Today I was driving through my old home town. It's a warm and early spring, and a quiet sunny day. I passed by a woman in a hijab, just chilling in her front yard, enjoying the breeze, and at seeing this I felt an unexpected surge of joy. Let me explain that.
(or, in which Ryan verbosely unpacks a challenging, deeply internalized relation with race. Feel free to check out now if that's not your jam today)
My community was white, growing up. Really, really white. Isolated, too, by distance, by weather, even by culture – I didn't realize that all of Canada wasn't French-Catholic by default until about junior high, and even then the idea of other religions, other backgrounds, was hazy, distant, hypothetical. Except the Ukrainians, who had pretty weird and tasty food. I went to school with The Chinese girl, The Black brothers, The Middle-eastern family. Singular. Isolated. Outliers.
Other People didn't come here. Occasionally, an older white man would marry a South-east Asian woman, we would titter for a few days, hire her to clean our houses, move on. Even the few people of colour I knew usually had one white parent, which I mention not to diminish their identity in any way, but to emphasize that very few first-generation families or families with cultural practices that stood out among the white mainstream came to my town. There are no mosques or synagogues for hundreds of miles. There were single people, sure; men, usually, because this was oil-boom Alberta, a hungry sponge of labour. I learned what Pakistan was listening to the men in my life grouse about these Other men taking their work, undercutting their rates, giving unfair business deals to cousins and nephews and other Pakistani (not the word that was used)
I wouldn't bring my family here either, then, if I was one of those Other men.
(aside – this is all ignoring the enormous First Nations population who live here, so many that the local hospital used to offer service in Cree, and the ongoing segregation, assimilation, and tension that is the subject of a completely different essay that one day I hope to grasp the nuances of well enough to write. How I saw these people, or rather didn't see them, is a rather dense unpacking, and so with apologies I'm setting that bit of reality aside as I continue, at least for tonight)
I was crazy-racist when I left. I thought I wasn't, as most racist people do. But I was. I had assumptions, I had biases, I was laden with stereotypes that dictated my behaviour and my beliefs and my emotional responses. All of this is still inside me, imprinted, and I can't count the times in a day that I have to catch myself, call myself out, think twice about a snap call or judgement that exposes these ugly biases. Even the little things, like defaulting to White when I imagine a character in a book, the things I DON'T notice, and have had to learn to look out for. I'm grateful to the people in my life who have helped me be better.
(that includes calling me in and calling me out, educating me and challenging me, friends and strangers)
That's not to say the people here are not nice. Goodness, the kindness of this community. It really can be a beautiful place. I know so many good people here. Many wear the same blinders I did. They will bend over backwards for an individual, help out any way they can, treat any one person with respect and kindness and love and the warmest welcome, perhaps with a little too much enthusiasm even especially for those who look a little different, who are obviously not from around here. In highschool we even had a black priest from Africa! (I know I was told where in Africa, more than once, but always with an unsure and unfamiliar sense of “I think it was maybe... there?” and anyway I didn't realize it mattered to register such information at the time) His English was terrible, with a thick french accent and infectious, brilliant enthusiasm and we all giggled, but not about his blackness. Still, I can't fathom giggling about anything to do with Père Ploff, the long-serving former head of our parish.
Well, most people are nice. When someone would leave town, usually within a few years of arriving, I would hear all about how something was always a little funny about them, they were a little off, they were always a little Different. I've heard every slur slip into polite conversation and colloquial vocabulary, casual hate crimes relayed as jokes. That mustn't be diminished, and I am grateful for the related-but-different insight my queer identity has given me into how all that feels from the other side, though as a straight-passing cis man I was more often the secret agent behind-enemy-lines than the target of such violence.
A few years ago, I did a double-take walking down the street. I don't live here any more. I visit twice, maybe thrice a year, a week or two at a time. There was a little girl playing on the gazebo. She wasn't white. Primed, looking, I saw a teen a few blocks later, enjoying a slush with two white boys on a sidewalk bench. He wasn't white either. This was new, families and children who didn't look like me, who weren't siblings or outliers or exceptions. Who *lived* here, the same way I had. I see more people of colour at fairs, at parties, at events and in the community, sharing a drink around a camp fire next to those over-enthusiastic welcomers who have stopped trying, finally, just as they do with any white stranger who is new in town.
I felt joy to see a woman wearing her hijab just down the street from where my Grandparents lived for half my childhood, because my old hometown is starting to look like the Canada that I know, the place I was promised in Social Studies, the multicultural society which accepted and welcomed and embraced. Eventually, maybe, the kids I see on the streets of my hometown won't carry/carry on the same damage, the same hurts, and the same violences that I have always known. In little steps, slowly, maybe, we are becoming the nation that I want to live in. (p.s. If you made it through that, here, have a Poetry cookie for your brain http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/someday-ill-love-ocean-vuong)