
from the UK to China, Vancouver was called “Hongcouver.” People in East
Van weren’t saying “Hongcouver,” because East Van was already a diverse
place with lots of Chinese. The places that were really resistant to
this new diversity were West side communities such as Kerrisdale and
Shaughnessy – areas that you could say had been living on the fumes of
white supremacy for decades.
Yes, people were coming from Hong Kong. In making the decision between a
one-bedroom condo in Hong Kong or a six bedroom mock Tudor mansion in
Shaughnessy, many decided to go for the latter (the price at the time
was about the same). The discovery that Vancouver’s real estate was
relatively inexpensive in comparison to places such as Hong Kong may
have been a shock. That some of the discoverers had Chinese faces was
probably more shocking. I will talk more about the economic aspect
later, but it is important to understand that one of the mainstays of
displaying shock throughout Vancouver’s history has been racialized
scapegoating.
We should look closely at dynamics
that unfold when non-whites move into neighbourhoods that were built
around white supremacy, like Shaughnessy or the British Properties.
Properties in these areas historically had legal covenants stating, “Do
not sell to a non-white person.” As in California and throughout the
West Coast, property came with covenants stating, “don’t sell to Jews,
don’t sell to Blacks, don’t sell to Natives, don’t sell to Chinese.” Of
course, we don’t enforce these covenants legally anymore, but they were
there. Particularly in those neighbourhoods that reacted the most
emotionally to immigration in the 1990s.
A couple years ago, there was a
controversy about whether places like UBC and U of T were “too Asian.”
Maclean’s Magazine put “Too Asian?” on the front cover of one of their
issues. The question only makes sense in the context of a society built
around white supremacy. Questions like this can only go unquestioned if
the assumption is that white society is the norm against which
everything else is measured. They can only come unquestioned in a
settler colonial province, like British Columbia, settled on 98% unceded
territory.
Speculative real estate market is the problem
I put these ideas together about who and where we are as a way to
understanding our past, but also our present, and to argue that if we
want to move forward in solving any of these issues we have to think
through the complexities of what it means to live in a settler colonial
society. Racialized immigrants have since the beginning been scapegoats,
but we also have to understand settlers as experiencing different
degrees of class and privilege.
Today a lot of people are undeniably coming to Vancouver with a lot
of money, and they are investing in speculative housing, because there
is a speculative housing market here. They’re not the problem,
speculative capital in real estate is a problem. It is the structure of
our city right now. Indeed, from the moment of colonial dispossession of
Indigenous land this has been a speculative real estate market. New
immigrants didn’t cause this. If we don’t like it, then we need to
change it. We have to ask what kind of structure we want to create in
its place.
One of the last ironies in this
history is the Downtown Eastside. It’s not the Downtown Eastside that
people from mainland China want to move into. That’s not where the
capital from the People’s Republic of China is flowing into right now.
Yet the housing crisis there continues to worsen.
If we’re looking neighbourhood by neighbourhood, Chinatown is
incredibly low rent too, and also facing a threat from development. We
have so many Chinese seniors that need affordable housing, and yet we
continue to build luxury homes for the private market. While wealthy
immigrants are often blamed for lack of affordable housing, it is the
speculative real estate market that those wealthy enough – Chinese or
not – are capitalizing on.
One of the great ironies of the
freeway fight in Strathcona and Chinatown was the way that it saved a
number of areas. Those areas that were bulldozed, and where public
housing was built like at Maclean Park, are still there and still
low-income housing. But other places like houses in Strathcona that were
saved by a broad-based, multi-racial progressive coalition are now a
million-and-a-half dollars each.
This question of private versus
public housing is an important one, and I’d throw it in as a last kind
of caution as we think about real-estate economics and housing markets.
The city that we most often associate with hyper-capitalism and
neoliberalism is Hong Kong. Hong Kong was a colonial city, like
Vancouver, built upon real estate speculation. And yet compared to
Vancouver it is night and day.
Hong Kong has the highest percentage of its residents of any city in
the world living in public housing. As much as money has been made in
real estate speculation and development in Hong Kong, they managed to
also house ¾ of the city’s residents in publicly subsidized housing
using profits from that speculation and development. Why can’t we even
house 5% of our population in public housing? I just want to throw that
out going forward.
I’m a historian, and what I’ve said
here builds on the past, because we need to learn from the past as we
move into the future. If we’re going to live together here, we have to
face our past, including the foundations of white supremacy, and how
common it has been to blame Asians for all our ills; but we also need to
imagine a future together where we can live together in a just peace,
not the wary watchfulness between those who have and those who have not.
Blaming Mainland Chinese for the affordability problems of an
unaffordable speculative housing market is a red herring that misses the
point. History shows, whether through out labour movements or the
building of our neighborhoods, that this is a point that has been missed
before.
