Racism in British Columbia

Racism British Columbia Focusing on Japanese

Racism is certainly not a new or exclusive phenomenon to contemporary world. Psychologically, humans seem to feel far more comfortable categorizing "the other" in order to subjugate or find reasons or justifications of control. For example, in the 19th century, power structures were driven by supposed scientific endeavors such as "standardizing" measurement of skin color and hair texture. The psychological community implicitly (sometimes explicitly) supported the notion that certain races were "mentally inferior." Possibly the most striking offense was the movement towards Eugenics, a form of Social Darwinism which was the view that the "unfit" be systematically removed from society via sterilization. "The field of psychology, in particular, was hostile towards the involvement of African-Americans." In fact, non-White scholars were totally excluded from any academic experience, denied matriculation into institutions of higher learning, and blatantly absent from any scholarly publications. This placed race at the core of the bottom of social status (Guthrie, 2003).

The very core of what sociology helps to unravel is the ideal of a group's privilege over another and the idea of the "invisible knapsack" in which there are tools for living in society available to some, and not to others, simply based on skin tone. This is the very core of what social work seeks to unravel. The invisibility of the tool-kit, however, is what makes it a racially based argument, "What privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks" (McIntosh, 1988). Further, racism is not always a conscious activity -- not all Whites have the same understanding or overt psychological reaction towards other races. Ethnocentrism is universal in its notion that one's group has a mode of living, values, and patterns of adaptation that are superior to others. One group feels contempt for another, manifesting in attitudes of superiority and hostility. Ethnocentrism is expressed, typically, in discrimination, proselytizing, and verbal aggression against the "other," the outside group with the sole belief that one's way of life and culture is not only superior to the "other," but of intrinsically more moral value (Webber and Iezanson, eds., 2008). One culture may critically evaluate the other, one race; one ethnicity may be superior to all others simply based on its own hegemony. "Whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and also idea so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow 'them' to be more like 'us'" (McIntosh).

There is certainly controversy about whether skin tone or other ethnic characteristics produce an innate organizational behavior in humans -- a recent study found that babies do tend to "differentiate" color at an early age (Bronson and Merryman). Indeed, for Canadians, there were two different historical times in which overt prejudice against Japanese immigrants became rampant -- at the turn of the century, finally causing riots and looting in Vancouver's Japanese and China towns, and then after the bombing of the U.S. base on Pearl Harbor. Both of these outbreaks were based on the mainstream notion that the Japanese had not socialized into Canadian society and were still loyal to Japan. Like the Americans, BC's role as a "white province" was threatened and the Japanese were placed in Internment Camps, much the same as America was doing at the same time (The History of Racism in Canada, 2009).

Sociologist Erving Goffman (1986) sees stigma as a means of hierarchically categorizing people between what he calls virtual social identity and actual social identity:

Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. ... When a stranger comes into our presence, then, first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate his category and attributes, his "social identity" ... We lean on these anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expec-tations, into righteously presented demands. ... It is [when an active question arises as to whether these demands will be filled] that we are likely to realize that all along we had been making certain assumptions as to what the individual before us ought to be. [These assumed demands and the character we impute to the individual will be called] virtual social identity. The category and attributes he could in fact be proved to possess will be called his actual social identity (Goffman, 1986, p. 2).

During tense economic times or wartime, it is typical for the political powers to attempt a dehumanization of the enemy, making it easier to stereotype and box individuals as "evil, hunnish, commies, etc." rather than see them as individuals. The "enemy" loses its human characteristics and with it the morality that would usually make someone reasonable towards their fellow humans. Cognitive dissonance, then, it what makes it possible for humans to disassociate people from bias, and to learn to hate or kill based on race. We call them "towel heads" or "hajjis" similar to during Vietnam when the enemy was known as "gooks" or "Charlie," or in past conflicts "the evil Hun," "kraut," "Nazi Pig," "Commie," etc. (Dower; Talerico) Victoria, BC, for instance, was a town of immigrants. Many never differentiated the difference between Japanese and Chinese, which led to the "Chinese Question," whether Orientals should be shipped back to their home country because they degraded labor and lessened the opportunities of employment. Images of the enemy are created by national media propaganda (in complicity with governments) to prepare the minds of citizens to "hate those who fit the new category your enemy" (Racism Toward Immigrants, 2008).