Color me annoyed

Sometimes racism just irritates me rather than infuriating me. Canada has a racial designation called "visible minorities," which is actually used in official demographics. As I mentioned somewhere or other I heard a women say, when I was in Vancouver, that Edmonton is no longer a white city, because they have 18% visible minorities. This kind of language is an invitation to think in the stupidist way about immigrant groups, native American groups, and so on. In linguistic terms, "visible minorities" marks people as belonging to a non-standard group, much as "man" is the standard human being, whereas "woman" is a variant on the standard. In Canada it is "normal" to be white and "abnormal" not to be. So my Irish hostess at a dinner party I attended was considered plain Canadian in spite of her strong Irish accent, and her kids were totally assimilated, whereas the children of (say) East Indians would be considered members of an outsider group. And Central and Eastern Europeans, in spite of being very different culturally from Anglo-Canadians, assimilate rapidly.

So if any Canadian wants to talk to me about white racism, I will just point out that Canada is pretty racist too, but they are covert about it.

Now if you are considering moving to (say)Toronto, you can pull up maps that show you the exact racial and ethnic composition of any neighborhood you might consider moving into.

I myself belong to a visible minority. I am a white person living in Hawaii. If I lived in California, I would be a "visible minority," too. A lot of white people here are very uncomfortable with this visibility, out of the very natural (for them) notion that they are supposed to be in charge of everything and don't want anyone pointing out to them that the reason they think they should be in charge of everything is because they are white.

It's all very silly.