Yesterday in our ASTU class, I had the pleasure of watching the fantastic presentations done by my fellow classmates of their archival studies we have been working on for the past few weeks. There was a wide range of work done, from a family tree of the MacLennan family, to an interactive website and a book about the artist Jack Shadbolt, to the Tumblr page documenting Japanese internment camps in Canada during WWII, focusing specifically after Pearl Harbor. The collaboration of hard work and so many different ideas to make these contributions to knowledge was both fascinating and the end to a fair amount of stress.
My group, consisting of Anna, Emily, Mishal, and myself, focused on the Chinese oppression in Canada throughout the 20th century. We took documents and photographs from the Chung Collection, and made an infographic focusing on the lack of representation of the marginalized in a contextualized manner. While working with these archives, and making the infographic timeline of the continual marginalization and racist remarks, make me think of the article we read by Jiwani and Young, Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse, about the continued ignorance by the general public, mainly in Vancouver BC, of the mistreatment Aboriginal women in the Downtown Eastside. Both my group’s project and the article by Jiwani and Young have interconnected ideas of the lack or misrepresentation of the marginalized. The article focused mainly on how missing and murdered women from the Downtown Eastside, mainly those of Aboriginal background, don’t get enough attention by the police forces and the media outlets. They are mistreated and pushed aside as the other when it comes to political and economic, as well as social matters. Both the Chinese immigrants and the Aboriginal women had similar features of degrading tones. The Aboriginal woman were noted as the “bad” (Jiwani and Young, 900) women, due to their sex trade and rough ways of living, which as then categorized as the way of Aboriginal people everywhere. The Chinese were considered less in every way, being called the “canker of Canada” (RBC), and blamed for taking all of the jobs that were supposedly meant for the Canadians.
Racism plays a huge part in both of these topics I’ve mentioned, which is what led me to connect the sociology lecture about racism from today to both the infographic work my group did, and the Jiwani and Young article from class last week. While talking about four elements of racism, racialization seemed to be the most fitting to how the infographic and the article frame their findings. Racialization is the “social process where groups of people are judged and viewed as inferior or superior based on their intellect, morality, and culture” (Dilley). I think that this sums up quite well the gist of some of the points both pieces were trying to get across, implying that the differences in peoples and cultures shouldn’t reflect how each one of them is treated and recognized in society, even though, sadly, it does.
Works cited:
Jiwani, Yasmin and Young, Mary Lynn. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.4 (2006): 895-917. Web. 10. Feb. 2016
UBC Rare Books and Special Collections, Chung Collection, FC106_C5_O74_1912; https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/chung/chungpub/items/1.0056195#p12z-6r0f:race