Well, this is embarrassing.
Believe it or not, for longer than I care to admit, I didn’t think Canada was racist.
This is even more embarrassing when you consider no one sold me Canada as a dream country—I landed here by accident and stayed because… reasons. That’s another story, anyway.
But part of the reason I stayed is that Canada seemed very easy-going and open. I didn’t stick out as a clueless foreigner with questionable English and locally exotic French. As soon as I started working, I met people at different stages of Canadianness from pretty much every country on the globe. Seriously, I discovered regions of the world I didn’t know existed.
There also wasn’t any far-right party in sight, much less skinheads. I met skinheads in France. Not socially, of course, more like… ahem, in context. Like, I’d be on one side of the street, the one with Molotov cocktails, and they were on the other side with beer bottles (as projectiles, not for hydration), with riot cops between us.
Comparatively speaking, Canada felt very civilized. Look, when I mentioned my husband was Chinese, Canadians would politely ask “Mandarin or Cantonese?” while in France, I was asked if we kept dog parts in the fridge, ha ha ha.
It was just accepted in Canada that this is a giant piece of land and there’s no way the existing population was going to fill it by having more kids, so immigrants were needed to diagnose people at the walk-in clinic, teach kids in schools, run things and otherwise help fund everybody’s retirement.
Keep in mind that I’m white, though, so really, who am I to write about casual racism. No, really, I was unlikely to be screened out of a job interview because of my name or because my university degree came from Paris (France, not Texas).
But I sound French and this prompted the first few prejudiced comments I heard. Not against me, mind you. They were confided to me because I was considered a top-tier French speaker.
“Ah, I knew your accent wasn’t from Quebec!” I heard time and time again when I was teaching. “Phew, lucky me! Your French is just… so much better, so much more refined than those… Québécois. They sound so uneducated.”
I was taken aback the first time. What should I reply? “Thank you?” Thank you for calling 20% of your population uneducated?
I heard all of it, casually dropped on me because I was a “real” French person who wasn’t from the cursed province. Quebec lives off Canada, French speakers only get jobs because of their language skills, and then there was all the complaining about how inconvenient it is to have to learn French “because of them”.
The more I made sense of Canada as a country and as a society, the more I absorbed English and cultural references, the more I realized that even though Canada looked wonderfully multicultural, bias and prejudice were poisoning it too.
I had just missed all the signs of everyday racism because they didn’t make sense to me.
I had no idea that fried chicken and watermelon were racially loaded, for instance. Once I decoded American racial iconography, it clicked that racism runs on local codes—legible inside a culture, invisible outside it. That’s how dumb racism is: it’s built on lies and assumptions, not logic, so it doesn’t carry across cultures.
And I had yet to learn that millions of people who were there first, long before the settlers, were victims of cultural genocide. It’s not the kind of thing that was taught; it’s something you discover.
Of course, I know a thing or two about colonial oppression. Hi, I’m French, you may remember us for bringing “civilization” to our colonial empire. But in the early 2000s, Canada wasn’t yet talking much about truth and reconciliation.
I stumbled into reality and, of course, tried to figure out what the fuck was going on.
It started with seemingly innocent comments heard here and there about “natives”. They took me aback at first. In the (naïve) French iconography I grew up with, “Indians” or “Eskimos” were portrayed favourably. If anything, Europeans tended to romanticize them, admiring how they survived off the land in harsh environments and projecting all kinds of mystical qualities onto them.
Yes, I know, the whole thing is problematic as well, the whole “noble savage” myth.
But Canada didn’t even seem to have anything positive to say about the people who were there first. Lazy, living off the government (ah, like the Québécois?) and often drunk or on drugs. Oh, there was no overt hostility, more like a paternalistic tone that bothered me.
By then, the pattern was becoming familiar. There were apparently all kinds of grudges I was expected to pick up along with the cultural references.
The settlers were reasonable people. The First Nations had been begging for civilization.
Wow. Here was Canada’s brand of racism.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And coincidentally, I started translating for Indigenous organizations and discovering the other side of the story. It hit me full force. Forced assimilation, displacement, systemic marginalization… and you must have heard of residential schools by now, right? I had to do my own research into a few chapters of Canadian history because I could hardly believe what I was reading. I ended up in tears several times.
Meanwhile, I stopped using the past tense when talking about Indigenous people because, believe it or not, they are—gasp!—among us. I met Métis, First Nations and Inuit people who explained to me who they were as individuals and how they related to Canada, their ancestors and history.
How could I possibly buy into this brand of Canadian racism?
I tried hard to become Canadian in my twenties. Then I tried hard to work out who I was across cultures in my thirties. There are aspects of Canadian culture I adopted, and many more I eventually deciphered but knew would always remain vaguely exotic to me. There are plenty of Canadian fights I fought peacefully in my own way—yes, I believe in language rights, and I’ve spent much of my working life helping French hold its own in Canada, even if we speak English at home.
But there’s one thing I actively stand against—letting Canadian racism get into my head.
I didn’t inherit the grudges. I didn’t grow up with the stereotypes. And when Canada tried to teach them to me, I refused to learn.
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