A Wandering Mind – The Spread of Racism
Raymond Li – September 25th, 2014
Can Interpretative Communities extend beyond education?
A couple days ago, I was doing research on the Komagata Maru incident that happened a century ago.The Komagata Maru incident happened at the doorstep of Vancouver, the Burrard Inlet. On May 23rd, 1914 the Komagata Maru (a Japanese ship filled with South Asian passengers) arrived in Vancouver, but was not allowed to anchor due to tight anti-asian immigration laws.Two months after floating in the Inlet, the Komagata Maru was forced to leave (http://www.vancouverhistory.ca/archives_komagatamaru.htm). Many passengers died in this incident, resulting in passionate south asian freedom movements in India (http://komagatamarujourney.ca/intro).
Passengers from the Komagata Maru incident (http://content.lib.sfu.ca/utils/ajaxhelper/?CISOROOT=/km_2&CISOPTR=15397&action=2&DMSCALE=65&DMWIDTH=650&DMHEIGHT=466)
In my research, I was specifically focusing on an interview of Communications Strategist Manjot Bains and how she (as an indian canadian) connected with the incident. She dealt with racism as both a child, and an adult. She also finds that textbook information about culture in Canada does not reflect the proportionate population. With all the mentions of textbooks and cultures, my mind wandered off to think of the term “interpretative communities” found in Shahzad’s paper, “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning,” that we read during our english class. This specialized term refers to how the way we learn “involve a collectivity of significant ‘others’..” (Shahzad 2010). While my mind was wandering, I began questioning: does “learning with others” simply constitute education, or can it extend towards experience or feelings (such as hate and racism). In the case of Manjot Bains, she first felt the hate of racism in grade four (http://komagatamarujourney.ca/node/4790). She gained a new experience (racism) through her community (in this case, Canada) which all related back to the history of Canada. I extend my thoughts further to think that the racism that Manjot Bains experienced also came from interpretative communities. The certain inhabitants of Vancouver back a century ago during the Komagata Maru event retained and collectively remembered the feeling of resentment towards South Asians resulting in their future generation to “learn” the hate that was given to Manjot. In that case, the “previous generation” was the interpretative community to the “future generation” where hate and resentment towards South Asians was the knowledge that was passed on. This causes my mind to wander even more: is racism a product of interpretative communities? I think we can help reduce or eliminate discrimination if more research is done on the link between interpretative communities and racism.
Raymond Li
I agree that we can help reduce or eliminate discrimination if more research is done on interpretative communities and racism. I feel that the Komagata Maru is a black mark on Canada’s otherwise pristine record of tolerance towards multiculturalism. In 2011, a Sikh was elected into some form of governing position of BC, showing how far Canada has come since the Komagata Maru days.
You asked “is racism a product of interpretative communities?” I agree with you in that racism is definitely a factor at play when it comes to collective learning especially in a nation that strongly supports and believes in multiculturalism. You also mentioned that Manjot Bains stated that she experienced racism and hate in the fourth grade partly because she was not a part of the majority (white children). Now a days, as Vancouver is becoming more and more multicultural I noticed that not only are white people initiated the racism but just majority race groups in general. At my high school, the majority of the kids were either Indian or Chinese. One of my teachers even made a joke that the majority (white people) some how became the minority. Because the majority of my school population was Indian, I noticed a lot of racism towards other races that were not Indian. I just found it interesting that not so long ago Indians in Vancouver were facing racism and now it has switched, or at least in my high school the roles switched.
You make some extremely important and moreover fascinating points. It’s quite compelling to question the interpretative communities in which we grow up and surround ourselves with. At the basic level, I initially view interpretative communities to be fairly neutral agents in our lives, they determine how we access or come to view various topics in life and influence how we access or accumulate knowledge. They are seen as family or friends, the foundations of how we socialize ourselves. But I’m glad you raise the point of how racism can breed through such communities as well. For all the values and virtues I’m sure we take away from interpretative communities there are inevitably negative ways of looking at the world that are infused into certain communities. Yet there are grey areas of what communities can instill in us. From a personal account, growing up in one of the whitest states in America, all I was ever exposed to was white-to-white human interaction, I inevitably exposed myself to white ways of thinking regardless of however progressive they were. On that rare occasion I did see a race other than caucasian, the element of that person’s race stood out to me more than if I had been socialized in a more multiracial setting. Reflecting on this now, I had a weird complex going for me as an Asian American thinking within a white mindset and seeing other races as “other” races, not inclusive of myself. I’m curious your thoughts on my specific interpretative community. My communities didn’t necessarily breed racism yet they more noticeably made me think in terms of an “us” race and a “them” race. Not implying one race was more supreme than another, but just that race was more actively noticed and picked out in people set apart from the majority race.