White Ghetto

Remember WASPs?  That's the anagram for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.  I don't hear that word anymore and it appears to have fallen out of use during the Nineties.  Nor the accompanying lightbulb joke.  Remember lightbulb jokes?  For example: How many WASPs does it take to change a lightbulb?  Two.  One to send the household staff to London Drugs and one to mix the martinis.

Today I visited the White Ghetto, also known as West Vancouver.  I had been thinking of going for a while, just to get out of Vancouver for an afternoon.  It's a wealthy municipality, city actually, over the Lions Gate Bridge from Vancouver.  I got off the bus and wandered for a while the pristine street lined with fancy shops till I hit a coffee shop.  While trying to not get too annoyed as strangers kept crowding past my table where I was working on a drawing, so wanting a bit of personal space, I began to notice something odd about the place.  It felt pleasant, familiar, but lacking something.  I thought for a minute or two then looked around and then I got it:  Every single person in there, staff, customers and me, all had one thing in common.  We were all universally and overwhelmingly Caucasian.

This saddened me a bit, not only because I found this at first so comfortable, but also because it was very clear that this place was lacking something.  There was none of the diversity that I have come to take for granted and enjoy in Vancouver.  Everyone was middle to upper middle class Caucasian.  The air almost stifled with privilege.

I even went so far as to comment about this to the staff before I left.  I was surprised by their reaction.  They seemed a bit perplexed, puzzled, and even a little bit offended, or at least struggling to not feel offended, and small wonder.  Someone had just told them to wake up, and that someone was one of them.

When we are surrounded by people who look just like us we don't tend to notice much, only the other, the visible minority, the obviously different.  This can evoke any number of reactions, often all of them mixed: intrigue, curiosity, desire, lust, threat, interest, dislike, repulsion, warmth, friendliness, hostility, fear, love.  Basically I was telling those nice white young people to wake up and realize that we are not the only ones here on this earth.  I was slapping their faces with diversity.

As I walked for a while I did see a few Asians, (the first ones, I noticed, were ironically Chinese faces on real estate ads at bus stops).  Then I saw an Asian couple across the street, followed by a young man who looked Filipino, another Asian (I am guessing Chinese) couple, and a young Middle Eastern woman in hijab.  Then I began to relax a little.  Still, even with this slightly more diverse demography I still didn't feel entirely comfortable.

Bored with it all I hopped on the first bus to Vancouver that pulled over near where I was walking and got off in Vancouver's West End (not to be confused with West Van) and resumed walking.  Then I felt really at home and I could suddenly tell why.  Surrounding me were poor people as well as the better off, and I also noticed a few indigenous people.  Then our collective portrait seemed complete: white people, Asian people, brown people, poor people, rich people and others.

Of course what no one is really saying much these days is that the divisions in our global demographic are also changing.  It is no longer a difference delineated by race, nationality or religious faith.  It is rather the difference based on level of income, rich and poor.  I tend to scoff when I hear people using the phenomenon of Chinese millionaires buying their way into this city as a matter of race or racism.  True, we do have ignoramuses sounding off online about this new yellow peril but really there is no cultural threat here.  They are not going to turn Vancouver into little Beijing, rather, they, or should I say, their children, are going to integrate and we will experience here a touching and a fusion of cultures.

I already mentioned in a recent post that culture is not static.  To be truly culture, to be something living it has to accept change, and morph, transform and reinvent itself with each new influence that touches it.  Otherwise it implodes, a toxic fossil, a geriatric caricature.  Fermented foods, such as yogurt, sourdough bread, kamboocha, all contain a living culture that transforms it into something other.  So it is with people.  If we want everything to remain as it was forty years ago, well, we do have museums.

I am just wondering now, as we are entering into this new epoch, this brave new world of globalism just what is going to be done to address this new divide of rich and poor.  The current greed and unbridled capitalism doesn't seem to promise anything outside of an increasing divide as more people sink into poverty and are left to die on the margins.  So we will have, one will hope, a colour blind internationalist culture, rainbow nations of everyone getting along and intermarrying and raising beautiful mixed race children.  That is, provided we can survive this current wave of fascism and racist fear that is paralysing many of us.  And if the rich can somehow be persuaded to be a lot more generous with their largesse.  Otherwise we're going to have to take it from them.