Whoo boy, but what a can of worms this series is going to open, Gentle Reader. Instead of perambulating to extinction let's cut to the chase, shall we? I am going to begin in my own backyard, or should I say my own building where I live.
I live in a BC Housing building where I pay subsidized rent of no more than thirty percent of my monthly income. The building is owned and operated by a Christian nonprofit called "More Than a Roof Housing Society" which is connected to the Mennonite Central Committee. The staff are all evangelical Questions (that, Gentle Reader is an authentic Freudian slip. I meant to type Christians, so this might be a subtle indication of how seriously I take their religious profession.) The demographic of tenants here is incredibly diverse and I think that in some ways we could be said to accurately reflect Canadian multiculturalism.
We have tenants from Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Africa, as well as home-grown Canadians like me. We also have a contingent of tenants living with mental illness, some forty percent of the tenant body.
I would be inclined to suggest that here in Candela Place, my subsidized apartment building, we have at least three specific types of culture: a culture of multiculturalism, a culture of evangelical Christianity and a culture of mental illness. I have a stake in all three: multiculturalism because as a Scots-German blend I am not a stereotypical white Canadian, and from time to time strangers with poor manners will still ask me where I am really from, given my eastern European features. Having started my career as a Christian as a teenage Jesus Freak has taught me all I will ever need to know about evangelicalism. I am a survivor of PTSD and work in the mental health field.
One would think at first blush, oh but what a perfect fit you must be, Aaron! Excuse me while I get over my perfect fit: of laughter alternating with gagging and choking.
One of the most egregious errors that we tend to make in Canada is in our tendency of categorizing social realities under very convenient headings, all black and white, no nuance. It is most convenient for the intellectually lazy and these are two words that particularly characterize a lot of Canadians.
Being a member of a visible minority (or a not so visible one) does not put you all in the same convenient category. It isn't just that Chinese Canadians are going to have their own particular reality, Filipinos theirs, and Iranians their own. Despite what each group holds in common: race, language, religious beliefs, food and customs, etcetera, not everyone within the group is going to be agreed or in unbroken communion with one another. If you are a queer Iranian your experience and expression of your culture is going to be decidedly different from that of your fellow Iranians. Likewise, if you are an Islamic Filipino or a Pentecostal Christian Chinese.
By the same token, not all evangelical Christians are going to agree on everything and some, like me, are more likely to think of ourselves as ex-evangelicals because we simply cannot agree with the narrow lens through which our fellow evangelicals are going to view the world.
We also can`t reasonably expect everyone who has or has had a mental illness to happily coexist with others with experience of mental illness, for the simple reason that not all of us want to be associated with sick people, especially if we are already recovered and simply want to get on with our lives unimpeded by others who are unable or unwilling to move forward.
Add to this mix the idea that regardless of our particular culture we are also all individuals with unique experiences, ideas, opinions and needs and we had might as well say bye-bye to the neat categories and get to work on treating and approaching people as individuals with human dignity.
The mix of tenants in my building is something incredible: white Canadians of four generations or more with Asian Canadians and Latino Canadians, Iranian Canadians, African Canadians, Russian Canadians and others that I don't know about yet, some who might also have mental health issues, or could be Christians, evangelical, Catholic or other, some who might also be queer; we have evangelical Christians and other Christians from a diversity of ethnic backgrounds, and we have mental illness survivors of various persuasions religious (or none at all), various other ethnicities (or none at all). Not all of them are going to be conventionally heterosexual.
This is real diversity: not the neat little categories for do-gooder white Canadians to be very kind and nice to, but an entire plethora of realities, collective and individual, that overlap, superimpose and blend and merge one into the other. If we are to honestly meet one another in a spirit of dignity and inclusiveness, then on top of recognizing and respecting the obvious cultural differences, we all owe it to ourselves and to one another to approach one another as individuals to be treated and addressed with kindness, respect and reverence. As we look for persons instead of convenient collective identities then I think we are really going to make progress in forming a new, healthy and healing body politick. We are still going to have to negotiate with the categories, but only insomuch as we can each get through to one another as persons.
No comments:
Post a Comment