Re A Trail of Miracles, February
It must be emphasized that, unfortunately, with racial/ethnic diversity, often comes bigotry—and it’s not a white and non-white immigrant issue that can be alleviated by some miracle.
Indeed, I can recall an incident in which I overheard an Oriental-Canadian tell some fellow Oriental-Canadians that members of my (now-deceased) father’s ethnicity (he was of Eastern European origin) are “all the same.”
However, “white” people can be bigoted toward other “whites.” A good example is that again of my now-deceased father, and many other Eastern European immigrants to Canada just like him: Having arrived on Canadian soil in 1951, my father, who was officially categorized as “white,” had to deal with bigotry against him (his heavy accent gave him away). Some years ago, as a labourer in the resource industries, he—unlike the fluent-English-speaking labourers—was selected to perform the very dangerous tasks at hand, though he stood his ground and refused. He was also referred to as, among other things, a “DP [displaced person]”—a label typically given to the many ‘undesirables’ back then.
On another occasion, my father was told by a fluent-English-speaking Anglo-Saxon police detective that he, the detective, does not care at all for people of my father’s ethnicity— “you people are all the same,” he said— and therefore refused to deal with my father.
Regardless, my father, in our affirmative-action day and age, was still classified as a white male and thus a member of an “advantaged group.”
