The area of Toronto I live in, known as Parkdale, is a relatively low-income community with a high proportion of first-generation immigrant families. It's still kind of nice, saved from being too sketchy by being nestled between Liberty Village (the new King-West, young urban hip yadda yadda) and Roncesvalles village (a quiet middle-class area with a lot of artisanal delis and free-trade coffee shops). Someone in the area apparently doesn't share my neutral/positive view, however.
The corner at which I catch the streetcar in the morning is also home to a long-term rooming house (there are a lot of them on this stretch of King street). As I approached this morning, the front door of this building banged open and someone stormed out carrying a bicycle, obviously in mid-rant. This is the part I caught:
"So many fucking immigrants that don't belong in this country, and that cocksucker across the street [a police officer sitting in his cruiser] won't do anything about it, so I'm gonna have to take care of it myself, old fashioned style!"
And with that he hopped on his bike and wobbled down the street. I turned around to watch him go, not entirely believing what I had heard, and realised there was a group of Chinese women walking behind me that had been treated to this display of goodwill and brotherly love.
It's not the first time I've seen behaviour like this. Last year there was a memorable incident at the Chinese Lantern Festival starring a man who was furious that the rides at Ontario Place were closed after dark for the festival, and announced at the top of his lungs that it was the fault of 'the fucking chinks'. There's also the less obvious and more casual racism that pervades my industry; the last telecom company I worked for was rife with mutterings about the Asian Indians we often hired.
Every time I hear this kind of thing, it makes me ashamed to be white (and I am very white. Any whiter, I'd be paper). It makes me want to hide out in a tanning salon until I'm dark enough to pass for anything except the majority. It makes me want to start wearing a sign that says "I'm very sorry. I'm not with them."
It frightens me, because I can't understand it. There are a lot of philosophies that I don't agree with, that I actively argue against, that make me so angry I see red and start figuratively foaming at the mouth (pro-lifers, for example, but I digress), but there is at least a train of logic that can be followed. It may be faulty logic, it may be based on erroneous premises, but there is a process that I can look at, and understand how A-B-C resulted in conclusion D. The casual, dismissive, and occasionally incredibly angry racism I see has no such coherence to it. It's emotional. It's arbitrary. It's excessive. It appears to have no basis in reality whatsoever and it scares the shit out of me.
My father's parents were both immigrants to the United States. Shortly before the first World War, my great-grandfather came over from Italy with his wife and daughter. They settled down in Rochester and started having more children, but my grandmother was not born in Canada, or even in North America. My grandfather came over from Ireland as a young man. I don't know if they experienced that kind of pointless hatred, or if that's reserved for people who aren't white*.
I don't even know where I'm going with this. Some people are so angry at the world and their lives that they spew this vitriol out at innocents in public, and every time I see it, I'm too stunned to act or speak until it's too late. I feel like this makes me an accessory to madness.
*aside: my half-Irish father somehow got all the swarthy Italian genes that my grandmother did not appear to have. If he grew out his beard and put on a turban, he could pass for Arabic. I find this hilarious.
The corner at which I catch the streetcar in the morning is also home to a long-term rooming house (there are a lot of them on this stretch of King street). As I approached this morning, the front door of this building banged open and someone stormed out carrying a bicycle, obviously in mid-rant. This is the part I caught:
"So many fucking immigrants that don't belong in this country, and that cocksucker across the street [a police officer sitting in his cruiser] won't do anything about it, so I'm gonna have to take care of it myself, old fashioned style!"
And with that he hopped on his bike and wobbled down the street. I turned around to watch him go, not entirely believing what I had heard, and realised there was a group of Chinese women walking behind me that had been treated to this display of goodwill and brotherly love.
It's not the first time I've seen behaviour like this. Last year there was a memorable incident at the Chinese Lantern Festival starring a man who was furious that the rides at Ontario Place were closed after dark for the festival, and announced at the top of his lungs that it was the fault of 'the fucking chinks'. There's also the less obvious and more casual racism that pervades my industry; the last telecom company I worked for was rife with mutterings about the Asian Indians we often hired.
Every time I hear this kind of thing, it makes me ashamed to be white (and I am very white. Any whiter, I'd be paper). It makes me want to hide out in a tanning salon until I'm dark enough to pass for anything except the majority. It makes me want to start wearing a sign that says "I'm very sorry. I'm not with them."
It frightens me, because I can't understand it. There are a lot of philosophies that I don't agree with, that I actively argue against, that make me so angry I see red and start figuratively foaming at the mouth (pro-lifers, for example, but I digress), but there is at least a train of logic that can be followed. It may be faulty logic, it may be based on erroneous premises, but there is a process that I can look at, and understand how A-B-C resulted in conclusion D. The casual, dismissive, and occasionally incredibly angry racism I see has no such coherence to it. It's emotional. It's arbitrary. It's excessive. It appears to have no basis in reality whatsoever and it scares the shit out of me.
My father's parents were both immigrants to the United States. Shortly before the first World War, my great-grandfather came over from Italy with his wife and daughter. They settled down in Rochester and started having more children, but my grandmother was not born in Canada, or even in North America. My grandfather came over from Ireland as a young man. I don't know if they experienced that kind of pointless hatred, or if that's reserved for people who aren't white*.
I don't even know where I'm going with this. Some people are so angry at the world and their lives that they spew this vitriol out at innocents in public, and every time I see it, I'm too stunned to act or speak until it's too late. I feel like this makes me an accessory to madness.
*aside: my half-Irish father somehow got all the swarthy Italian genes that my grandmother did not appear to have. If he grew out his beard and put on a turban, he could pass for Arabic. I find this hilarious.
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