White Folk

One of my favourite hobbies is to observe patterns of behaviour among groups, speculate as to why these patterns exist, and draw inferences from my speculations. Toronto’s rich ethnic and socio-economic tapestry is in a sense the ideal laboratory, and my cosmopolitan outlook has been very much enriched by my upbringing in this city.

If there’s anything life has taught me, it’s that human society is a complicated thing. It’s a tangled web in which we tend to mingle with those most like us, and naturally disassociate from “alien” outsider groups. In America, the most divisive line of social demarcation is race; in Britain it’s class; in India it’s caste. In Canada, the demarcations of race, class, and caste are not so rigid – indeed they are in fact rather fluid. While America’s ugly history of slavery and segregation continues to mire its racial politics, and in India caste-based restrictions continue to block the social mobility of low-castes, Canada is perhaps the most egalitarian state in the world – a young society blessedly free of the rigid social demarcations of race, caste, creed and feudal hierarchy that afflict other nations; a nation abound with opportunity for all.

Yet socio-cultural class divisions are far less transient thank we like to think, and while Canadians are too meek to openly acknowledge them, a private recognition of such divisions does permeate (at least subconsciously) this landscape.

Now Toronto is one massive polyglot - a teeming salad bowl of ethnic diversity – and every ethnic group has been categorically stereotyped in one form or another. And yet while every other group dissected, cross-sectioned, analyzed, and categorically stereotyped, there is one group that has largely evaded this categorization: plain old White Folk.

No more.

It’s now time that this group is too placed under the proverbial microscope that is Sen’s Lens. So I’ve embarked on something similar to what I did earlier with the Math Personalities where I pull a Carolus Linneaus with a Dave Chappelle/Terry Woo spin.

And thus below, the fruits of 19 years of empiricism.

The way I see it, Toronto white folk can be classified into four broad socio-cultural camps, with members of each camp displaying a remarkable homogeneity in characteristics:

Underclass Whites / White Trash
Their homes are broken, mothers are single, fathers absent and alcoholics, and welfare dependence is rampant. They love any shirt without sleeves. They reside in low-rent, low-rise apartment buildings or shabby dwellings, but unlike the continuous waves of new immigrant communities they live shoulder-to-shoulder with, they lack the ambition or drive to move on up and out. The notion of education is foreign to the parents (or more aptly, parent), and their unruly kids don’t care about school, often getting into disciplinary infractions and ultimately flunking out. In the 70s and 80s white trash kids took pleasure in harassing conscientious but meek minority pupils, but this slowly retreated when the “minority” pupils grew more assertive and soon became the majority. Lacking positive role models in the community, the angry wigger kids have willfully adopted the gangsta-rap underclass culture of the American inner-city while assimilating all its attendant values. The knowledge economy has passed them by, so the most disenfranchised of all end up on the street or in prison, while the white trash teenage girl finds solace in frequent copulation with a diverse array of black males and thus can oft be seen escorting mulatto toddlers.

Working-Class White Folk
Once upon a time they populated Scarborough, but they soon migrated to Durham region to flee the fried rice and curry. The male typically engages in a blue-collar position that requires some deal of physical dexterity; his wife maybe works a pink-collar job. After a hard day of physical labour, the breadwinner likes to recline in his Lazy-Boy and treat himself to a well-deserved beer and a game on the tube. He’s a big fan of the Leafs – hates the Habs – but follows both avidly, and a fan of Garth and Shania and the sort of music that venerates the bust-your-ass working-class ethos. He’s not particularly thrilled with his rather mundane job, but he takes pride in bringing home the bacon to his kids. Nuclear families are the norm, and with his neighbourhood largely devoid of the social pathologies afflicting white trash, he is satisfied with its simple day-to-day domesticity, filled with like-minded people who respect law, order, and authority. In fact, the working-class family loathes white trash, and so are big proponents of accountability and welfare reform. The parents attempt to shield (with limited success) their children from white-trash underclass influences lest their kids fall prey to them, and so Public Enemies #1 and 2 are Kid Rock and Eminem, respectively. They silently aspire for their kids to achieve educated middle-class status and push their kids to attain, at the least, the college diploma that eluded them (but aren’t as fervent about this as their immigrant white counterparts). Since they are often vying for the same fast-shrinking labour-oriented jobs, they are quietly resentful of immigrant competition. The ultimate fear of these working-class folk, however, is the massive immigrant incursion wrought upon Scarborough –hence the innumerable “Whites Roads” in Pickering!

Middle-Class White Folk
They reside in commuter suburbs like Oakville and Newmarket, but these GO Train travelers do their business on Bay Street. Of the ones in Toronto, most of middle-class white folk live within 15 minutes of the Yonge Street corridor (though pockets of affluence can also be found anywhere in close range to The Lake). University-educated, they engage in professional occupations or are in lucrative managerial/administrative positions. Though like their working-class compatriots job security is always a concern, they vote Liberal because the 90s have been good to them. Like the working-class, they hold white trash in contempt, but are generally so far distanced culturally and geographically that their exposure to "lower-order" elements is limited, and so they are only a passing concern. Ever class-conscious, their white-collar elitism leads them to silently patronize uniformed employees as well as provincial small town hicks. They (hypocritically) don’t mind immigrants and are fond of the cultural diversity they bring to their rather banal existence (so long as they don’t penetrate their lily-white oasis) but they are a little fearful of their kids losing admission spots at elite universities to growing numbers of Chinese and brown kids.

Immigrant White Folk
In the 50s they were Italian, in the 60s Greek, in the 80s Portuguese. More recently they’ve been Poles, Russians, and Slavs. Recently arrived and lacking “Canadian experience,” the parents engage in some small-scale entrepreneurial activity or menial labour. But in complete contrast to white trash, they have big dreams for their kids and strongly aspire for their children to attain the same middle-class status in Canada they occupied in their native country. Acculturating the immigrant ethos, they left everything behind to forge a new path in Canada, and so while dad toils mother pushes her kids hard to excel in school, citing (in thick European accent) “Your father and I work very hard for you. We sacrifice much from back home. We not leave (___) to see you become failure.” Usually their persistence has successfully guilted the kids into working hard and achieving, and within a generation their upwardly-mobile kids are solidly entrenched in the middle-class, ultimately outperforming their fifth generation WASP counterparts.

Rich White Folk
No wait - in Canada they're considered a minority.

Of course I should have prefaced this by saying such sweeping generalizations should not be made about white folk, that white folk come in all shapes, sizes, and err- shades of white, that not all white folk can be lumped into these four groups, that there are exceptions, that they should not be stereotyped like so etcetera. So there - now I’ve said it.