The Parable of the Textbook

Two years after the publication of the Macleans article "Too Asian" this collection was published as an examination of the controversy. My contribution was an allegory that I used at the time to explain how to understand the legacy of the past in the present. The "Parable of the Textbook" was excerpted and published in The Tyee on September 15, 2012.

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2012/09/15/Too-Asian-Allegory/

Nurturing Dialogues between First Nations, Urban Aboriginal, and Immigrant Communities in Vancouver

Excerpt from Ashok Mathur, Jonathan Dewar, Mike DeGagné, editors, Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the Lens of Cultural Diversity (Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2011):300-308

During 2010, I had the privilege of being involved with a unique process organized by the City of Vancouver. Recognizing that in Vancouver, we stood at a historic juncture in which new immigrant communities have transformed the populations of our city, we began a conversation that we hoped would allow for the creation of a common future together for immigrant and aboriginal communities. Moving forward meant creating a new vision of Canada that recognized a history of injustices to both aboriginal peoples and non-white immigrants. This terrible history--wrought by white supremacist policies of land dispossession, residential schooling, immigrant exclusion, and racial discrimination in voting, housing, and employment—needed to be acknowledged and its legacies made widely known before a more optimistic future could be envisioned together. We hoped that if this process could be started in Vancouver, that it also might inspire other cities and regions of Canada to undergo a similar process of dialogue that would help lay the groundwork for a transformation of our society.

          As one of three Co-Chairs, along with Councillor Wade Grant of the Musqueam Nation and Susan Tatoosh, Executive Director of Vancouver’s Urban Aboriginal Friendship Centre, the Steering Committee was a diverse group of representatives from Vancouver’s local First Nations of Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh, from urban aboriginal organizations, immigrant settlement organizations, and neighborhood houses, and academics from local universities. The Steering Committee was formed to help advise city social planners Baldwin Wong and Karen Fong in helping plan and implement a series of dialogue circles involving members of local First Nations, urban aboriginal, and immigrant communities.[1] The Steering Committee recognized that many new arrivals in Canada received very little information about the history of aboriginal peoples, and in particular of the devastating effects of government policies such as residential schooling, and therefore through no intention of their own were often left only with stereotypes and the negative images of popular culture as the basis for their knowledge about aboriginal peoples.

          What could be generated, we wondered, if we could organize a dialogue process in which small groups mixing engaged and thoughtful participants from aboriginal and immigrant communities could speak and listen to each other in a safe and secure environment? How could we help begin to address the gaps of knowledge that existed, so that as our society continues to be changed by new arrivals, they can work together with First Nations and aboriginal peoples on building better communities through a process of shared understanding rather than ignorance and misapprehension? Could we produce together from these dialogues a story of who we are, and where we are, and who we aspire to be?

Who am I? Where am I? What is an immigrant? Who was here first?

My name in English is Henry Yu. My Cantonese name is 余全毅 , and I was born in Vancouver in the year of Canada’s Centenniel. My maternal grandfather, Yeung Sing Yew, and his brothers and their father before them, came to British Columbia from Zhongshan county in Guangdong province in China. My parents, Yu Shing Chit and Yeung Kon Yee, came to Canada three years before I was born, joining a community of family and kin who had been crossing the Pacific back and forth for over 150 years. This is my story, my history, and I tell it this way to acknowledge that although I was born here, my family comes from somewhere else, and like all the migrants whose families came to Vancouver from somewhere else, we have made our home on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish peoples. During the Dialogues Project, urban aboriginal participants invariably acknowledged, during their stories of “who they were,” a story at the same time about the First Nations or Métis communities somewhere else in B.C. or Canada or the United States from which they or their families came. This story about “where they were from” was at the same time an important acknowledgment about where they were now, that they now lived on someone else’s territory as a guest.

It seems like such a simple thing, to acknowledge that my family comes from somewhere else, and that except for the First Nations who were here before migrants arrived in the 18^th and 19^th centuries from across the Atlantic and Pacific, we are all late arrivals. But in Vancouver, in British Columbia, and in Canada in general, stories of arrival and claims about belonging are fraught with violence. Oftentimes the violence has been physical—involving the removal and abuse of bodies—but the violence has also been a very effective narrative violence, a mythic story of dispossession and possession that renders damage by distorting and celebrating the stories of some people, while silencing and erasing the stories of others.

I was born here, but when I was growing up, the history I learned in school was a collection of stories I could not recognize. “Our” story, I was told, was of people who came from across the water far away, who rode a train across a vast land and built a place called Canada. Some of those people had English names, and some of them had French names. But somehow my grandfather and greatgrandfather and people with names like mine were missing. I remember just once, hearing that the Chinese had helped build the railroad upon which the Canadians rode, but then they disappeared into silence for the rest of the story. What were they doing the rest of the time?

In the third grade, my teacher asked us to build models of either the traditional long houses or the ocean canoes of the Coast Salish peoples. Since I was eight years old and forbidden at home to use a sharp knife, my older brother helped me carve a canoe out of balsa wood, based upon a picture we found in a library book. I was so proud of my little carving, and after the class celebrated our achievements, I kept the canoe on my desk at home all the way into high school. Seeing it reminded me of the lesson that day in school, about how native peoples had lived here before the arrival of Europeans. It was the last time in school that I remember being asked to think about the aboriginal people in whose land we lived. What were they doing the rest of the time?

The rest of the time.

It is this silent erasure of time that tells another set of histories. Stories ignored or kept in the narrow margins in the sidebars of textbooks. Stories erased from our common past. It is not that the story of my grandfather and others like him was untold. He told it to those within the family, or to his friends, in fragments and snippets. Some of those stories involved interactions and relationships between Chinese and aboriginal peoples. There was a world only glimpsed by the rest of us, a world in which the railroad that my greatgrandfather and his relatives helped build ran through indigenous communities all the way up the Fraser Canyon, and even as the Chinese finished laying the tracks in 1885 and were immediately asked to pay an onerous Head Tax in order to keep coming, they kept coming. They kept coming by the boatload in the tens of thousands year after year, working in mines, and in logging camps, and in canneries, and in grocery stores, and the farms that grew the produce for those stores, and as cooks and laundry men, and café and store owners in every small town in B.C. and across the Prairies all the way to Halifax.

Even as those migrants whose families had come from Europe rode the train westwards and arrived to see aboriginal people and Chinese everywhere already, those young Chinese men like my great grandfather walked and rode the train in the other direction, often marrying into local aboriginal communities and creating a very different world than the one I had learned about in textbooks about “westward” expansion and settlement. When that mixed and unique world was steadily eroded and ended by the ethnic cleansing of aboriginal peoples through reservations and residential schooling, and by anti-Asian immigration legislation and exclusion, the traces of memory remained within many aboriginal communities of Chinese men who were fathers and grandfathers, and kindly local restaurant and store owners in small towns who welcomed rather than turned away all customers no matter their race. But they are only glimpses and fragments, traces of a real, lived history targetted for eradication and erased from a collective memory framed narrowly as a white settler history of the Canadian nation. We supposedly have two “Founding Peoples” of Canada—the English and the French. But when Canadian Confederation was invented, there were many other people already here, and the colony of British Columbia was just as much in existence as what would become Ontario and Quebec. And the presence already of Chinese, as well as Native Hawaiians and other Pacific migrants in B.C., along with the complex indigenous societies along the coast and in the interior, could not simply be erased. Stories long ignored or forgotten can be told and retold, filling the silences created by erasure.

During the opening launch reception for the Dialogues Project, a short snippet of a documentary made by the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of B.C. entitled “Cedar and Bamboo” was shown. The film, produced by CCHSBC Board members Jennifer Lau and Karin Lee, and directed by Diana Leung and Kamala Todd (who is also one of the City of Vancouver’s Dialogues Circle Project Team), focused on the stories of four people of mixed Chinese-aboriginal ancestry. The film makers had a powerful vision of the impact that recovering these forgotten and ignored histories could make. By providing a historical context for considering the long history of engagements between aboriginal peoples and immigrants who were otherwise unwelcome, the film created an important moment of mutual recognition through a shared past. Musqueam Councillor Wade Grant, one of the three Co-Chairs of the Steering Committee for the Dialogues Project, spoke movingly about growing up aware of his own mixed ancestry, and of his pride over seeing the story of his own father, Howard Grant, featured in the film. The family history of the Grants themselves perhaps exemplified the promise of opening up a dialogue about histories still too uncommonly told, and the challenge of what kind of shared future still awaits us.

So much of our common past is left out of what is supposed to be our common history, so that we are left with an array of uncommon stories that do not add up. One of the triumphs of a white supremacist colonial history of Canada was the mythical alchemy that made it possible for everyone who arrived from Europe to become a “Canadian,” and for all those who were non-white to remain a “visible minority,” forever arriving late, or a “native” forever destined to disappear. During the early 20^th century, when anti-Asian politics ruled British Columbia, the slogan used was “White Canada Forever,” a phrase that meant those who were considered “white” owned not only the future, but also the past. The moment a migrant stepped off the boat in Halifax from Glasgow, even before he climbed aboard the train that might take him all the way to Vancouver, he was already a “Canadian.” His “accent” would not undermine his claims to belong in the way that speaking English with an “Oriental” accent would, and still does. Despite the fact that migrants from across the Pacific arrived at the same time on Coast Salish land as those migrants from across the Atlantic, white supremacy built a sense of belonging around “whiteness.” Non-English speaking “white” migrants could gain the status of full belonging in Canada by speaking English and converting themselves to Anglophone dominance. Those who were considered non-white were not accorded the same privileges and possibilities.

Say the word “immigrant” and who do you imagine? To those aboriginal peoples whose ancestors welcomed the first trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific migrants to these shores, everyone is a migrant to their homeland. If we are to all make a home together here, there can be no reconciliation with the inequities of our past until this simple truth is recognized. But the demographic reality of our present and future must also be taken into account. There is a “New Canada” being made in the last four decades since immigration reform removed racial barriers to non-white migration. The top 10 places of birth for immigrants who arrived in Canada between 2001 and 2006 included only two Europeans countries. The United Kingdom, which was the dominant #1 sending nation for the first century of Canadian history, was on the list at #9, sending just over 25,000 new immigrants. In contrast, 6 of the top 10 countries were in Asia, and the top 4 on the list alone—the Peoples Republic of China, India, the Philippines, and Pakistan, accounted for 2/3 of all new migrants to Canada in that period, with the PRC sending over 155,000, India over 129,000, the Philippines over 77,000, and Pakistan over 57,000.[2]

In 2006, 83.9% of all new immigrants to Canada came from regions outside of Europe, and the very moniker “visible minority” to designate “non-white” Canadians had become a questionable description, in particular to describe Canada’s urban populations. Over 96% of Canada’s “visible minorities” live in metropolitan regions. Two main groups— South Asians and self-identified ethnic Chinese—accounted for 1/2 of all visible minorities in Canada, with each accounting for roughly 1/4 of the total. Other migrants from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia are remaking our society. Ethnic Chinese and South Asians account for 8% of Canada’s total population, but because they have settled overwhelmingly in either the metropolitan regions of Toronto or Vancouver, they have transformed those cities. Between 1980 and 2001, for instance, the largerst proportion of new migrants to Canada were ethnic Chinese who came from various locations in Southeast Asia (including Hong Kong), along with migrants born in the Peoples Republic of China. These various ethnic Chinese migrants went overwhelmingly (87%) to the five largest cities in Canada, with 41% going to Toronto and 31% to Vancouver alone.[3]

What is clear is that trans-Pacific migration from Asia, as well as “visible minority” migrants in general from outside Europe, have transformed Canada in the last 25 years. Vancouver in particular has become a city in which the term “visible minority” makes no sense. In 2006, 4 out of 10 Vancouverites had been born outside Canada, and 5 out of 10 were of Asian ancestry. Richmond and Burnaby, suburbs of metropolitan Vancouver, were 65% and 55% visible minority, and 50% of Richmond’s population is ethnic Chinese--in Vancouver, Canada’s third largest city, the “visible minority” is “white.”

If the “New Canada” can be understood by looking at the changed face of Vancouver in the present, so too can the future be seen in the largely non-white faces of our youth. Visible minorities in Canada are literally the face of tomorrow—their median age in 2006 was 33, versus an average age of 39 for the population as a whole. The fast growing non-white population of our younger generations also includes First Nations and aboriginal youth, who represent one of the fastest growing segments of Canada’s young. The future of Canada can be seen in our changing demographics, but are we ready to meet the challenges of this new world?

The Dialogues Project was meant to engage in a sharing of our pasts—who we are and where we are from—but also to create a shared understanding about who we aspire to be in the future. Nine locations were chosen as sites for dialogue, with a mix of participants selected from volunteers and those identified and invited by the Steering Committee as having valuable insigts to contribute to the conversations. We strove to include both elders and youth of aboriginal and immigrant backgrounds in as many of the groups as possible, recognizing that wisdom and life experience blended with the fresh curiousity of the young was an important element of bridging many of the generational gaps that exist in both aboriginal and immigrant communities. Each of the groups met three times and was guided in its discussions by one of a set of trained facilitators, led by Eric Wong, and a group of volunteer youth leaders played a prominent role with the intention of having them also lead an outreach process to broaden the process to other youth. A closing dialogue circle involving all of the groups together was held at the Vancouver Public Library, with the Mayor of Vancouver Gregor Robertson and several City Councilors in attendance, as well as Her Honourable Adrienne Clarkson; the former Governor General of Canada and her husband John Saul had taken a keen interest in the Dialogues Project, with the intention of exploring how similar dialogues might take place in other sites across Canada.

After the dialogue circles ended, a series of site visits were organized. The Steering Committee believed that these were crucial for creating a sense of familiarity and welcome among the participants. Urban environments so easily become segregated spaces, and like welcoming a neighbor into one’s own home, a mutual process of visitation and hospitality was seen as an organic outgrowth of the sharing of stories within the dialogue circles. At the conclusion of the Dialogues Project, some of the most interesting insights and moments will be made available in both a written and video form. Although all conversations from the circles themselves were private and kept anonymous in order to create and maintain a safe and secure atmosphere for dialogue, follow up intereviews and a summation of many of the issues brought up during the dialogues will become a valuable document that we hope will become the basis for further discussion and educational outreach, in particular for addressing the dearth of information about First Nations and aboriginal issues and history currently provided to new immigrants to Canada.

Even as we break the silences and speak the truth about many of the terrible things that have been done in our past, we are left with the task of trying to understand what we have in common, what we can take from our broken past, upon which we can build a shared future. Do we need a shared past in order to have a common future? I became a historian in a quest to answer this basic question, and the Dialogues Project for me is an important part of a collective, collaborative project for those sets of people whose stories have often been silenced or ignored, so that they could speak and hear each other’s stories. We hoped that each of us in listening would be able to know ourselves and each other a bit better, and to generate a dialogue that created a mutual understanding of our differences as well as what we shared in common.

We remain so far away from creating together a new shared future. The settlement of land claims and treaty negotiations, and a much needed reconciliation process will be long and hard. But perhaps through one story at a time about who we are and where we are from, we can begin to build in a collaborative manner a new shared history, one that recognizes the painful aspects of our past, and perhaps even provides a common understanding of who we are and where we are.

---

[1] The Steering Committee’s first task was to help advise social planner Baldwin Wong in the City of Vancouver’s application for a grant from British Columbia’s Welcoming and Inclusive Communities and Workplaces Program (WICWP), which receives most of its funding from the Federal Government under the Canada-British Columbia Immigration Agreement. http://www.welcomebc.ca/wbc/service_providers/programs/welcome_program/index.page? The Dialogues Project homepage and a documentation of the process can be found at http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/socialplanning/dialoguesproject/index.htm.

[2] 2006 Census of Canada, “World: Place of Birth of New Immigrants to Canada, 2006,” produced by the Geography Division, Statistics Canada, 2007. Romania at #7 was the origin of just over 28,000 immigrants Also, “Immigration to Canada from the Asia Pacific, 1961-1996,” Population & Immigration Statistical Reports, Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada (original source 1996 Census).

[3] Chinese Canada is not homogenuous, with a great variety of linguistic and social variation reflecting varied origins in not only in Asia, but from around the globe. The same can be said of South Asians, who like ethnic Chinese, often come to Canada as part of global diasporas that emanated from home villages decades and even centuries earlier, carrying to Canada a wide array of family journeys and complicated histories from around the world and over many generations. By 2006, South Asians had slightly surpassed ethnic Chinese as the largest group of “visible minorities” in Canada, but both are categories that envelop a complex spectrum of family and personal histories that cannot be reduced to simple ethno-cultural or racial categorizations. Shibao Guo and Don Devoretz, “The Changing Faces of Chinese Immigrants,” Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis, Vancouver Centre, No. 05-08, February 2005.

National centre needed to celebrate Pacific immigrants

BY INGRID PARENT AND HENRY YU, VANCOUVER SUN FEBRUARY 26, 2011

The federal government recently announced the designation of Pier 21 in Halifax as Canada's National Immigration Museum. We applaud this recognition of the importance of immigrants to the development of Canadian society.

However, we need a national centre -a hub of digital learning -located in Pacific Canada to recognize a history and future for our nation that Pier 21 cannot alone represent. The millions of Canadians who came from China, Japan, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and other parts of Asia did not cross the Atlantic Ocean, and Halifax is not their symbol of arrival.

In addition to Pier 21 in Halifax, we need a complementary immigration museum that would encourage those who came to Canada across the Pacific to feel included in our common history. These people have been ignored for too long in definitions of Canadian identity. The time has arrived to recognize the importance of trans-Pacific migrants in building our society.

Understanding Pacific Canada requires a perspective on our past and future that differs from a mythic history of westward expansion from the Atlantic. Canada was founded in 1867, but by that point there was already a Pacific and an Atlantic component to its past. Some have even argued persuasively that the Chinese had visited B.C. shores as early as the 15th century. The perspectives of Pacific Canada recognize the long process of historical engagement between trans-Atlantic migrants, trans-Pacific migrants, coureurs des bois and aboriginal peoples. If Canadians are to share a common future, we need as a nation to recognize this still largely untold history.

Chinese Canadians who built the CPR spread across Canada, riding the railway in the opposite direction of European migrants. Filipino Canadian nurses who first came to Winnipeg now work in hospitals from Victoria to Halifax. South Asian Canadians who were denied entry a century ago now account, along with migrants from China and the Philippines, for two-thirds of all new immigrants to Canada. And the tens of thousands of Canadians of all backgrounds who go to Asia every year -to teach English, to pursue business and career opportunities, and to foster ever-growing trade ties with Japan, China and Korea -also reflect the aspirations of Pacific Canada.

Indeed, Pacific Canada is not a region -it is an identity that informs how an ever-increasing proportion of our citizens understand Canada's place in the world.

So what should a centre that celebrates Pacific Canada look like? First, it needs to embrace the future -not just the changing face of Canada, but also the latest digital and multimedia technologies that can transform our museums into centres of education and discovery. The 20th-century museum was an imposing monument built around massive collections that were mostly hidden from visitors. A new approach would result in an engaging and powerful user experience at a Pacific Canada Heritage Centre that, in turn, would support existing archival and museum collections. A consortium of libraries, archives, museums and universities can work together so a flagship national entity would use new technologies to tell long-neglected stories and preserve them to ensure long-term access.

As a librarian and a historian, both of us have been devoted to preserving our past so that future Canadians can have a sense of shared identity. Canadians' interest in exploring their roots -through online resources available at organizations such as Library and Archives Canada and Ancestry.com, and through popular TV shows such as the recent series Who Do You Think You Are -is exploding. For too long we have neglected and excluded so many peoples from our national sense of identity.

Granted, trans-Pacific immigrants now arrive in a country that is more welcoming, and the sting of discrimination and racism may have diminished. But if we are to build a future together, we need to cherish and celebrate a much broader past.

A Pacific Canada Heritage Centre, located in a city that already attracts visitors from all around Canada and the world, would help build a more complete sense of the Canadian experience and promote an inclusive vision that embraces so many more of our people.

Ingrid Parent is the university librarian at the University of B.C. Henry Yu is a professor of history at UBC and the project lead of Chinese Canadian Stories (www.chinesecanadian.ubc.ca)

Originally published by the Vancouver Sun.

Sorry Is Not Enough

Maclean's must answer for racial profiling

Asian-Canadians aren't just being too sensitive. There's a history behind their reaction to the magazine's 'Too Asian'? article

By Henry Yu, Vancouver Sun November 27, 2010

A Maclean's article about some Canadian universities being seen as 'too Asian' has raised objections, but no apology from the national magazine.

Photograph by: Steve Bosch, Vancouver Sun, Vancouver Sun

In the weeks since the Maclean's article ' Too Asian'? was published, there have been a lot of opinions expressed. As a historian, I would like to point out some problems of just having an opinion without understanding what has led to some of the emotional reactions to the article, especially among those who have grown up in Canada.
The problem was not just the simplistic racial profiling which served as the inflammatory lead. More disturbing to many was that in a seasoned newsroom at Canada's self-proclaimed only national news magazine, no one had the good sense to ponder whether publishing an article designed to incite racial profiling of Asians was a good idea. Judging by the continued insistence on the part of Maclean's that their story was good journalism and that they have nothing for which they need to apologize, their editors and publishers remain unclear about just what they did wrong.
So what is going on? These are not unintelligent people. The problem is that there are so few people in their newsroom (and indeed among many of our English-language daily newsrooms) who might through personal experience understand what it is like to grow up Asian-Canadian, and indeed to be a visible minority or an indigenous person in Canada. Like the misguided student quoted at length who kept insisting that she was "not a racist" even while expressing racist opinions, those people who have spent their lives enjoying the privilege of not having to think about their race often do not understand why non-whites are so "sensitive." It is one of the signal benefits of our racial hierarchy that being white is the norm and everyone else has to deal with being Asian, or native, or black. What an amazing privilege indeed to just be able to live.
It is not enough just to know someone who is non-white. Americans in the 1970s who resisted the desegregation of their children's schools would often insist that they were not in fact racists for wanting to exclude blacks; in fact, the phrase "one of my best friends is black" was so commonly uttered it became a joke.
One of the problems with the Maclean's article is that it represents for so many Canadians those often arbitrary moments when their race suddenly matters. They are reminded that despite whatever they do to fit in, they will be considered an Asian. Some people who are recent arrivals, or who have made peace with being considered exotic and different, have no problem with this. They like being different. But racial stereotypes have consequences beyond the level of personal identity.
If you think that being considered a model minority is a good thing, perhaps it would be useful to know the history of the concept. It first arose as the "yellow peril" in the 19th century, when Chinese and Japanese on the west coast of North America were stereotyped as "cheap" labour compared with whites. They were threatening because they were able to accomplish more with the same resources. Being productive, they were framed in anti-Asian rhetoric as being "too hardworking." They threatened "normal" whites. Sound familiar?
In the 1970s in the United States, the term "model minority" was coined to describe Japanese-Americans and then Chinese-and Korean-Americans. Why were they a "model"? Because they suffered racism, but unlike blacks, they just took the abuse and worked harder and accomplished more with less. In California, this justified the removal of affirmative action policies put in place to reverse centuries of anti-black racism. But many Asian-Americans resisted the label of being a "model" because even though it seemed like a positive stereotype, it came with high costs. One cost was the destruction of anti-racism coalitions with Jewish-Americans and African-Americans that had helped overcome white supremacy during the Civil Rights era. Another cost was the revival of the racist image that Asians were a threat to "normal" white Americans.
When the Maclean's writers and editors trafficked in this image, they invested in their article the values of a century-and-a-half of white supremacy. Many Asian Canadians immediately felt the cost, even if many of them cannot quite articulate why they feel angry. But they are not being "overly sensitive." Their hurt is real because the damage goes beyond personal feelings.
One of the costs of the image of Asians being studious is that it often justifies a glass ceiling that limits their promotions to positions of leadership or management. In the U.S., studies have shown how stereotypes of Asians as being good at math but lacking social skills has justified their stalling in lower or middle management while those who are seen to have better people skills are promoted past them. Many women in Canada may be familiar with similar justifications when their managerial skills are dismissed for equally empty reasons.
There are many approaches to managing people, but reserving positions of power for those who look and feel familiar to those already in power commonly hides bias in seemingly objective judgments. But these judgments often traffic in racial and gender stereotypes -- she's not "outspoken" enough or "too quiet" are words used to describe someone who works quietly behind the scenes to build consensus.
Maclean's is going to apologize at some point. Probably sooner rather than later. The reason is that Rogers, which owns the magazine, has other businesses, including Omni TV, a multicultural channel that relies upon Mandarin, Cantonese, Punjabi and other "Asian" language audiences. They are vulnerable because a boycott of one of their divisions for the sins of another will hurt. Maclean's itself is suffering from declining circulation and a subscription base that is dwindling, precisely because it is not based upon the urban demographic of young Asian-Canadian students and university-trained professionals that they so inanely targeted with their article. But their cellphone division does rely on this very important population of Vancouver and Toronto, and as soon as these customers decide that Rogers is not worth supporting because the national news magazine dismisses their concerns, they will apologize. One of my students mentioned that Rogers had lost its monopoly on the iPhone, and wouldn't it be great to organize a campaign with Bell to have her classmates switch over their cellphone contracts? The students can make fun of Rogers and mock them for being uncool. There is nothing worse for corporate branding than being laughed at. Forget lawsuits or waving placards in the streets; this will scare the wallets out of Rogers.
But saying sorry will not be enough. Even if it is as abject and grovelling as CTV's apology 30 years ago for their W5 program (you can find it online, and by the way it took nearly half a year for them to admit they had done anything wrong), the problem with just saying sorry is that newsrooms will remain the same. Maclean's is facing layoffs for having a shrinking readership, and so hiring young people to diversify their newsroom is not going to happen. Unfortunately, this is the problem with so many of our daily newspapers, which face the same problem of declining circulations and an obsolete business model. They are dinosaurs, and judging by the energy that young bloggers have shown in responding to the Maclean's article using the new media (often without spending a single penny on buying the magazine), the future is with the young Asian-Canadians university students so insulted by the magazine.
What would be better is if Rogers endowed some money from their more profitable communications divisions to help support the development of new media that will better engage a diverse Canadian society. Their current market segmentation model has created the paradox that they can insult Asians on the one hand while another hand makes money from the publicity in their Asian language news. They can profit this way for awhile, but not for the common good of us all.
I hope our boardrooms and leadership circles have a better chance of becoming more diverse than our English-language newsrooms. The first step is to avoid racial stereotypes about either Asians or whites, even if they seem at first to be positive images. Asking "Too Asian"? has been a question designed to reinforce white supremacy for two centuries. One look at our boardrooms and leadership circles in Canada might raise the question of what "Too White"? might mean in this context. But I don't write for Maclean's and so I won't ask such a question now. By the way, some of my best friends are white.
Henry Yu is a professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is writing a book entitled Pacific Canada, which argues for a perspective in 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.

Is it Racist to Ask "Too White?"

Is it Racist to Ask if a Community or a University or Company is "Too White?"

In February, in a Vancouver Sun Commentary, I asked rhetorically what was wrong with Kits. Many people believed that my use of the term "white" was racist. Was it?

When I pointed out that in a city where every neighbourhood had significant ethnic Chinese populations, and asked whether a neighbourhood that was all white was a "problem," the answer I did not supply was "Nothing is wrong with Kits." What does it mean that nothing is wrong with Kits? What does it mean that we can ask the question of a neighborhood or a school whether it is "too Asian?" and yet it is meaningless to ask if a neighborhood or a company is "too white?"

When you ask yourself what is wrong with Kits, and the likely answer you come up with is "Nothing is wrong with Kits," what is erased in that sense of normalcy is the great amounts of political work and a long history of white supremacy that made that normal.

Racial hierarchy in Canada started from the very first moments of clearing indigenous peoples from their lands, and the long history of white supremacy created anti-Asian and anti-Native and anti-Jewish prejudice. It created racial categories such as "Oriental," "Indian," and "Black." It also created a category called "white."

But the category of "white" is not the same as the other categories because in a society that is built around white supremacy, those able to be a part of the category of "white" received privileges that were denied the others. The categories are not equal. People who came to Canada as "Finns" or "Italians" or "Ukrainians" and had never thought of themselves as "white" in their home villages learned very quickly that to be "white" had advantages. Those categorized by the system of racial classification as "non-white" had almost no choice in the matter.

For most of Canadian and U.S. history, people wanted to "pass" as "white" because of the privileges. Very few people who could be counted as "white" wanted to pass as "black" or "Indian." What does that tell us?

We now live in a time when being classified as "white" doesn't seem to give the same advantages it used to give. In fact, many people now don't even bother trying to identify that way because it isn't much of a benefit. But that doesn't mean there aren't still long-standing legacies of racial hierarchy and white supremacy.

An all-white neighborhood takes a great deal of political work to build. It can endure long after such work has been done. There is nothing "wrong" with the people who live in Kits, but they might wonder what the historical causes are that led to the creation of whites-only neighborhoods such as Shaughnessy, Kerrsidale, and the British Properties, and why each of them were desegregated by Hong Kong Chinese migrants in the 1990s. Kitsilano was not.

We live in a society that was built out of inequity. So many of those inequities were overcome. We have mixed couples and marriages a-plenty. We have children who do not think about race. But that does not mean all of the legacies of inequity are gone. By asking "what is wrong with Kits?" the answer for most people is "nothing." And that should give us pause, because if we ask "what is wrong with Richmond?" the common answer is "too many Chinese." I haven't even touched upon the vicious anti-Native prejudice that passes for common sense in Canada, and our convenient forgetting that we live on someone else's unceded land.

If Macleans asks what is wrong with our top universities, and their answer is "Too Asian," that says a lot about just what we find so normal that the whiteness of Kitsilano is normal and all those "Asians" around us are a "problem."

Macleans' Nonapology for "Too Asian?"

Henry Yu: Macleans offers a nonapology for writing a nonstory called "Too Asian?"

UBC historian Henry Yu has suggested that Macleans employed disingenuous arguments in justifying publication of the article "Too Asian?", which focused on Canadian universities.

November 27, 2010

By Henry Yu

Macleans editors have issued a commentary online in which they “regret” that some people (putatively the “Asians” they stereotyped) were offended, but defending their story "Too Asian?" as good journalism.

It was not good journalism. What is particularly offensive about this nonapologetic nonapology is how they have tried to evade the issue.

Their statement, rather than dealing with the racist and inflammatory nature of their article, tried to rewrite the intention of their story, disingenuously asserting that their story was in fact a principled stand against the adoption of U.S.-inspired admissions caps on Asian Americans. It was no such thing.

Let me state this unequivocally as a professor teaching at UBC and who taught Asian American studies for 12 years at UCLA. I have knowledge about how Asian Americans have been categorized and racialized in admissions processes in the U.S., as well as how Canadian universities differ in their approach. There is not a single Canadian university considering adopting some form of admissions cap on “Asians”.

In fact, it would be practically impossible because our universities in general do not collect that form of information as part of our admissions process.

The ethnic-breakdown statistics that the Macleans article used from UBC were collected from a survey conducted of first-year students who were already admitted. The Macleans suggestion that there are private whispers or discussions of adopting race-based admissions for Asians in Canada is not only irresponsible journalism through unsubstantiated insinuation, but an outright lie.

They raise a red herring (Canadian universities considering U.S. policy) and then use the word "perhaps" to say we should “perhaps” not consider it, but there is nothing that is being considered (or dismissed) that they themelves have not invented out of fantasy.

Their article is not, as they claim, a principled antiracist stand calling for Canada to somehow defend meritocracy against American race-based admissions.

The main point of their article is the statement—clearly made—that there is a problem on campus caused by so many "Asian" students. That is what the title “Too Asian?” refers to—not a nonexistent nonmovement by Canadian universities to adopt U.S. policies.

And their absurd claim that the title was borrowed from an “authoritative source”? Let’s just call this what it is—bullshit. If you go to the original article in 2006 that used the title "Too Asian" in the U.S., a careful reader will quickly realize that the Macleans story takes the main idea of that story—that Asian Americans only seem to want to apply to prestigious schools, and therefore less prestigious schools face a challenge of convincing Asian American parents and students to apply to their schools—and twists it to conveniently become a story about race-based admissions capping too many Asians.

Except for a few exclusive Ivies in the 1980s and 1990s, no school in the U.S. wants "less" Asian American students; in fact they are considered prize students to be recruited, as is indicated in that article.

I taught at UCLA during the debates in the 1990s about removing affirmative action from public universities. I was a graduate student at Princeton when allegations surfaced that Ivy League schools were secretly capping Asian American admissions at 15 to 20 percent.

There were contentious and heated conversations about race and the meaning of meritocracy. There were many different opinions, and sometimes the debates were ugly. But the truth is that not a single university or college in the United States had a publicly stated race-based admissions policy that limited or put a quota on Asian Americans.

Whatever the debates, there was never any such thing as a race-based admission policy for Asian Americans. In fact, part of the complexity of the controversy regarding Ivy League admissions involved the need for activists and scholars to use statistical means to establish that these institutions were somehow limiting Asian American enrolments, a fact that Ivy League universities still deny.

But if there is a secret policy that is race-based in the U.S. in regard to Asian Americans, it is not explicitly stated as policy in the way that Macleans implies, nor is any single Canadian university contemplating such a policy in secret or in the open.

It is disingenuous and nauseating that Macleans editors raise this nonissue as if they themselves are the white knights riding to the rescue of the “Asian” students that they blame as the problem.

During my years at UCLA, I spent over a decade as a scholar trying to counteract the noxious effects of stereotypes about so-called “overachieving”, “model-minority” Asian Americans. I counted among allies other scholars and also a large community of political activists, parents, and educators from a wide spectrum of ethnic backgrounds.

When I returned to Canada in 2003 to the city where I was born and the university from which I had received my undergraduate degree, I felt relief to be again at home in a society that had legally enshrined multiculturalism and to teach at a university where mixing and socializing across a wide variety of differences was the norm.

Can we do better? Of course. Do we have a problem of being “Too Asian?" I do not even understand the meaning of the question as Macleans has posed it.

What is an “Asian” in their mind? Is it the same definition created by the anonymous pair of girls from Havergal College, who were mentioned at the beginning of the original story?

I am sickened that Macleans, in the most disingenuous way, would claim to be taking a heroic, principled stand against race-based admissions capping “Asian” enrolments, as if anyone other than this magazine was contemplating it for Canada.

Over a century ago, William Randolph Hearst perfected “yellow journalism”, a way of selling newspapers through outrageous and sensationalist headlines. Race-baiting was a common technique in yellow journalism, and in California a series of newspapers owned by Valentine McClatchy used anti-Asian headlines to incite the movement to disenfranchise and exclude Chinese and Japanese immigrants.

The “Too Asian?” headline that Macleans used, and more importantly, the nonexistent Asian “problem” that they themselves invented, could have come right out of one of those rags. They should be ashamed of using it, and they should be even more ashamed of foisting responsibility off on the Americans that they falsely accuse, as if Macleans had no responsibility for creating the headline.

Words matter, and no matter how you spin and twist their meaning, you cannot reinvent what was written for all to read. Macleans fucked up. Own up to it and stop pretending that you were saying the opposite of what you actually wrote.

Our Future as a Half-Chinese City

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Original talk took place in UBC Robson Square.

Why Macleans and racism should no longer define Canada

originally published in the Georgia Straight, Nov. 16, 2010

Thirty years after CTV aired its infamous W5 program “Campus Giveaway”—insinuating that Canadian universities had too many "Asians" and therefore too many “foreigners”—Macleans magazine has cynically used racial stereotypes to invent a nonissue. In its annual university rankings issue last week, Macleans asked why “white” Canadians think some of our top universities are “too Asian”.

Buried amid 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 harbouring the assumption of the writers that “Asian” is the opposite of "born in Canada"?

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”. Judging from the first 300 comments on Macleans' online edition, many of which dismissed the article as being pointless and inflammatory, there are plenty of Canadians more articulate and intelligent about the dangers of racial stereotyping than the authors.

Each day in my classes, I hear intelligent and humane dialogues between students of every colour and from everywhere around the world. It's something that makes UBC and other Canadian universities special places that seemingly have better sense than the Macleans newsroom.

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. But racist questions obscure the important issues facing us.

Talking about race involves seeing through the generalizations, and understanding what is actually happening, not posing racially inflammatory questions that reinforce rather than refute dangerous stereotypes.

In referring to characterizations of Asian Americans in the U.S. 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 that 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 criticized in the U.S.: the characterization of all “Asians” as overachievers who threaten “white” students.

Framing their article around the question of whether our campuses are “too Asian” obscures whatever useful points the authors thought they were trying to make.

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 “nonwhites”, 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 camraderie 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 the Second World War, 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 “nonwhites” 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 Macleans 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”. 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. Rather than blaming them for “self-segregating”, go think a bit more about why you assume they are all the same.