When reading Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, I couldn’t help but think about the evolution of racism in Canada. On page 14, Wah describes a conversation he had with his mother, about marrying a Chinese man and the racism she faced. She notes that, “there was a lot of racism in those days… it isn’t like it is now, a completely accepted thing…” How about today, Mrs. Wah? Is interracial marriage a completely accepted thing? Does racism still exist in Canada?

To me, racism in Canada is still very apparent. However, over the years, people have learned that it is wrong to be racist, it is taboo. Because of this, the racism still remains but it seems like it is often masked as a “joke”, talked about with a selective audience, or discussed behind closed doors. Wah notes in his book, on page 165, the “old fart pink-faced investor worries about the Hong Kong real estate takeover… [and] moans that UBC has become the University of a Billion Chinks.” Since this book was written, nothing much has changed and this passage unfortunately speaks to the current attitudes that I witness all too often.

Racism is so engrained from Canada’s past that it still appears to be lingering in the attitudes of its people. In Linda Besner’s article, she quotes labour professor David Camfield saying, “all this racist history has left its mark on Canadian society, and it affects how people interpret these issues today.” Besner’s article discusses the brutal history of racism against Chinese immigrants in Canada, and how it has evolved into a fear of the “Chinese takeover” due to a multitude of Chinese immigrants investing in Vancouver property. 

I can barely bring myself to type the “C Word” on this blog, and I must admit I’ve heard the “joke” about UBC before. I have also heard people talk about how “we” (caucasian people) are becoming the minority in Canada. These types of comments simply make me uncomfortable. It is difficult to be proud of the so-called cultural mosaic of Canada, a country that boasts its acceptance of all cultures, when I see and hear the animosity about other cultures “taking over” all too often. Canada, racism is not a joke, nor is it acceptable under any circumstance, and it’s time to move past this intolerance and ignorance.

Recently, I have been weary of Facebook. In fact, this spring I quit Facebook in an effort to “cleanse” myself of it. Facebook has an intrusive nature that I had become increasingly uncomfortable with. When I reactivated my account in order to do homework for English class, I was quickly reminded of why I quit. Interestingly enough, we are currently studying a few of the very reasons I decided to take a step back from it.

In Eli Pariser’s Ted Talk he discusses the personalization of what we see on Facebook and of the internet in general, namely in our Google searches. He argues that our experiences on the internet differ greatly from one another, and that the “gatekeepers” of the internet are essentially personalizing our individual experience, leaving out what they think we don’t want or need to see. While this allows us to see content that we are interested in or that is relevant to our lives, we are unaware exactly what it is that we are missing out on. When I think of these internet “gatekeepers” that Pariser talks about, I can’t help but imagine Winston Smith from George Orwell’s novel, 1984. In this dystopian novel, Smith works at The Ministry of Truth, where he controls propaganda and rewrites past newspaper articles so that they are in line with the current government’s regime. Although this is definitely a much more extreme example of what we’re dealing with here, we are still missing out on crucial information and the choice of what we are seeing, is not ours. Unlike in Orwell’s novel, these “gatekeepers” are not promoting one oppressive message in their attempts to personalize our experience, however they are censoring us from information and this is an unsettling similarity. One of the most disturbing aspects of Orwell’s novel is that the people living under this oppressive system are unable to make the choice, and this is what Pariser suggests – that we need to be able to see what gets through our filters and what doesn’t so that we can have some control, and I most definitely agree.