Passing, Or Something Like It

By Paul Aguirre-Livingston

A t-shirt given to the writer by his late father, Juan.

I am a person with white skin. I concede to the idea that, by certain interpretations, I am considered “white.” I unwillingly accept that a white skin colour represents the infallible truth of the status quo. It affords some of us certain positions and privileges. I acknowledge that I may have benefited from those privileges that I was previously unaware I even possessed. (Deeply unaware, even.) That error in judgment is easy enough when, well, I do not identify as “white.”

I don’t come from a clear lineage of Caucasian-ness – not genetically, culturally, or socio-economically. My father immigrated to Canada from Chile with his parents in 1980, and my mother is Canadian-born with Irish heritage. My father, like my grandfather, was dark-skinned (with our origins in northern Chile, the closest tip of the country to the equator), and my mother is fair-skinned. Shortly after I was born, my mother left, and I went to live with my paternal Chilean grandparents. When I was eight, I lost my father and these grandparents adopted me.

Jesus Saves

By Lisan Jutras

About 10 years ago, I found myself taking the St Clair streetcar through a rainy autumnal haze to a church near Old Weston Road. I wore a grey dress and my good shoes and I was alone and I was going to see a concert by Donnie and Darryl, the Gospel Midgets.

I was glad I dressed up because the vibe was pretty formal. Underneath the cross that hung outside the church, casting a neon reflection of the words JESUS SAVES onto the wet pavement below, a crowd was massing. I showed myself into the church and took a seat  among families dressed up, bald dads with maroon shirts and matching handkerchiefs carrying little girls in layers of lace, moms in bright suits and shiny pumps, grannies in yellow silk and Mrs. Doubtfire glasses. The church got more and more full until every seat was taken. There had to be 500 people in there. Even after the pews were filled, people stood at the back of the room.

And everyone was black. Except me.

Finding My Canadian Self in Ireland

By Kath Halloran

I grew up in Toronto’s East End in the 1970s when the city was so painfully white “Catholic” was considered “ethnic.” My only taste of a wider racial world came from my Jamaican nannies, Peggy and Rosie, generous, patient, indulgent women who raised my brothers and I five days a week to support their own children, both those in Toronto and those left behind in Jamaica.

I loved these women dearly. One of my earliest memories is refusing to watch Gone with the Wind, angered to the point of tears by the idea of slavery, let alone that anyone should watch a movie about people who owned slaves who were clearly bad people because they owned slaves. Morality is gloriously binary to children – the good do good thing, the bad do bad things. Racism, particularly the ugly, murderous racism of the Antebellum (and post-bellum and, in many ways, the contemporary United States) offended my burgeoning sense of decency and my innate sense of fairness. And I loved my Rosie; a world where she was an unperson because of her skin was an intolerable concept.

To Be Italian

By Nina Boccia

Nonno Genesio standing beside his tomato plants at his Jane and Sheppard home

Confused and nervous, I swung around and stared at my mother, who was standing at the foot of our driveway on a quiet cul de sac in Toronto’s west end. I had no idea what the kids standing in front of me were saying. Sensing my panic, she rushed over to take the post as translator. I was three years old and I didn’t speak a lick of English.

Up until then, my parents and I had communicated entirely in Italian. My father Bruno, the son of postwar immigrants, and my mother Violante, an immigrant who docked at Halifax’s Pier 21 in March 1964, decided that as soon I started speaking, it would be in Italian. It also pleased both sets of Nonnis (grandparents named Genesio, Pina, Gino and Angela), whose broken English ­– Italiese – had not been fixed despite nearly 30 years of residency and moderate assimilation. Nudged by the incident with the neighbourhood kids and the looming start of kindergarten, my parents figured it was time I learned Canada’s official language.

I went to Catholic elementary school, where the curriculum included a daily Italian lesson. I can still recite the Our Father and Hail Mary prayers. I can sing Fratelli d’Italia – Italy’s national anthem – and I can watch the evening news on OMNI without subtitles. I can properly pronounce the names of every single Italian woman Silvio Berlusconi has allegedly slept with and I can translate each issue of Corriere Canadese, the “Canadian Italian Daily News.”

Not Guilty, Not Innocent

By Sarah Nicole Prickett

"Not Guilty," Mr. Brainwash, 2011.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to the valedictorian of my high school, because I’m too lazy to go look at her Facebook. She was so funny and smart and she said the funniest, smartest thing about all of us at South Secondary School in London, Ontario. “I was glad to go to such a diverse school,” she said. It was the opening line of her speech on the last day of those lives. “There were white kids who shopped at American Eagle, and there were white kids who shopped at the Gap.”

I was a white kid whose mom shopped at Winners, and these acute small discrepancies in class were all I could think about. Race hardly occurred to me; intersectionality I would not understand til after I had dropped out of university twice. It wasn’t only that I had grown up in the middlingest town, a place so white and so dull it spawned the guy who made Crash. It was also that I had been homeschooled, and that for years and years my only friends were other (white, Christian) homeschoolers. One day we were visiting my mom’s best friend, whose kids were regular-schooled, and one of them was wearing a “stop racism” pin. I wasn’t sure what “racism” was. I was twelve.

8 Simple Rules for Marrying a Chinese Woman

By John Michael McGrath

Though my title cleverly references a TV show and the luckiest number in Asian numerology, I can’t deliver on its promise. Lord Almighty, it turns out there’s no one Chinese Girl ^TM out there to date and marry. They’re all different! My wife Vicki is even totally different from her sisters! It’s weird. The internet did not prepare me for this.

I also blame the internet, nerve centre of all fetishes, for the super-awkward first meeting with Vicki’s closest friends. Immediately upon sitting down for coffee one afternoon in 2000, they asked if I’d ever dated a Chinese girl before. Answer: No. Next question: have I dated any other Asian women before? (No.) Third question: Are you sure? (Um, yes.) My answers didn’t actually seem to convince anyone. I’m pretty sure I was considered a rice king until proven innocent. Almost 12 years later, I’m relatively certain I’ve put them at ease.

I’d actually recommend this experience to other people of a paler persuasion. Not specifically accusations of Yellow Fever, but I think more white people could use some baseless assumptions about their skin colour making them really uncomfortable at least once or twice a year. At the very least, it would make that score look a bit less like the Harlem Globetrotters vs. the Washington Generals.

Carlton, Karmin and Why White Rap is Just Wrong

By Jesse Kinos-Goodin

There’s an episode of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air where Carlton tells Will that he borrowed his Public Enemy tape to jog to. “You like Public Enemy?” Will asks, to which Carlton replies by singing in what can only be described as the whitest, most Vegas showman-sounding voice possible, “Get up get, get, get down, 911’s a joke in this town.”

“That used to be my favourite song,” deadpans Jazz, a line I’ve used a million times since.

Carlton was the symbolic white person — from his privileged lifestyle and tucked-in shirts to his complete obliviousness to black culture. Carlton’s “whiteness” not only made for one of the sitcom’s funniest running jokes, it also sent a message to a young, impressionable me: Black (Will and Jazz) is cool; white (Carlton) is, well, not.

White Issue(s)

By Jonathan Robson

You see them at ____fest at Harbourfront, or catch them climbing out of Bakka Phoenix. Volunteering at Karma Co-op. Gaunt, yogic middle-aged men and floor-skirted women who seem to embody what’s left of the promise of the Annex a generation ago. Presumably they like Metro Morning for the music, and set their weekends by its litany of cultural events and festivals. Often they’re wearing a vest and sandals.

These are the white people who seek out multicultural experiences. I am not one of them.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Whiteness

By Navneet Alang

When we launched the Ethnic Aisle almost a year ago, we did so because we wanted to hear the voices of people from ethnicities and cultures that were sadly missing from mainstream discourse. So we’d understand if you were a little skeptical of this, our White Issue, which will see white writers talk about… well, being white. Sounds a little strange for this site, doesn’t it?

Yet, despite the fact that it’s everywhere, we rarely talk about the various forms of whiteness as cultures or ethnicities unto themselves. Far too often, whiteness is a kind of assumed norm without a name—something neatly encapsulated by the fact that no-one ever calls grilled cheese or steak “ethnic food”. Instead of thinking about things like Western dress, sexual mores or eating habits as specific ethnic, cultural practices, we treat them as if they just are. In such a situation, the “normal” ends up becoming the normative—the thing everyone just assumes is the default.

But in a city like Toronto, where just over half of the population comes from some place else* (see below), it won’t do to keep talking about things that way. So, we asked some local writers to shed light on the experience of being white in a kaleidoscopic, multicultural city. Our point isn’t so much to have yet one more view from a white person as it is to think about where whiteness fits into a modern city where, soon enough, no one group will form a dominant majority.

If you think the idea is misguided, then that’s what comment sections are for—and, to be honest, we hope they’ll be lively. But along the way, perhaps we’ll do a little something to demystify whiteness. Maybe we’ll learn about exotic dining habits, which, as we understand it, involve eating a kind of loaf made from meat, at 6pm. Perhaps we’ll come to understand more clearly why a set of miniature crystal animals is less tacky a wedding gift than handy, no-strings-attached cash. But most of all, what we hope is that in thinking about “white” as just one of many identities, we’ll move away from treating it as the norm—and get a little closer to the idea that we are all, each in our own way, “ethnic”.

*To clarify, this is not to imply that Toronto’s visible minorities are somehow not Torontonian or Canadian – simply that, statistically speaking, half of Toronto’s population is foreign-born. It’s this fact makes “demystifying whiteness” as the norm and centre such an an important project.

The White Issue

This week on the Ethnic Aisle: white writers talk about whiteness.

But first! Navneet Alang on why we decided to do such an issue: “Far too often, whiteness is a kind of assumed norm without a name—something neatly encapsulated by the fact that no-one ever calls grilled cheese or steak “ethnic food”.”

Then, Jonathan Robson on his Rosedale-bred White Issue(s): “Rabbit stew takeaway from Arlequin at Ave and Dav was probably as close to a multicultural experience as I ever came to back then. Maybe that Gipsy Kings album; maybe Julio Iglesias.”

Remember Carlton Banks? Jesse Kinos-Goodin traces a line from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air to swag-popping Boston hip hop cover band Karmin and argues (sort of) that White Rap is Just Wrong.

John Michael McGrath would like to share his 8 Simple Rules for Marrying a Chinese Woman except “it turns out there’s no one Chinese Girl ^TM out there to date and marry. They’re all different! My wife Vicki is even totally different from her sisters! It’s weird.”

“One day we were visiting my mom’s best friend and one of her kids was wearing a “stop racism” pin. I wasn’t sure what “racism” was. I was twelve:” Sarah Nicole Prickett is simultaneously Not Guilty, Not Innocent.

Do only WASPs get to be white? Nina Boccia, in To Be Italian: “Many people are apparently shocked that I don’t have the olive skin that once so blatantly marked hundreds of thousands of Italian immigrants as not truly “white” and continues to racialize their descendants.”

Kath Halloran on white privilege in Finding My Canadian Self in Ireland: “The woman beside you on the streetcar lived in Canada her whole life and some people will always assume she got off the boat yesterday.”

Black envy, or black in a past life? Lisan Jutras in Jesus Saves: “When I heard “Mary Don’t You Weep,” on Aretha’s gospel album, I’d picture myself running super fast, or maybe even floating, with a pushing feeling inside my chest, and I’d find myself crying.”

and

Passing, Or Something Like It: Paul Aguirre-Livington on realizing that despite being a son of an immigrant father whose first language isn’t English, the actual colour of his actual skin still makes him “white.”