Today, a co-worker of mine with whom I share, shall we say, a similar vintage (we are both between fifty and death), when I asked her about her enthnic background, replied that she is a "mutt" and said that she is a real mix of British Isles and Northern European ancestry, rather similar to your humble scribe. My, how time flies. I was asking her if she spoke a second language which is basically how the subject came up. We both grew up in an era when having any ancestry in English speaking Canada that wasn't strictly British Isles and more specifically, English, would mark you as an exotic. Canadians of visible minorities, when we were growing up in the fifties and sixties had only recently been granted voting rights and high school student populations were still overwhelmingly Caucasian. If I were to tell anyone then that I am Scots, German, Austrian and Norwegian, they would have replied, Wow, a real Heinz-57. Large scale immigration of new Canadians and refugees from China, India, the Philippines and Latin America were still a few years away. Canadians of Italian, Portuguese, Greek and Ukrainian descent were considered exotic and not quite one of us. I had even, from time to time, been held in suspicion over my Canadian authenticity because some people thought my cheekbones were a little bit too big; perhaps I'm Ukrainian, or even worse...Russian?
I think to almost anyone from a non-European culture it is baffling that we of British and Western European heritage would see so much difference between English and Scot, and Dutch and German and Irish and French and Swede. What, are we not all white, and don't we speak dialects of the same European language? They would be just as hard pressed to see much difference among us as my father felt to see any difference between Chinese and Koreans ("they're all Chinamen to me" I heard him say once.)
When I was a kid interracial marriage did not happen, or if it did no one knew anything about it. I had an Asian aunt. Because she was tall I think she would have been Korean. Her children, my cousins, none of whom I have seen in decades I remember as beautiful Eurasian kids, the best looking people in the family. They had inherited the handsomest features of both their ancestral cultures. I sometimes asked my parents if my aunt was Chinese. They denied this and Mom spun a lie that she was Belgian but a bit of a "throwback." I didn't buy it, but in a way it saddens me that I will never know for sure. I would like to know that despite the racism, the downright white supremacy of my parents, especially my father, that they had indeed sunk to this depth of hypocrisy. Since my childhood best friend, a Japanese Canadian, looked so much like my beautiful cousins I must have thought, well why not? What's good for my uncle is good for me.
As I was crossing over the threshold of adolescence I was fascinated by race and intermarriage intrigued and attracted me. A Japanese-European family moved into the neighbourhood. We never became acquainted but I couldn't stop looking at them sometimes while marvelling at their utter ordinariness. At fifteen, when I started attending St. Margaret's church, fraternal twin sisters were engaged respectively to a Chinese young man and a Japanese. Shortly afterward two dear friends of mine, a Chinese Canadian woman and a British Canadian man tied the knot. A year later I was sometimes walking to school with a Japanese European boy whom I thought to be totally cool and interesting. At church I met a family of beautiful sisters of Caribbean, I believe Jamaican, provenance. They would have been called mulatto in those days. I just found them enchantingly lovely. Mom would admonish that she hoped that my brother and I would never consider marrying a girl of a different race. I laughed in her face while imagining what it would be like to be married to one of those girls but without regret I have remained single while later in life my brother married another Caucasian.
Throughout the nineties and into the two thousands I had a friend somewhat younger by thirteen years. I was often appalled by his small town ignorance towards persons of colour and when he went from racism to full blown white supremacy I dropped him like a burning coal of hell and ended our friendship. One of his many memorable comments regarded the coming birth to a mixed Caucasian and Chinese couple who happened to own a café we enjoyed hanging out in. One day he mused out loud wondering how this Chinese-White concoction would end up looking. I replied tartly, well I trust that he or she will have two eyes, a nose and a mouth, two arms and two legs, five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot.
To this day I am puzzled by the fuss that still gets made about race. I think in Canada we have made a lot of progress but we still have a long way to go. Culture is really no excuse either because cultures are always changing, fluctuating and evolving. As I became fluent in Spanish and found that the majority of the people with whom I conversed in the language of Cervantes were of mixed racial heritage a rather curious change has since been occurring with me. I find that I relate and identify with Latino people at a particularly deep and visceral level and the whole question of race has no meaning to me. It seems that the Spanish language is beginning to inhabit me at a deep level and this is displacing my sense of race and racial difference. I hope this continues to happen.
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