The not so Great Racism in Canada Thread

[dleung]

Originally Posted by Pavlov

I can't believe I was stupid enough to take the bait again.

They're professional rabbit-hole burrowers. They've got all the time in the world lol

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by dleung

They're professional rabbit-hole burrowers. They've got all the time in the world lol

приветствия!

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Pavlov

I can't believe I was stupid enough to take the bait again.

If there's any "bait" here, it was Rose Tuong that laid it; we merely took it, all of us together.

Though, I'm not sure I like how you're denying my hardships. I believe you're not supposed to tell me that my feelings are invalid.

I actually spent most of 2020 living in Vancouver, where I felt positively alienated. Not enough Québécois faces, way too many South Asian and East Asian faces. Poor me! (Rose Tuong and I should be in the same support group, it's not easy to be alienated. I speak from experience!)

[jamincan]

Originally Posted by lio45

It's actually much easier for a gay person to court/screw girls to fit it than for an unilingual francophone to achieve fluency in "white speak"...

I can't believe this still needs to be said in 2021, but managing to have — with a woman or flirt with her does not change your —. I'm not interested in rehashing 30 year old arguments about — with this forum's biggest troll.

[dleung]

Originally Posted by lio45

If there's any "bait" here, it was Rose Tuong that laid it; we merely took it, all of us together.

Though, I'm not sure I like how you're denying my hardships. I believe you're not supposed to tell me that my feelings are invalid.

I actually spent most of 2020 living in Vancouver, where I felt positively alienated. Not enough Québécois faces, way too many South Asian and East Asian faces. Poor me! (Rose Tuong and I should be in the same support group, it's not easy to be alienated. I speak from experience!)

lol Vancouver still has over twice as many caucasians as any other ethnic group.

A more analogous situation would be if you got into karate and felt alienated being the only white guy there, so you introduce the sport to other white people. How outrageous and racist of you!

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by dleung

lol Vancouver still has over twice as many caucasians as any other ethnic group.

A more analogous situation would be if you got into karate and felt alienated being the only white guy there, so you introduce the sport to other white people. How outrageous and racist of you!

If you talked about the situation in terms of feeling "alienated" by the mere presence of all these Asians around you, wouldn't that be exactly how you'd get labelled?

[Acajack]

Wouldn't a more 2021 way of framing it, be:

"Wow, karate is so awesome, but too few non-Asians like me realize this and take part in it. I'd like way more people, outside its traditional base of practitioners, to discover this awesome sport. And I'm gonna do something about it!"

[dleung]

^^She said all those things in the other 99.99% of the article, not our fault your snowflake self fixated on the one word

[lio45]

If I actually during an interview said several reasonable things and one disgustingly racist thing, you'd totally be fine with it because most of what I said is okay? Riiiiight.

[Pavlov]

Originally Posted by jamincan

I can't believe this still needs to be said in 2021, but managing to have — with a woman or flirt with her does not change your —. I'm not interested in rehashing 30 year old arguments about — with this forum's biggest troll.

Unfortunately, I must advise that you have apparently come to the wrong subforum then.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by dleung

lol Vancouver still has over twice as many caucasians as any other ethnic group.

Stop trying to erase my ethnic group!!!

A more analogous situation would be if you got into karate and felt alienated being the only white guy there, so you introduce the sport to other white people. How outrageous and racist of you!

That's quite racist actually. Why on Earth would I have a problem with my karate buddies happening to be East Asian?!? I'm not race obsessed at all, I'm there for the karate, all that matters is that I have the best karate partners available, I'm not going to start caring about the color of their skin like it's 1850. That would be sooo weird and distasteful. Time to enter the 20th century, let alone the 21st.

If I seriously genuinely complained that there are too many East Asians for my taste in some club I'm a member of, wouldn't you scream racism in a microsecond? Of course you would. And for once, you wouldn't be that wrong.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by jamincan

I can't believe this still needs to be said in 2021, but managing to have — with a woman or flirt with her does not change your —.

WTF?!? That's absolutely crazy. I never said nor even suggested that. You might want to re-read.

BTW, I can't change my native tongue, the only one I'm for the rest of my life going to be 100.00% comfortable thinking in and speaking in, nor change the fact that I will always have some sort of slight accent in English, due to not growing up speaking it.

If the above happens to disadvantage me, all I can do is try to deal with it. (And/or complain online. )

[Acajack]

I also don't think that anyone on here has suggested that — orientation is just a preference, an attitude or a whim.

Only that if someone wants to "fake it" (ie pretend you're on the other side, in terms of orientation), on a practical level it's a lot easier than it is to fake that you're a native or advanced speaker of a language you don't already know.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I also don't think that anyone on here has suggested that — orientation is just a preference, an attitude or a whim.

Only that if someone wants to "fake it" (ie pretend you're on the other side, in terms of orientation), on a practical level it's a lot easier than it is to fake that you're a native or advanced speaker of a language you don't already know.

Exactly. That's all I said, and that's obviously correct (despite the argument from Pavlov that we can't be 100.00000% sure there's not one person out of seven billion who could somehow manage to acquire fluency in a foreign language sooner than they could convince themselves to — a pig).

[Pavlov]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I also don't think that anyone on here has suggested that — orientation is just a preference, an attitude or a whim.

Only that if someone wants to "fake it" (ie pretend you're on the other side, in terms of orientation), on a practical level it's a lot easier than it is to fake that you're a native or advanced speaker of a language you don't already know.

Remind me what argument that observation is relevant to again? Are you and lio arguing that the existence of a dominant language/bona fide language requirements for employment are somehow more discriminatory than a society/employer which required everyone to be heterosexual (and therefore required non-heterosexual people to "fake it")? Surely not, right? So please explain what this stupid red herring argument is relevant to? Or what its purpose was (if not to, once again, totally derail the Racism-in-Canada thread into nonsensical whataboutism and semantics)?

Again, I apologize to everyone for my part in permitting/encouraging this derail. I am an idiot.

[jamincan]

The entire premise of lio's argument is that it's easier for a gay person to fake being straight than a non-native English speaker to fake being an English speaker, and therefore there is justification that language should also be a protected category.

— is not a protected category because of the difficulty of faking your —. It is because we understand it to be an immutable characteristic. This entire argument rests on the idea that — is performative or behavioral, which it absolutely is not.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by jamincan

The entire premise of lio's argument is that it's easier for a gay person to fake being straight than a non-native English speaker to fake being an English speaker, and therefore there is justification that language should also be a protected category.

— is not a protected category because of the difficulty of faking your —. It is because we understand it to be an immutable characteristic. This entire argument rests on the idea that — is performative or behavioral, which it absolutely is not.

No one here has said that — should not be a protected category, or that it is simply performative, behavioural or preferential. Everyone recognizes it as innate. You're basically arguing against a ghost on here.

But language is also a protected category in Canada, as per the Charter.

In terms of discrimination, there are actually WAY more people who argue on SSP, on a regular basis, that language should not be a protected category (usually with francophones in mind - how nice), than there are who say that — orientation should not be a protected category.

In fact, basically no one argues the latter.

Originally Posted by Pavlov

So please explain what this stupid red herring argument is relevant to? Or what its purpose was (if not to, once again, totally derail the Racism-in-Canada thread into nonsensical whataboutism and semantics)?

Again, I apologize to everyone for my part in permitting/encouraging this derail. I am an idiot.

This subtle anger over the alleged "wasting of time" would be justified if we were part of some government task force that had a tight deadline to produce concrete solutions to address pressing issues where something critical like human lives were at stake.

As such though we're just a bunch of nobodies voluntarily discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Even if the last few pages are a "derail" (which I don't think they are), it's not that big a deal.

Those who think it is are the ones with a problem. Not me.

Originally Posted by Pavlov

Remind me what argument that observation is relevant to again? .

It's relevant to where the discussion was at at that specific point.

Discussions on here meander all over the place. I don't have to go up through the entire thread like some SSP Livingstone looking for the source of the Nile, just to prove the relevancy of what I've posted.

[Pavlov]

Originally Posted by Acajack

No one here has said that — should not be a protected category, or that it is simply performative, behavioural or preferential. Everyone recognizes it as innate. You're basically arguing against a ghost on here.

But language is also a protected category in Canada, as per the Charter.

In terms of discrimination, there are actually WAY more people who argue on SSP, on a regular basis, that language should not be a protected category (usually with francophones in mind - how nice), than there are who say that — orientation should not be a protected category.

In fact, basically no one argues the latter.

Did you know that Papa New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse state on earth? There are nearly 850 languages spoken in the country of 7.6 million people, making it the most linguistically diverse place on earth.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Pavlov

Did you know that Papa New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse state on earth? There are nearly 850 languages spoken in the country of 7.6 million people, making it the most linguistically diverse place on earth.

Yes. Actually, I did.

Very interesting, isn't it?

[lio45]

Originally Posted by jamincan

The entire premise of lio's argument is that it's easier for a gay person to fake being straight than a non-native English speaker to fake being an English speaker, and therefore there is justification that language should also be a protected category.

— is not a protected category because of the difficulty of faking your —. It is because we understand it to be an immutable characteristic. This entire argument rests on the idea that — is performative or behavioral, which it absolutely is not.

That wasn't exactly my argument.

My argument was that I can see a lot of similarity between "I suspect my coworkers secretly dislike me, and I suspect I'm being unfairly passed for promotions, because I am gay and they are bigots" and "I suspect my coworkers secretly dislike me, and I suspect I'm being unfairly passed for promotions, because I am a francophone who speaks English with an accent and they are bigots".

"Being gay" and "Speaking with an accent" are both immutable characteristics and in both cases, there ARE people out there (idiots/bigots) who are going to look down on you solely because of that.

You'll be gay until you die of old age. I'll be speaking English with an accent until I die of old age.
Nothing we can do about that...

But if you tried really really hard, you could probably pass as hetero. And if I tried really really hard, I could probably manage to pass as a native English speaker. If our lives depended on it, and in my case I was given enough time to prepare, we both could achieve it. (Needless to say, living in a world where our lives depended on such things would be horrible, and absolutely unacceptable.)