Canadian Racism

Malcolm X once said that anything below the Canadian  border was the South, referring to the existence of white racism throughout the United States. That led other blacks to label the so-called "liberal" North as "Up South."

The "Up South" label could just as easily apply to Canada, a destination many fugitive slaves  headed for to gain freedom.

In Norman Jewison: A Director's Life by Ira Wells (Sutherland House Books, 2021), I learned that the Canadian-born film director (born in 1926),whose many films include In the Heat of the Night, A Soldier's Story, and The Hurricane, grew up in a Toronto neighborhood that was a five-minute walk from a Lake Ontario beach. At the beach, there was a sign Jewison would see that said, "NO JEWS, N******[NIGGERS], OR DOGS." The sign, writes Wells, a Canadian academic and journalist, was there to ensure that "the sight of a Black person or Jew" would not hinder the enjoyment of the beach by families seeking relief on a hot summer day. 

So despite being seen as a refuge for runaway slaves and a land that promotes racial tolerance and multiculturalism, Canada had its own struggles with racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry.

Note: Despite his surname, Norman Jewison is not Jewish. He is a white Protestant of British ancestry.

A Novel About The Internment Of Japanese-Canadians During WWII

I knew about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. What I didn't know was that the same thing occurred in Canada. While skimming through the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, I came across the name Joy Nozomi Kogawa, a Japanese-Canadian poet and novelist, born in 1935, who wrote a novel called Obasan, published in 1981.

Wikipedia describes Obasan as a book that "chronicles Canada's internment and persecution of its citizens of Japanese descent during the Second World War" and is told "from the perspective of a young child." Obasan, continues the Wikipedia article, "is often required reading for university English courses on Canadian Literature."

I plan to put Obasan on my Must-Read list.

Setting the Record Straight

An editorial in the right-wing New York Post ("Oh (No) Canada," February 3, 2010) erroneously stated that "President Obama...hopes to overhaul American health-care."
It's not health-care that needs to be reformed, it's health-care insurance.