Crossdressers-Haven.com

In another thread I talkrd about my experience with gay and lesbian folks at a time in my life.

It (as it allways does) got me to thinking of my life experence with prejudice in general because as allways I sometimes feel I overly try and point out how I am not of anyone but that is becuase I have been and in some part of me still am prejudice in some ways and that is a part of myself I have the mose problem with and wish to change the most.

I started this post to relate my whole life history with this as it is somthing I have wanted to do for a very long time but it is too long of a story for one telling and besides it is not a fun story and I am not in a mood to get really depressed.

So I will do this in small chunks and hope others will add to this with thier own stories.

To start I lived my life from birth till 20 in Arcadia and Temple City California. Both very much White only areas to live at the time. There were Hispanic and Asian kids at my schools but no blacks at all even into high school with only one black student.

My Grandfather on my dad's side was the worst bigot I have ever known.
He was just in general a really bad person and seemed to enjoy that fact.
The only joke(if you can call it that) I ever heard him tell was "they say you cannot take your money with you. I plan on burying mine and getting it on the way down"

Ok I am going to leave this thread here and add to it when I feel I can do it without getting depressed any more.

OK I will add another small chapter before I go to bed.

My parents bless them really tried at that time not to be predudice against race. My mom as far as I can tell never was. My dad grew up with it and it was harder for him but he did try.

My first best friend was a hispanic kid and we were really best friends. No one had a problem with it that I know of but we were in first through 3rd grades.

We stopped being friends over the stupidest point. He was in (cub scouts?)
And I wasn't and I found a lunch bag some kid had left near our class room. I looked in to see if there was a name and there wasn't but there was a (merit badge?) and I showed it to my friend and he wanted it but I wouldn't let him have it and gave the bag to my teacher and that broke up our friendship.

I was upset and told my parents and my dad made bad statment though I don't remember the words about mexicans being all thieves and this was my first direct encounter with prejudice.

Ok I will end this here.
P.S. If a moderator thinks this is not the place (or the forum) for this disusion please remove and let me know I will not continue this thread.

I was a kid in the late 50's and early 60's in the Northeast. When the first Asian family moved into our neighborhood the guy selling his house to them approached his neighbors about it, asking if they minded. The first next door neighbor he asked responded that he was fine but they should ask the Chinese family if they were okay about living next door to Jews. After that he didn't ask anyone else. However a few years later a Black family moved in and it was much different. They remained pretty much ostracized.

Grade school and Jr high had a couple of Black kids and I don't remember much reaction. But HS had a lot of tension, between the Black and Italian kids in particular. I went into HS pretty unprejudiced and left after having been on the recieving end of a fair amount of hostility being somewhat negative towards Black people. A few years later I had a job where most of my coworkers were Black and the negative attitudes eventually went away again.

I also lived in the midwest for a while in the mid 60's. They were proud of themselves that at that point they were being more accepting of Catholics. Except for the teachers, there was only one word used to refer to Black people. You know what it is and I'm not going to write it here. The thinking matched the word. However if you fit in with who you thought you could be the people there were very pleasant.

Happy ending. I went to my HS reunion a few years ago. Danced with one of the toughest Black girls in the school and then chatted a while. I told her I used to be afraid of her and she laughed and said "oh everyone was" I thought of asking if she was in recovery or found Jesus or something but didn't.

Zari

Back in grade school in New York (Manhattan), we lived in what was then a "melting pot" neighborhood on the west side. I remember I had a particular pal who lived close by. We used to skate in the street, play stickball, visit each others homes, although our families never got together. It was many years later, when I looked at the pictures in our graduation book, that I realized that my buddy was black. I never noticed the difference at the time - neither did my parents. As it said in the song from "South Pacific": "You have to be taught to hate." Luckily, I skipped that part of education common in the U.S..

Hugs,

Lydia

Hi all,

I think a discussion of racism does have a place on this board. It's a form of prejudice, after all. Something most of us here have probably had some personal experience with, insofar as we show our true colours to the world.

I am going to ask, though, that people refrain from being unnecessarily offensive. Graphic descriptions of popular bigot-lore won't be tolerated. Certainly not by me.

I hate very few things in this world. But racism is one of those things. The propensity to attribute pejorative characteristics to an entire cultural or ethnic group based solely on the behaviour of a few of that group's members (or, more accurately, that a negative image of an entire group is applied to an individual) smacks of ignorance. In a sense, that may be good news actually because there is a remedy to ignorance and that is education. Walk a mile, not necessarily in someone else's shoes, but on the same road alongside someone else--especially someone whose ethnic and cultural heritage is different than yours--and ignorance will eventually be dispelled. So the theory goes, anyway.

I live in a city where there's a constant, not always positive, interplay between the French and the English. It's odd, in a way; both groups--the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons--share a somewhat common ancestry, in that both have their roots in the barbarian hordes of Europe, yet now, today, in this time and place, accusations of prejudice and racism fly between them like thick-shafted spears. The irony in all this is that both groups are direct heirs to the most virulent forms of bigotry and racism; I'm referring here to the systematic extermination of aboriginal peoples and cultures that took place in the early settlement of Europeans throughout the Americas. The now-"civilized" European barbarians--the English, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spaniards--waged cultural war on the so-called barbarians of the New World.

I see the French calling the English by all kinds of, to say the least, unflattering, names and I see the English doing the same to the French. The French accuse the English of cultural imperialism and the English accuse the French of attempting to exterminate the English culture in Quebec. Underneath the arcs of these high-flying spears, I see the homeless and terminally addicted Aboriginals, robbed of their millenial cultures and traditions by both the French and the English alike, huddling for support at the local Native Friendship Center or corralled into "reserves" where the alcoholism and suicide rates are three to four times higher than the national averages. Racism, indeed.

Today, what with the accelerated flow of migration having made the world a much smaller place, there are new elements thrown into the mix. The effects of this influx of immigrants came to a head here, in Quebec, over the past couple of years over the issue of what should (and should not) be considered legally sanctioned "reasonable accommodations" (i.e., cultural harmonization practices) with respect to immigrant populations that are now increasingly becoming a part of the demographic reality of the province. The provincial government even set up a study group--The Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences--in order to engage in some kind of structured collective soul-searching. Commonly referred to as "the Bouchard-Taylor Commission," this study group spent the better part of two years travelling throughout the province to set up public forums that would allow citizens from all cultural and ethnic groups to explore their concerns over the question of the perceived "preferential" cultural and legal treatment of individuals belonging to immigrant populations. It wasn't always pretty, I swear. I discovered that racism and prejudice are alive and well in Quebec. It actually floored me, some of the things I heard.

Here's an example of one recent instance of a (granted) reasonable accommodation request. The directors of a local private Orthodox Jewish school asked the management of the nearby YMCA that it frost the Y's ground-floor windows in order to prevent the schools' students from being tempted to peek in through those windows at the "provocatively-clad" female members of the YMCA going through their fitness routines. This request created a mini-scandal. That the Y decided to acquiesce to it only added fuel to the fire. Personally, I think that the fact that a solution was reached without resort to legal rulings is actually a success story.

Here's an (admittedly lengthy) excerpt from the Commission's final report, published last year:

As we saw in section II, a considerable number of Quebecers of French-Canadian origin have adopted a very negative impression of harmonization practices, in particular owing to what we have dubbed the crisis of perception. We will now attempt to go back to the underlying causes of this crisis, which public rumours and the role played by the media alone cannot explain.

To all appearances, we must, to this end, examine the insecurity of members of the minority group, which has been an invariant in the history of French-speaking Québec. This insecurity has displayed itself recently in several ways, through the resurgence of debate on language, misgivings about globalization, new questioning about the identity and integration of immigrants, and the fear of ghettoization. During our consultations, several interveners made very gloomy comments and occasionally evoked the disappearance of French-language culture. The feeling that there has been a loss of reference points appears to be very widespread at present. Some people believe that the Quiet Revolution [the period of social upheaval in the 1960s that led to the secularization of Quebec] destroyed the founding traditions and that the great ideals that sustained it have not been replaced. Here, as elsewhere, the September 11, 2001 attacks have instilled in some individuals a sense of suspicion towards Muslim citizens. To this picture must be added various reasons for dissatisfaction related to job insecurity, economic deregulation and the relocation of businesses, the feeling of alienation or loss of citizen rights in light of what is deemed to be the rampant action of the courts, or the vain search for a consensus on a “major collective project” for Québec.

All of these factors appear to have coalesced in such a way that requests for religious adjustments have spawned fears about the most valuable legacy of the Quiet Revolution, in particular gender equality and secularism. Controversies surrounding prayers prior to municipal council meetings, the crucifix in the National Assembly and Christmas rituals, largely provoked by Quebecers of French-Canadian origin, have been perceived as threats to national traditions. The groundless impression that most immigrants appear to be fervent believers and that their culture is sustained by a more substantial or robust foundation has highlighted the feeling of a symbolic void that afflicts certain French-Canadian Quebecers. Some of them called into question rapid secularization in recent decades, while others reacted to the emergence of “new” religions that appeared to contravene the shift to secularization in Québec society. Finally, the double or even triple affiliation claimed by several members of the ethnic minorities has sometimes been perceived as a form of non-integration into Québec culture and thus as a threat to its survival.

The “wave” of adjustments has opened these old wounds and touched several emotional chords among French-Canadian Quebecers. The result has been an identity counter-reaction movement that has expressed itself by the rejection of harmonization practices. Among some Quebecers, this tension targets immigrants, who have become, to some extent, scapegoats. We believe, however, that the shocking comments that we heard, for example, during the forums, stemmed largely from the anxiety of members of a minority and erroneous perceptions of the immigrant reality. However that may be, it seems that political and social leaders could have done more from the outset to put things back into proper perspective.

What has just happened in Québec may give the impression of a face-off between two minority groups, each of which is asking the other to accommodate it. The members of the ethnocultural majority are afraid of being swamped by minorities that are fragile and worried about their future. The conjunction of these two anxieties is obviously not likely to foster integration in a spirit of equality and reciprocity. It hinders the institution of a majority-minority relationship that conforms to the intercultural ideal.

However, it must be agreed that for Quebecers of French-Canadian descent, the combination of their majority status in Québec and their minority status in Canada and North America is not easy. It is a difficult apprenticeship that began in the 1960s and, which, obviously, is not over. However, French-speaking Québec espouses values of reception and solidarity. This is a message that everyone has read or heard for some time. We believe that these values do indeed exist but that they are not fully expressed because of anxiety over identity. We also think that this impediment in itself adds to the malaise.

French-speaking Québec is a minority culture and needs a strong identity to allay its anxieties and behave like a serene majority. This is the first lesson that we should draw from recent events. The identity inherited from the French-Canadian past is perfectly legitimate and it must survive, but it can no longer occupy alone the Québec identity space. It must hinge on the other identities present, in a spirit of interculturalism, in order to prevent fragmentation and exclusion. All in all, it is a question of sustaining through symbols and imagination the common public culture, which is made up of universal values and rights, but without disfiguring it. Québec must now apply itself to this difficult task.

Before we go any further, it would be useful to note that Québec society’s recent experience is neither unusual nor special. A number of Western nations are experiencing malaises that resemble those expressed during debate on accommodation. We might assert that the main source of such malaise is the growing ethnic diversification of Western societies. During the 1950s, countries such as France, the United States and Canada were already diversified, but others such as Denmark were virtually homogeneous. Countries such as Germany and England are experiencing fairly pronounced anxiety over identity although they are not subject to the same linguistic and culture pressures as Québec is.

If certain analogies can be made between the situation in Québec and that in other Western nations, it is important, however, to ascertain how they differ. Fears that may be warranted elsewhere are not justified here.

Thus, we must first note that Québec has welcomed immigrants for a long time and that they are contributing significantly to the development of society. Québec has integrated this understanding of the situation and perceives itself as a host society.

Unlike Québec and Canada, during the post-war period, a number of European countries did not perceive themselves to be countries of immigration although millions of immigrants entered them. They regarded the newcomers as simple visitors, temporary workers who, in exchanges for the wages that they could not obtain in their country of origin, performed tasks essential to the economy that natives of the country were unable or did not wish to perform. Today, we can see the utopian nature of this arrangement. The children of immigrants now live in major German cities and the Paris suburbs who have lost a good part of their culture of origin without being able to integrate into the host society. They live in prosperous consumer societies without being able to participate in them. They feel that they are the victims of discrimination, alienated and stripped of their rights. Some of them are on the brink of revolt.

Certain European countries are facing serious problems linked to the emergence of underprivileged urban zones, which are inhabited by underqualified populations and are the hub of tensions that are exacerbated by a keen sense of injustice and rejection. Mistrust and resentment obviate the potential benefit of social programs that are initially well designed but often poorly received by the communities for which they are intended. Gestures of discontent and revolt irritate the more privileged classes and undermine the majority’s goodwill (it becomes hostile to the search for solutions). Against this backdrop, strong xenophobic right-wing movements flourish.

The situation in Québec is much different, in at least four respects:

a) Marginalization factors exist in Québec, but they are not of the same magnitude as in certain European countries. We do not observe in relations between immigrants and the host society a comparable level of tension and socioeconomic exclusion. Furthermore, we must do everything possible to avoid a downward spiral in this respect.

b) Over 60% of the immigrants who arrive in Québec are selected in light of their occupational and linguistic skills, with the result that they are generally better educated than the average member of the host society. This is a far cry from the situation of under-educated immigrant populations in certain German and Dutch cities or in certain French suburbs.

c) A number of immigrants come from the middle class and thus share in many ways the lifestyle of numerous Quebecers. It is a known fact that the middle classes much more closely resemble each other through their lifestyle than the less privileged classes.

d) Immigrants in the European countries are often the nationals of former colonies, e.g. Indians and Pakistanis in England and North Africans in France. To all of the other grounds for alienation must be added the painful recollection of colonization and exploitation. Many North Africans told us during our consultations that they decided to immigrate to Québec instead of France because they feel more accepted and free of the burden stemming from the memory of a longstanding relationship of domination.

All of these favourable conditions should enable us to effectively combat discrimination. However, as long as Quebecers of French-Canadian origin feel anxiety over their identity, they risk displaying little sensitivity to the genuine problems of ethnic minorities. The condition of underprivileged minorities and the discrimination that they experience are, however, realities with which we must deal.

-- BUILDING THE FUTURE: A Time for Reconciliation, ABRIDGED REPORT; Gérard Bouchard, Charles Taylor; 2008, pp. 73-78.

It bears repeating: The condition of underprivileged minorities and the discrimination that they experience are, however, realities with which we must deal.

Personally, I have a zero-tolerance policy towards racism and prejudice and will call anyone out on it who exhibits either. What I see most often here (in Montreal) are acts of vandalism that stem from anti-semistism or arabophobia (no, it's not just Islamophobia anymore, it's fear of any citizen of Arabic origin). Racism, in my view, amounts to the failure to understand that any given "finger" is an integral part of the "hand." In the end, you only cripple yourself by cutting off. And, yes, every human being on earth bleeds red.

Again, I think this might be an interesting thread. But, like graphic depictions of sexuality, race-based bashing of any sort will not be tolerated on this forum. Proceed accordingly.

Love,
CJ

CJ wrote:Again, I think this might be an interesting thread. But, like graphic depictions of sexuality, race-based bashing of any sort will not be tolerated on this forum. Proceed accordingly.

I totally agree!!

- SL

Hmmmm. Interesting question. I grew up in two different towns, one from birth to 7 yrs., and one frome 7 years to highschool graduation. The first town had a large percentage of Native Americans living in the town and around it on farms. Most of the anglo population worked in oil production (oily's) or worked at Ft. Sill in nearby Lawton, or were business owners. The latter included my Grandfather, the former my father who worked several different jobs for Texaco. I was aware of prejudice in the way that the anglo population talked about the Native Americans, and I had heard my father (a wwII vet) speak sneeringly of "Japs". My mother never spoke in my hearing against anyone.

The town we moved too in 1950 was similar, except the population was 99% anglo, 1% or less native american, but of that total, about 50% were "oilys", the rest farmers and businessmen, and far too many preachers. The oilys included men who were petroleum geologists and other well educated people. In my neighborhood, we had three pretroleum geologists, four school teachers (two with Phds), one doctor, and a judge/lawyer, and a farmer/realtor. Both these towns were close in size, but neither could be considered a melting pot. I heard prejudicial statements that were "racially" biased, but more that were religously biased (usually stated in a "joking" way but with a certain bite to it). Baptists dominated the town in numbers and their political activity. They were very judgmental as adults and never practiced the "let him without sin cast the first stone". There were Methodists, Assembly of God, and a couple of others who practiced some different modes of dress among the women (long dresses, dark colors, behive hairdos, did not cut hair), 2 family's who were catholic, and no one of Jewish faith. There were no black americans, no oriental americans. Still aren't. I kept quiet, and let my silence substitue for learning to fit in, and just watched and wondered. Once I was out of highschool, I would not have gone back to that town if it had not been for my parents, and when I did, I did not really have any friends to look up. Everyone with any sense left.

As far as personal prejudice, I was on the receiving end of some since I was quite, small, until I was given growth hormones or testosterone, and had poor skills and less interest in sports, was bookish, and kept to myself. I smiled and joked in public a lot to avoid being confronted, and basically tried to be invisible. I always figured everyone's business was their own as far as I was concerned, as mine was my own. I knew myself as being very different from my "peers" and felt I had no right to judge others, except by the way they treated me. Consequently, I did not like jocks who harrassed and committed what would now be called sexual assult against me when I started growing breasts at 13, and do have prejudice against people of that mentality.

Interestingly, if you were good in sports it brought forgiveness for almost anything. There was one very effeminate guy, definitely as it proved out gay, but he was considered OK because he would play sports, and was a quick runner on the football field. He had more approval than I was offered by our peers, and I was satisfied to simply be left alone.

I think most of us have been the object of some kind of prejudice, it doesn't matter what the reason is it hurts the one who is prejudged and in the long run the prejudger.
The best why to combat this is to stand up and defend those being prejudged. For example if someone is being bullied because they are/or suspected of being gay we should try and stop it. It doesn't mean that we are gay or that we even accept the life style, it just means that we believe they have the right to their life free from the torments of others.

I am getting ready for work so this has to be a short post for now.

When I started this threag it was for the purpose of discusing what I and others have seen in prejudice in thier live and NOT as a place to share prejudice views of any sort!
I do not think there are any sites that you should do that and most definetly not here.

Hi, Dalindra -

Dalindra wrote:When I started this threag it was for the purpose of discusing what I and others have seen in prejudice in thier live ...

Yes, and for the most part that is precisely what is being discussed.

Dalindra wrote:...and NOT as a place to share prejudice views of any sort!
I do not think there are any sites that you should do that and most definetly not here.

My interpretation of the posts so far is that they are not 'sharing prejudice views' but, rather, discussing prejudice they have seen in their life times, in the same manner of your first 2 posts.

If you wanted to discuss prejudice that each member has been personally subjected to in their own lives, then it appears that everyone has misinterpreted your original post, including CJ and myself.





- SL

Well, I have got to tell my story. It will be abbreviated as much as possible. I worked my way through secondary school (a private school of the military persuasion if you will). I was waited on tables , three meals a day, seven days a week. What this did was put me in direct contact with the servers and cooks in the kitchen of which all were African-American, needless to say "back then" they did not refer to themselves as that nor did anyone else for that matter, but I digress. I always had a good relationship with these guys. To give you and idea of the situation, most if not all lived "out back" of the kitchen in there own barracks. Actually, I never thought much about it then other than it was a place you did not go and no one who did not live there was ever invited.
I, along with my roommate and two other guys got into some serious trouble our senior year. My roommate's father was a Marine, stationed on Guam and he was a senior "self-defense" instructor for the marines on Guam. He made frequent trips to Japan as well to teach and to train. A lot of this knowledge was passed on to us through his son. Well one spring outing, the entire school was as you would expect from a military school, on a three day bivouac and one of the challenges for a pennant to display on your company's flag was the company that was able to "obtain" the most "challenge" or "pass words" of the other five companies would be awarded this most prestigious honor. We were in "E" company! Guess which company won the pennant!? Yeah, we got it but several sentries from the other four companies paid a physical price to give up their passwords, but we got them all. Then the hammer came down. Since we had caused "physical harm" in the dead of night to seven or eight sentries, three of which required several days in the infirmary we were to be tossed out of school! Well, in a last minute reprieve we were given infinity number of demerits and forced to march what was called "ED" or extra drill for the six remaining weeks of school. Every spare minute, free time, before and after school and three hours each night six nights a week we marched back and forth with our M-1's up and down the faculty parking lot.
Point, the kitchen guys felt so sorry for us they would sneak around the cars, hiding from prying eyes and give us extra food, water and well, some "adult beverages" once in a while. I came to love black folk at that point in my life! If they had been caught they would have been fired on the spot and who knows what that would have done.

OH, the stories I could tell!!!'

Love,

Virginia

I would seem my last hasty post here was perhaps not understood.

This thread is going just where I had hoped it would go.

Just that I read what CJ said about not tolerating and bashing etc and I just wanted to make clear I never wanted that either.

Hi all,

So, yeah, I grew up with prejudice in my backyard too. I was five years old when our family came to establish itself in Montreal. This was in 1966, at the height of the "Quiet Revolution" (mentioned in my post above), when it became official social and government policy to jettison the Catholic Church's teachings and influence. It was a time of turmoil but one thing was clear to most French-Canadians living in Quebec: those who spoke English were the enemy.

I was born and spent the first five years of my life in the neighbouring province of Ontario and, though our background is Franco (or "Francophone," i.e., a speaker of French), in fact we usually spoke English at home and our front yard friends were all Anglos (short for "Anglophones," speakers of English).

The year we moved to Montreal, my parents decided to send us to French school. Although my little brother (who started school a year after I did) and I spoke some French, it was not necessarily a natural thing for us to make friends who lived on the other side of the "language divide," either at school or in the neighbourhood. To boot, we lived in the eastern part of the city where French predominated. (To this day, Montreal remains divided by St-Laurent boulevard, where all civic addresses running either east or west of it begin at number 1 and French-speaking neighbourhoods and communities are typically found east of St-Laurent and English-speaking neighbourhoods west of it... and there's a good historical reason for this, but that's another post entirely.)

I spent the first three or four years in grade school learning to count, to read, to write, and to submit to the hatred and bullying of others for being part of that rare group, the neighbourhood "blokes" or "squareheads." I write these two words down now and it strikes me that they lose much of their power to hurt when, ironically, I translate them into English. But they hurt back then, oh yes they did. My little brother and I were marginalized and excluded in our first few years in the neighbourhood. Not because we couldn't speak French. We could. And did. But just because it was general knowledge that we also spoke English and, horror of horrors! we came from Ontario.

I was nine years old when Quebec came to the brink of civil war in the fall of 1970 over the issue of language and cultural identity. A Quebec terrorist group calling itself the Front de Libération du Québec--or the "Quebec Liberation Front" (not that they would ever have given themselves an English name, mind you)--planted and detonated bombs in the ritzier Anglo neighbourhoods of the city and kidnapped British diplomat James Cross as well as the then Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte (the latter of whom the FLQ eventually killed). This led to what is still referred to as "the October Crisis." Pierre Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada at the time, declared martial law. Curfews were imposed. Hundreds of French-speaking Quebeckers were summarily arrested and detained. The Armed Forces came to town; I still remember my nine-year old self marveling at the noise the tanks made as they rolled on Sherbrooke St., two blocks south of where I lived. I didn't really understand what was going on at the time. I just knew that a miracle had happened: there was to be no going to school for three whole weeks.

All this because, at the time, the French hated the English and the English hated the French (or so the French told us; I never saw any evidence of this myself). Today, things are a little quieter; generally speaking, the French and the English merely don't like each other or choose to ignore their historical animosity in favour of more pressing (and unifying) economic concerns.

Even so, I still hear the occasional "damned squarehead" (when I'm in a group of Francos) or "friggin' frogs" (when I'm in a group of Anglos) but I find it hard to take these half-hearted attempts at prejudice seriously; too much of the St-Lawrence River has flowed under the Jacques-Cartier bridge since the days of the FLQ. But this is Montreal, a fairly cosmopolitan center as far as world-class cities go. On the other hand, and as I stated in my post above, I was shocked to discover, in the course of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission's proceedings on cultural harmonization practices, that, elsewhere in Quebec, simple Anglophobia seems to have morphed into a more generalized (and blatantly race-based) xenophobia. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Alas!

I followed with interest what went down in the U.S. a few years ago when the government of France chose not to participate in the U.S.-led "coalition" that invaded Iraq. French-bashing suddenly became fashionable south of the border ("Freedom fries, anyone?") and echoes of my childhood came back to haunt me, cooling my desire to visit this great country. But then I remembered: whether it be here or in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world, prejudice is the province of the ignorant, even if those ignorant should be leaders of municipalities, states or nations. More immediately and closer to home, I remembered Gracie (Beauty)--African-American (or of "mixed heritage," as she describes herself), transsexual--and yet she thrives in her home, the U.S. So all is not lost.

All is not lost.

Love,
CJ

Dear CJ

Thank you for your post. I remember some of the events you spoke of but I certainly didn't know the background of why it was all happening. I do appreciate helping me to understand.

Hi all,

You're very welcome, Susan.

I find this period of our history a fascinating one even though I was just a bit too young to be affected by events as negatively as many adults were.

Today, what with globalization, a migrant work force, geotourism (culture as commodity), and cloud networking (such as the internet) having made the world a much smaller place, people on either side of the local language divide are forced to agree that fluency in both English and French is preferable (and certainly more profitable) than fluency in either alone.

If you're at all interested, Susan, in discovering what the roots of Quebec nationalism might be, you ought to take a peek at the following book (if you can get past the unsavoury title, where the "N-word" is used in an academic context). It's a local classic in Quebec's struggle to retain its identity in a sea of Anglophones. You may notice the author is not the strongest supporter or defender of modern capitalism. To say the least.

Pierre Vallière's White Niggers of America

CJ

P.S.
I struggled with whether or not to blot out the offensive part of the title but chose not to do so in the end, for a couple of reasons. First, the very fact that the term is pejorative is the main point the author is trying to make. Second, it's the actual title of the book; I can censor it all I want but that won't change the fact that you can pick up a copy in any bookstore. I'm not a fan of that kind of censorship, anyway. As usual, I'll leave it to the powers that be to rule on the relevancy of including the word in this thread, in this context.