"South Asian"
Statcan.ca is a really useful site. James will be off to Cornwall, Ontario next term, and so, out of curiousity, James, Smiley and I were looking up the ethno-racial demographics of Cornwall on Stats Can. Turns out there are 0 Koreans in Cornwall.
One thing that is curious is how Statistics Canada divides visible minority populations. It's funny that they divide Asian "Oriental" groups into Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Filipinos etc., but all "brown" ethnicities are grouped under one label - South Asian. It's as if the eggheads at Statscan went "Oh yeah, let's lump all them brown folks together. I can't tell the difference."
I suspect though that this is not done out of spite but is owing to historical circumstance. The Chinese and Japanese communities have had a significant presence in Canada since the late 1800s, and I believe Canadian census-takers have always recognized them as two separate, distinct ethnic groups. Once the Koreans and Vietnamese and Filipinos started arriving, the Statistics Cananada didn't know what to do, so they just created separate categories for them.
South Asian immigration didn't really start happening until the early 1970s, when Trudeau set up the race-neutral immigration points system. The initially wave consisted primarily of ethnic Indian Ismailis from East Africa, then more Punjabis came streaming in, then there was the Sri Lankan wave of the 90s, and now increasing numbers of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are settling in.
Now sure we all hail from the same subcontinental landmass south of the Himalayas, and we're all varying shades of brown, but that's really about all that we all have in common. Now the American customs guy may not believe me when I meet him in a few weeks but, really, apart from my skin hue, I have as much shared affinity to a Pakistani Pathan as a Nigerian has to a Swede. The Pakistani dude is from a different country, speaks a different language, eats different food, worships a different God, has different customs... we're very different. I wouldn't think of Ahmed bin Syed from Islamabad as a "brother".
But StatsCan must infer that there's some sort of shared pan-brown ethnoracial/ethnocultural affinity amongst us, and I don't really see it. It's true that my generation of South Asians does classify themselves as "brown", but it's only at a superficial physical level. But beneath the surface, there's really no real pan-South Asian identity. For the most part, the Tamils hang with the Tamils, the Punjabis with the Punjabis and the Muslims with the Muslims. This is really not a surprise as we're all very different, and each independent South Asian ethnic/language group is numerous enough in numbers to allow for ethnocultural-based segregation, and because, unlike the rather cohesive African-American community, we don't have a clear identity rooted on a shared collective historical experience of victimization to draw upon. I actually think this lack of a pan/co-racial identity is a good thing as it inhibits the fermenting of debilitating identity/victim/race card politics as in the States.
So my argument is that we're too numerous now and too heterogeneous to warrant just one label, especially as each independent South Asian group is now significant enough in numbers to merit its own separate category. There are only four major countries in South Asia to begin with, so why not split the "South Asian" demographic into the four major groups - Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan.
Aside: Black people are in the same boat, but the "Black" category is a little more problematic. Given that there are there are several dozen countries in Africa and numerous little islands in the Caribbean, separating Black into to independent black ethnicities would be a colossal mess - (although the vast majority of Black Canadians I've come across hail from two countries - Jamaica and Somalia.) I think they should do as they do in the UK census - split the "Black" category into two: Black African and Black Caribbean - though by no means are either of these groups a cohesive, homogeneous lot.
One thing that is curious is how Statistics Canada divides visible minority populations. It's funny that they divide Asian "Oriental" groups into Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Filipinos etc., but all "brown" ethnicities are grouped under one label - South Asian. It's as if the eggheads at Statscan went "Oh yeah, let's lump all them brown folks together. I can't tell the difference."
I suspect though that this is not done out of spite but is owing to historical circumstance. The Chinese and Japanese communities have had a significant presence in Canada since the late 1800s, and I believe Canadian census-takers have always recognized them as two separate, distinct ethnic groups. Once the Koreans and Vietnamese and Filipinos started arriving, the Statistics Cananada didn't know what to do, so they just created separate categories for them.
South Asian immigration didn't really start happening until the early 1970s, when Trudeau set up the race-neutral immigration points system. The initially wave consisted primarily of ethnic Indian Ismailis from East Africa, then more Punjabis came streaming in, then there was the Sri Lankan wave of the 90s, and now increasing numbers of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are settling in.
Now sure we all hail from the same subcontinental landmass south of the Himalayas, and we're all varying shades of brown, but that's really about all that we all have in common. Now the American customs guy may not believe me when I meet him in a few weeks but, really, apart from my skin hue, I have as much shared affinity to a Pakistani Pathan as a Nigerian has to a Swede. The Pakistani dude is from a different country, speaks a different language, eats different food, worships a different God, has different customs... we're very different. I wouldn't think of Ahmed bin Syed from Islamabad as a "brother".
But StatsCan must infer that there's some sort of shared pan-brown ethnoracial/ethnocultural affinity amongst us, and I don't really see it. It's true that my generation of South Asians does classify themselves as "brown", but it's only at a superficial physical level. But beneath the surface, there's really no real pan-South Asian identity. For the most part, the Tamils hang with the Tamils, the Punjabis with the Punjabis and the Muslims with the Muslims. This is really not a surprise as we're all very different, and each independent South Asian ethnic/language group is numerous enough in numbers to allow for ethnocultural-based segregation, and because, unlike the rather cohesive African-American community, we don't have a clear identity rooted on a shared collective historical experience of victimization to draw upon. I actually think this lack of a pan/co-racial identity is a good thing as it inhibits the fermenting of debilitating identity/victim/race card politics as in the States.
So my argument is that we're too numerous now and too heterogeneous to warrant just one label, especially as each independent South Asian group is now significant enough in numbers to merit its own separate category. There are only four major countries in South Asia to begin with, so why not split the "South Asian" demographic into the four major groups - Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan.
Aside: Black people are in the same boat, but the "Black" category is a little more problematic. Given that there are there are several dozen countries in Africa and numerous little islands in the Caribbean, separating Black into to independent black ethnicities would be a colossal mess - (although the vast majority of Black Canadians I've come across hail from two countries - Jamaica and Somalia.) I think they should do as they do in the UK census - split the "Black" category into two: Black African and Black Caribbean - though by no means are either of these groups a cohesive, homogeneous lot.
posted by Sen | 7/13/2006 10:14:00 AM
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1 comments
1 Comments:
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Anonymous
I think the only reason they used the term "South Asian" was because it sounds more politically correct than "brown". A lot of political figures have trouble pointing out the obvious, in fear of criticism from minorities or white liberals (you know which type of liberals I'm talking about, lol).
2/28/2008 07:52:00 PMIf you're trying to divide everyone into distinct racial categories, you will always end up with problems. It's not that there's no biological validity to race, but rather the boundaries of each race are socially constructed, as are the meanings. I read in a contraversial study once that humans were divided up into 3 races: caucasion, mongloid, and negroid. I had a lot of problems with the content of that study. For example, where do arabs, latinos, and "brown" people fit in? Where does one of these races end and the other begin? This will become increasingly challenging to define as globalization continues and race-mixing increases.
To present how out-of-whack the notion of giving set boundaries to "race", one only needs to look at Europe, a presumably caucasion-dominated land. The recent multi-culturalism wave aside, Britons look very different from the Portuguese Azores, which in turn look different from the Spanish, which in turn look different from the Southern Italians, which in turn look different from the Romanians. You could apply the same thing to South Asia. This doesn't even begin to mention the differences within each region when it comes to culture, language, religion, or socio-economic development. My point in all of this is, where do you draw the line? Sure, we can use color-based words as a way to identify people when we don't really know their background, but it seems rather useless to group everyone into races. That's just what I think.
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