A look into B.C.’s history of racism, and its pursuit of a white man’s province
GARY MASON -The Globe and Mail- Canada – Published Friday, Jan. 10 2014
Province of British Columbia, Canada
While British Columbia is often celebrated for its physical beauty and a laid-back, open-minded culture, it is a province rooted in a little-discussed but hard-to-ignore bigoted past. This week we were reminded of just how dark some of that history is.
NDP Leader Adrian Dix drew back the curtains on some of the bleaker moments of those early days, an epoch when it was no time to be Chinese, or Japanese or South Asian for that matter, either. But it was the Chinese and Japanese, in particular, who were considered the paramount threat and treated almost singularly with contempt. Their banishment from the province would become a single-minded obsession of legislators – and the public – for more than 70 years.
“What we uncovered is seven decades of public policy that pursued a white man’s province,” Mr. Dix told me this week.
The outgoing NDP Leader had the legislative library do much of the legwork in delving into an aspect of B.C. little known to most.
His hope is it will help provide some context to the B.C. government’s planned formal apology to Chinese-Canadians for historic wrongs. That apology, like the one the Liberals delivered to Japanese-Canadians two years ago, is expected to occur this spring. [Read more]
Comments
I guess the Canadians were mirroring the Americans or vice versa because the “exact same thing”(redundant, I know) happened to the Chinese, Japanese, Philippians, and other Asians here in America.
Even now, in most states in America, our education system is designed to put more pressure on Asians to succeed. In order to be considered proficient in English Language, a score of 86% is required for Asians whereas Whites are only required to score 82%, though for most Asians English is their second language. They are also required to score along similar lines in Mathematics, too. And they need perfect to near perfect scores on the SAT/ACT to get into colleges of their choice. The same criteria does not apply for Whites students, especially White males, who are lagging behind White females when it comes to intellectual pursuits. At least they make good soldiers, and with America involved in over 134+ conflicts/strife making around the globe, they need all the soldiers they can recruit.
correction – Filipinos
Please give examples of the US states in which the English language requirements are different for proficiency (at what level?)