RC8/Daniel,
My problem is that your stance makes one of two mistakes:
- putting all vismins and/or immigrants into the same teapot, without making reference to generation (older generation who was educated in their country, vs. the younger generation educated by our progressive-led educational system ; also, first generation immigrants (the recent arrivals) vs the second/third/4th generation immigrants, who are completely acclimatized in "Canadian culture")
- using a single anecdotal interaction with an "immigrant" to jump to conclusions about a group. RC8's tale of this Sikh girl is a pretty good example of this. It's "pretty fucking obvious"!
You can talk about this anonymous Sikh girl all day long... I can talk about Jaggi Singh, Ujjal Dosanjh, Tarek Fatah and Irshad Manji.
Find me a Sikh who lives in the annex, or yorkville, or Y&E, with beliefs similar to those you espoused.
You did after all mention "Brampton". Why would you start talking about a redneck suburb and then be surprised to find rednecks there?
Coltain...speaking for myself...I'm not arriving at any definitive conclusions...and I'm not surprised about rednecks in Brampton.
What I expressed surprise about was in reference to when I first moved to Toronto many years ago and was admittedly very naive at least as far as ethnic groups are concerned.
Also, I 'have' met younger generation people who share many of their parents' attitudes. Of course, not all. For example, I have a very close friend who's Indian and he's as liberal as they come and he's in his 30's and came here (actually San Diego to do his phd and then here) in his 20's.
Conversely, I met a few other Indian guys during my days at school who were here from their homeland do go to school...they were in their 20's...lived in rented condos downtown (that their rich dad back home paid for), and said some pretty nasty elitist things during the times I knew them. What was really weird is that they were genuinly nice people, but when it came to some issues, like homelessness, gay pride parade, taxes, transit, etc...boy did their fangs come out. They hated gays, would NEVER take transit...that was for 'other' people, thought they should pay almost no taxes...comments like, "why should I pay so much just to take care of a bunch of lazy people on welfare"...
...these are the kinds of things I had heard not only from these two particular guys, but also from many others, and from BOTH old and new generations...
...so all I was trying to say is that this kind of thinking is alive and well, and to pretend it's not is not doing any of us any good...personally I think these attitudes are often rooted in class based societies, and sometimes that comes with the immigrant package, and that may be one of the reasons why ford got elected...that's all b/c he represented to many people who have these views, whether they are immigrants or long time Canadians...