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Racism in literature
Racial Discrimination in Literature
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Comparison of Racism in History
“ I have a dream... where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.';
-Martin Luther King Jr.
We have come a long way since the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Our cities are filled with numerous minority groups with different religions and cultures. We live in a multicultural society where we don’t have to think about hate crime too much. We can feel safe when going to the corner store without being pasteurized by a mob of “haters';. We live in a very safe country, but instances during the World Wars make us pray that non-of that will ever happen in Canada again.
This ISP will examine the similarities and differences of racism and racial issues between a “true-story'; novel called Obasan, by Joy Kogawa, and a fictional play called “The Komagata Maru Incident';, by Sharon Pollock. Each story is set in a different period during Canada’s history: World War I and II.
In the play “The Komagata Maru Incident';, Sharon tells a story of the racist Canadian Government. The setting of the play is in Vancouver and it takes place right after World War I. It’s about a group of 376 East Indian Immigrants who sail to Canada to start a new life, but are not excepted due to the racist immigration officials. The immigrants had a right to be in Canada because they were British subjects, but Canada decided to shut their doors. This shows how cruel the people were at that time. Slowly the East Indian communities within Vancouver were beginning to get racist threats. The “whites'; complained about how the immigrants were taking over jobs because they were willing to work cheap. It is overwhelming to think that just because of a different race, it would mean non-whites couldn’t do what whites do: make a living.
In the novel Obasan, it describes the hardship of a young girl, Naomi, growing up in Vancouver, while in the midst World War II. During this period, her family was torn apart, due to government orders, and sent to camps or sugar beet farms in Alberta and Manitoba. The reason why there was so much focus around Naomi and other families like her was because her family was Japanese. It is so inconceivable to think that Ca...
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...nadian government was paranoid enough to single out a race.
The novel Obasan and play “The Komagata Maru Incident'; can be compared, but really shouldn’t be. The situations and level of racism are much too different to compare.
In conclusion, when looking at the exterior of a person, it is much too easy to get the wrong impression, due to their skin colour, religion, or culture. This leads to the mind scurrying up stereotypic ideas about that person. Too often are projections about a person are totally inaccurate. It’s unfortunate that by the time we find out there’s much more to that person, it’s too late. Can Canada ever learn from it’s mistakes from it’s past? Or will racial conflict occur in Canada lead into another war? It’s too hard to say. With all the similarities in the novel Obasan and the play “The Komagata Maru Incident';, it showed that racism is present in the past and will be in the future.
Bibliography
Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Canada: Penguin Books, 1983.
Pollock, Sharon. “The Komagata Maru Incident';. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1978.
A Critical Analysis of Racism in Canadian Law and the “Unmapping” of the White Settler Society in “When Place Becomes Race” by Sherene H. Razack
One topic that was compared between the two novels was racism. The definition of racism is the belief that all member of each race possess characteristics
Eden Robinson’s short story “Terminal Avenue” presents readers with the dystopian near-future of Canada where Indigenous people are subjugated and placed under heavy surveillance. The story’s narrator, Wil, is a young Aboriginal man who struggles with his own inner-turmoil after the suicide of his father and his brother’s subsequent decision to join the ranks of the Peace Officers responsible for “adjusting” the First Nations people. Though “Terminal Avenue” takes place in Vancouver there are clear parallels drawn between the Peace Officers of Robinson’s imagination and the Canadian military sent to enforce the peace during the stand-off at Oka, Quebec in 1990. In writing “Terminal Avenue” Robinson addresses the armed conflict and proposes
The Japanese living in Canada during World War II (WWII) faced one of the harshest and inhumane living conditions in Canadian history. One unidentified woman remembers, “it was terrible, unbelievable. They kept us in the stalls where they put the cattle and horses.” Before WWII, the Japanese were targeted for their culture. An example is the Anti-Asiatic League that was created to limit the number of Japanese men that could immigrate to Canada. Canadians did not want the potential competitors in farming and fishing. 22,000 Japanese Canadians were interned during WWII, even though 14,000 had been Canadian born citizens. This was because the Japanese had bombed Canada’s ally, the United States. With this in mind, the Canadians viewed the Japanese as the enemy. This made the innocent Japanese Canadians become the victims of unfair suspicion and they began to fall through the cracks of Canada’s developing society and government. Internment camps were created to forcibly keep the “dangerous” Japanese from the seemingly “innocent and civilized” Canadian citizens.
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According to conservative conflict theory, society is a struggle for dominance among competing social groups defined by class, race, and gender. Conflict occurs when groups compete over power and resources. (Tepperman, Albanese & Curtis 2012. pg. 167) The dominant group will exploit the minority by creating rules for success in their society, while denying the minority opportunities for such success, thereby ensuring that they continue to monopolize power and privilege. (Crossman.n.d) This paradigm was well presented throughout the film. The European settlers in Canada viewed the natives as obstacles in their quest of expansion by conquering resources and land. They feared that the aboriginal practices and beliefs will disrupt the cohesion of their own society. The Canadian government adopted the method of residential schools for aboriginal children for in an attempt to assimilate the future generations. The children were stripped of their native culture,...
...panese Canadian Interment and Racism During World War II." IMAGINATIONS. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Jan. 2014.
During the course of this work, many ideas and themes are portrayed and readers are able to view subjects that surround the main topic of racial injustice and intolerance. With the three main narrators, Minny Jackson, Aibileen Clark, and Skeeter Phelan, the audience quickly gains an insight on how racial inequalities affected everyone. These thoughts help to form a plot that can easily keep readers entertained throughout the novel. During the course of the novel, there are many points in the plot that decide the actions and events other cha...
The film helps to explain the ambiguity in the motives and actions of the government workers. The government workers and the missionaries both want to do good and help the Aborigines, but their actions are guided by naturally ingrained stereotypes and self interests. The whites view the natives and the Aborig...
Harold Cardinal made a bold statement in his book, The Unjust Society, in 1969 about the history of Canada’s relationship with Aboriginal peoples. His entire book is, in fact, a jab at Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s idea of ‘the just society’. Pierre Elliott Trudeau made great assumptions about First Nations people by declaring that Aboriginal people should be happy about no longer being described as Indian. His goal was to rid Canada of Indians by assimilating them into the Canadian framework. Considered by many as a progressive policy, Trudeau’s white paper demonstrates just how accurate the following statement made by Harold Cardinal at the beginning of his book is : “The history of Canada’s Indians is a shameful chronicle of the white man’s disinterest,
Do you know that despite Canada being called multicultural and accepting, Canada’s history reveals many secrets that contradicts this statement? Such an example are Canadian aboriginals, who have faced many struggles by Canadian society; losing their rights, freedoms and almost, their culture. However, Native people still made many contributions to Canadian society. Despite the efforts being made to recognize aboriginals in the present day; the attitudes of European Canadians, acts of discrimination from the government, and the effects caused by the past still seen today have proven that Canadians should not be proud of Canada’s history with respect to human rights since 1914. First, is because of the attitudes of European Canadians towards aboriginals, which were mostly cruel and inhumane.
people of different ethnicities. Such harm is observed in the history of North America when the Europeans were establishing settlements on the North American continent. Because of European expansion on the North American continent, the first nations already established on the continent were forced to leave their homes by the Europeans, violating the rights and freedoms of the first nations and targeting them with discrimination; furthermore, in the history of the United States of America, dark skinned individuals were used as slaves for manual labour and were stripped of their rights and freedoms by the Americans because of the racist attitudes that were present in America. Although racist and prejudice attitudes have weakened over the decades, they persist in modern societies. To examine a modern perspective of prejudice and racism, Wayson Choy’s “I’m a Banana and Proud of it” and Drew Hayden Taylor’s “Pretty Like a White Boy: The Adventures of a Blue-Eye Ojibway” both address the issues of prejudice and racism; however, the authors extend each others thoughts about the issues because of their different definitions, perspectives, experiences and realities.
Vancouver currently maintains an image as a sort of maternal ethnic melting pot, a region rich in cultural diversity and with a municipality that is both tolerant and welcoming of various displays and traditions. However, upon closer examination of recent history, it becomes clear that the concept of the city embracing minorities with a warm liberal hug is both incorrect and a form of manipulation in itself. The articles Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity in Vancouver and The Idea of Chinatown unravel the cultural sanitization that occurred in Vancouver at the turn of the nineteenth century as means of state domination. Through careful synthesis of primary documents, the articles piece together the systematic oppression suffered by BC indigenous
I think this play is a lot about what does race mean, and to what extent do we perform race either onstage or in life:
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