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October 10, 2022

Like America, Canada is a nation comprised of people from around the world. And like America—perhaps even more than America—Canada is wearing racial blindfolds that make the government incapable of seeing that, just as “people of color” represent many different races, lands, and cultures, the same is true for “pale faced” people. This blindness erases Canada’s rich ethnic history.

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As an anthropologist who spent 17 years living and working in Sub-Saharan Africa, where Black lives really matter and where everyone belongs to a tribe with which they identify, it pains me that I must explain to fellow Canadians (and Americans) that pale-faced people are not all the same. Are they just one thing — that is, one ethnic group in contrast to the myriad of “others”? No.

Canada’s government allows residents to choose from the following menu as a form of self-definition: White, South Asian, Chinese, Black, Filipino, Arab, Latin American, Southeast Asian, West Asian, Korean, Japanese, and First Nation. I found the most interesting category, “White.” No, there is no such thing as just “White.” Let us consider for a moment all those founding Canadian citizens—the “pale faces”—who were either born here or moved here from abroad.

The first group of Canadian pale faces is the French-speaking citizens of Quebec and other parts of Canada whose ancestors came from France and settled here. They have a strong provincial government that protects and encourages their language, literature, music, poetry, film, scholarship, historical monuments, and all those other things that make a culture distinct.

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The Quebecois, as they call themselves, are an ethnic group with a clear sense of who belongs and who does not belong. This week they elected a government that wants to limit immigration and protect the descendants of the founding population.

Then there are the descendants of the Protestant English and the Protestants of Northern Ireland, who founded the area of Upper Canada and conquered the Quebecois, allowing them to retain their culture and religion but insisting that England and things English be the beau ideal of the state.

They knew who was in and who was out. In Ontario, until WWII, there was little chance of a government job if you were not Protestant. British subjects hired British subjects and their children. They intermarried and kept apart from others. In slang, they are called WASPS, and their elites ran the country politically, economically, culturally, and religiously until the 1960s, with some elite Quebecois input.

Canada has many Celts: Irish Catholics, the fourth largest ethnic group in the country, who came from Catholic Ireland (the Republic), and the Catholic communities from Ulster. They are family-oriented, have a deep historic identity, and a culture of song, dance, and literature that they often justly feel may be better than the English speakers who call themselves English. Some of them still speak kinds of Gaelic.

Next come the Scots, lowland Protestants, highland Catholics, and later splinter groups like Presbyterians—but all of them feel Scottish and, similarly, there are the Welsh.

Image: People who look diverse – including those “White people,” by rawpixel.

Other pale faces have arrived since these founders. There are Central European pale faces, such as the Dutch, Belgians, Germans (who were once a majority in Kitchener, Ontario), Scandinavians and, of course, the non-conformist Protestant German-speaking Amish and Mennonite religious communities that have flourished here. The same region sent Czechs, Poles, Slovenians, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Serbs and Croats, Ukrainians, Russians, and other Slavs who have been here as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelicals for more than one hundred years. Every one of these groups is ethnically distinct and has its own culture.