Racism in the Region

[danbrotherston]

Alright...I'm going to poke this viper nest...

I hope this is a relatively safe space where we can have a thoughtful conversation about serious and sensitive issues without anyone being called vermin, pests, or anything like that.

So...

Has racism increased in the region in the past few years? I definitely feel like it has, just perusing the Waterloo subreddit. More complaints about "foreign students", foreign drivers, people not speaking English.

Is this being driven internally? Externally? What forces are at play here?

[panamaniac]

Increased?  No.  More visible thanks to social media and a growing willingness to report/complain?  Probably.

[danbrotherston]

Whether the difference between "increased" and "increased in visibility" is meaningful or not depends on your philosophy.

But ultimately that is the fundamental question I think...

And I really am getting the feeling that there are people who are complaining about immigrants now, who wouldn't have before. And it's not to say that they have just "become" racist, but I think foreign students are becoming a new scapegoat.

But maybe I'm wrong.

Honestly, I was just really struck wrongly by the reddit post which complained that "foreign students weren't looking when they crossed the road". Which is like...stupid for all the usual reasons those objections are stupid...but also because if you're inside a moving vehicle, you have no idea what the visa status of someone crossing a road is...

[neonjoe]

I feel like in the online community those that have had the tendencies to be racist have been emboldened to state their views online in the last few years.

[bravado]

I think hard times are really hitting the population in general and it’s all too easy to point at a relatively new phenomenon, huge amounts of international students in a short period, and assign every possible problem to it when times are getting tough. The internet and social media makes it easier to say this out loud and get more ears.

[KingandWeber]

I think hard times are really hitting the population in general and it’s all too easy to point at a relatively new phenomenon, huge amounts of international students in a short period, and assign every possible problem to it when times are getting tough. The internet and social media makes it easier to say this out loud and get more ears.

Well put! That said, there are actually some legitimate concerns hidden under the racist undertones which I think we are ignoring to our peril. For instance, should we be accepting so many foreign students when we have a housing crisis? Should we be accepting so many foreign students from just one area of the world, namely India? Should we permit foreign students to be working in Canada up to 40 hours per week? I'll show my cards and say my view is that the answer is a varying level of "no" to all of these questions. However, I think it's critical to clarify that I definitely don't blame the students coming here. We've allowed this situation to develop through our policies and it's up to us to solve it through policies, not by blaming foreign students (after all, it's our government and a number of our institutions that have been encouraging them to come). However, the average citizen doesn't follow policy so their natural reaction is to blame the symptom, not the cause. So coming full circle, that's where I believe the increased racism - which I have anecdotally noticed as well - is coming from: economic anxiety channeled toward one easily visible result of our recent economic/social policies. I really can't offer solutions beyond increased civic engagement to hold politicians accountable and create better policies, but in the end I think that's where the solution lies.

[bravado]

I think the problem with a perfectly normal question like that “should we bring in this many students/immigrants?” is the following:

1: the housing crisis existed before the latest wave of newcomers and isn’t actually their fault that we have been selfishly negligent with building housing for more than 2 decades - stopping that influx wouldn’t mean that our NIMBY problem goes away in any meaningful way.

2: having productive people want to come to your country is a “problem” that many places on earth would like to have and we should embrace it as good public policy.

3: it’s embarrassing that we have so many levels of small-minded government that refuse to leave their silos and actually make good policy.

All of this dithering just makes it so much easier for unabashed racists to have a good time with the instability it causes.

[danbrotherston]

I would also argue that a question like "Should we be accepting so many foreign students from just one area of the world, namely India?"

Is rather problematic.

Leaving aside the question of what the level of immigration should be (I mean, I'm of the opinion that more open borders are a good thing--but I also live in the EU)...

Why do you believe that thinking that we should limit immigration from one specific part of the world in preference to another part? Is that not racist?

[dtkvictim]

Has racism increased in the region in the past few years? I definitely feel like it has, just perusing the Waterloo subreddit. More complaints about "foreign students", foreign drivers, people not speaking English.

I don't think people's internal views regarding race/ethnicity shift at nearly the speed that you're observing in public discourse. The other option is that the increase in racism is stemming from the newcomers themselves, which while I think is probably true outside of this discussion, is definitely not what you're referring to and is not who is leaving the comments you're reading online.

Rather, I think what you're observing is a shift in the environment causing greater contact between diverse cultures and thus more opportunity for conflict. In my own opinion, what you're observing is multiculturalism as it has functioned throughout basically the entirety of human history up to and including today.

I think it's also important for this discussion to not conflate critique of culture and cultural issues with racism.

Leaving aside the question of what the level of immigration should be (I mean, I'm of the opinion that more open borders are a good thing--but I also live in the EU)...

You also, perhaps not consciously, moved to a less diverse place (especially compared to SW Ontario) and one that has more or less rejected multiculturalism.

[KingandWeber]

I would also argue that a question like "Should we be accepting so many foreign students from just one area of the world, namely India?"

Is rather problematic.

Leaving aside the question of what the level of immigration should be (I mean, I'm of the opinion that more open borders are a good thing--but I also live in the EU)...

Why do you believe that thinking that we should limit immigration from one specific part of the world in preference to another part? Is that not racist?

I think it's beneficial to take in a diverse student pool to try to enhance multiculturalism. And this is true regardless of the country of origin, it's just that India happens to be the largest source of students right now by far. In a less nebulous sense, it's also just opening us up to a lot of risk. Many of our public, taxpayer-funded colleges in Ontario (and especially Conestoga) have massively expanded solely to cater to a student pool from India. If that student pool dries up tomorrow - which is not impossible to imagine given India/Canada relations as of late - it's going to cause some serious pain. Again, though, this is country agnostic; overreliance on having students from any one country just seems like a bad plan.

[plam]

The other thing is that people seem to be more willing to translate online hate into in-person hate. The NZ election is in less than two weeks and e.g. a Te Pāti Māori candidate has had her house broken into twice.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/o...aign-trail

NZ has traditionally been a pretty no-need-for-security place (Christchurch attacks notwithstanding?)

Waterloo Region? I have no idea. I'm not there right now, and even if I was, I would be in my own bubble (as many of us are).

[ac3r]

As a minority, I don't feel racism has increased all that much. Well, maybe the discourse on social media but the doom scrollers who sit on Twitter or Reddit all day getting into arguments aren't seeing the real world anyway.

If it has increased in any way lately, it's likely due to the extremely high immigration numbers and that has a lot of people upset, naturally so. Some of them are just expressing valid complaints (I mean we sure as hell can't handle the number of people coming here and we're seeing that...people renting blowup mattress "rooms" for hundreds a month...people walking around with resumes and going into every store they can with vain hope) and some are indeed legitimately racist. But is it actual racism? Have significant numbers of Canadians hate Indians all this time, and now have a "reason" to express that? Or any other people coming here? Or are people just frustrated by the shit show immigration policies and our higher education facilities?

If you want actual answers you have to poll large numbers of minority groups about their experiences.

[ZEBuilder]

Within Waterloo Region it certainly exists there is no denying it, any one can go on the subreddits and see it but I have yet to see it translated into actual physical/verbal attacks in public, it is primarily online. Many of the international students within the region are of similar age to me and because of this many of my friends are international students, I know the vast majority of people my age don't have any problems with them but it stems from the fact that most people my age have grown up within a very multicultural society.
 
I attended Cameron Heights before pursuing post secondary education at Waterloo, going into Cameron it had a reputation of being the bad school because it was downtown, but because of where it was located its catchment area brought people of all walks of life and because of this it was a very multicultural school, the cafeteria has flags of every country that present and former students are from, when one walks into the cafeteria many of the friend groups that you will see are made up of people from all sorts of ethnicities, assemblies would have performances of Bollywood dance, Kpop dance and really all sorts of multicultural performances. Due to this many people my age who are directly associating with the international students don't have any problems with them because we've grown up in an environment where there was already that push for representing every culture. So the hate that is online really isn't from the people who are constantly associating with them it is more so from those who are of an older demographic.

Obviously I have no idea how to solve any of the problems associated with an influx of international students, I have solutions I think would alleviate some of the issues but certainly I don't have the answers. But overall the vast majority of the online hate isn't coming from those who are constantly associating with the students, a lot of them are actually really decent people much like those who are already living in the region.

[clasher]

I check the local reddits sometimes and keep seeing a lot of repeat comments and similar threads, it almost seems like bots or some kind of coordinated postings.

[bravado]

It's also important to take the big picture and the fact that we haven't descended into tribal violence over the last 20 years of very rapid change is a pretty good sign and a credit to our overall tolerance + willingness for integration.

When I brought my dad to UW in the early 2000s, he was astonished by the "orientals" all over the place. This guy went to a one room schoolhouse in a town just 2 hours away. The pace of change is really wild.