POWER: Post-racial Canada still a dream

Posted in Articles, Canada, Media Archive, Social Science on 2013-03-18 17:33Z by Steven

POWER: Post-racial Canada still a dream

The Chronicle Herald
Halifax, Nova Scotia
2013-03-17

Megan Power

And we’re reluctant to face it, says Hill

Calling Canada a multicultural paradise is simply delusional, says author Lawrence Hill.
 
He made his comments prior to a public reading in Halifax last week, in which he was candid and forthright about the state of race relations in Canada. He doesn’t agree with Toronto Life magazine’s high-profile March cover story—the feature describes his book Black Berry, Sweet Juice as “quaint”—which proclaims Toronto the first post-racial city and declaring the end of single ethnicity status in the country’s megalopolis.
 
I detest that idea. I find it quite repulsive. … It’s just not true. Ask a thousand black students in high schools across Canada if they’ve escaped the challenges of race and I’m pretty sure that 995 of them will tell you absolutely not. I feel that it’s kind of self-serving and self-congratulatory to talk about a post-racial world.
 
“I’m not talking about myself. I’ve had a very fortunate life. But I’m not convinced that many black kids in society today are living in a post-racial world. Acting as if Toronto is some nirvana and everybody is happy and mixed, I think, is a slide into la la land.”…

…Hill was in town to give two readings at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. The morning session featured a reading from Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada, his 2001 non-fiction book about racial identity. The afternoon session featured his blockbuster, prize-winning novel The Book of Negroes (2008)….

Read the entire article here.

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