Monthly Archives: March 2015

On Wednesday, our CAP Global Citizens class attended the film screening of “Where Are We in the World?”, as a part of a week long series of events for Rule Out Racism Week that is organized by the Equity and Inclusion Office at UBC. We watched two short films featuring Vancouver’s Chinatown and the Komagata Maru incident of 1914, and both films depict how these ignored and hidden histories has shaped the identity of the city of Vancouver.

The first film in this series is called “Who Welcomes Immigrants to this Land?”, and one thing that really struck me is learning that the Komagata Maru incident and aboriginal residential schools were not taught in Canadian schools, and that only very recently has the Canadian government apologised for the incident. It is clear that there is a lack of recognition of this important part of Canadian history among Canadians. The second film “Chinatown- In the Making of Vancouver” was about the struggles in Vancouver’s Chinatown. This film highlights the issues of discrimination and racism that Chinese immigrants faced in the 1960s. The government’s early action in excluding Chinese immigrants, as well as the current gentrification process and construction of high-rises in the area, both contribute to Chinatown’s loss of its distinctive identity. Both films bring attention to the government’s effort in erasing the histories and the issues of losing of these unique cultures of the marginalized groups in Vancouver.

I approached these two films by relating them to Rodney Carter’s article “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence”, in which he explores the power relations in archives. Carter notes that institutions and states have enormous power in controlling who is being included in these acts of remembering. In a similar way, these two films are showing the power that the Canadian government possess in further marginalizing these groups by not only imposing laws and regulations against them, but also silencing them by disregarding these problems. As Carter mentions when a group is facing silence, it becomes “difficult for the group to tell its own story, [and] to write its own history”, and without these stories, “the possibility of gaining and maintaining knowledge over time is severely compromised” (221). As a result, the Canadian government actions have prevented these groups in trying to find their place in society, and exacerbate their struggle in connecting with their heritage. It is useful in looking at this concept of power relations on a local scale, and I also really appreciate this series of films as a community based, bottom-up approach in communicating these larger social issues that are often overlooked by the public to the Vancouver population.

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Work Cited

Carter, Rodney G.S. “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence.” Archivaria 61 (2006): 215-33. Web. 19 Mar 2015

UBC. “Where Are We in the World? – Who Welcomes Immigrants to this Land?” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 18 Mar. 2015. Web. 19 Mar. 2015.

UBC. “Where Are We in the World? – Chinatown- In the Making of Vancouver” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 18 Mar. 2015. Web. 19 Mar. 2015.

In our recent ASTU classes, we have been studying about the representation of vulnerable subjects, in which we looked at the media treatment of marginalized groups, such as sex workers and disabled people. In reading the article When The Media Treats White Suspects And Killers Better Than Black Victims, I noticed that the underlying racism is very apparent in these news report. The headlines are presented in ways which say that black victims are to blame for their own deaths. Compared with the portrayal of white suspects and accused murderers, in which the media tends to focus on the positive characteristics, and the differences are very striking.  In their article Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse, Jiwani & Young studied the missing women cases in Vancouver and looked at the gendered and racialized problems of media coverage. They mention that “black women are victims of crime, their stories rarely make it to the front page” and “yet when Black men are perpetrators of crime, their stories splash the front pages of news”, and suggest that some bodies have the propensity to commit crime and that is “directly tied to race” (901).

After the CAP Global Citizens group lecture on Monday, in which our class discussed the recent issue of race, justice and police violence, I came across a BBC article, Viewpoint: Why Eric Garner was blamed for dying, which reported that many news articles have been blaming blacks for their own killings. This idea is similar to Jiwani & Young’s discussion of the marginalized groups are often “regarded as society’s “others””, and are blamed for “being in the wrong place and doing the wrong kind of work” (901). The media has powerful political potential in shaping our perspectives on society and I found that media treatment that follows the dominant view to marginalized groups to be particular problematic. It tends to discriminate, devalue the victims and minimize the violence that these people are experiencing (Jiwani & Young 901). The question I want to pose is that why and how does mass media determine whose lives or deaths matters?

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Work Cited:

Jiwani, Y., and M. L. Young. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.4 (2006): 895-917. Web. 6 Mar. 2015.

Patton, Stacey, and David J Leonard. ‘Viewpoint: Black Victims Unfairly Blamed’. BBC Magazine 8 Dec. 2014. Web. 6 Mar. 2015.

Wing, Nick. ‘When The Media Treats White Suspects And Killers Better Than Black Victims’. The Huffington Post Canada 8 Aug 2014. Web. 6 Mar. 2015.

Image: http://yalibnan.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/black-lives-matter.jpg