I don't quite agree with the bold part, but I guess it really depends on what you meant. In terms of race, structural marginalization often boils down to class. If you look at proxies for a person's socioeconomic status (access to post secondary education, degree completion, health) coloured minorities do indeed fair worse than white people, but it is not as if white people do not face structural marginalization. There are plenty of impoverished white people and corresponding racial slurs (i.e white trash).
I think where race becomes an issue is that powerful groups of people, historically, deliberately socially engineered the environment in a way where coloured minorities (i.e Aboriginal people in Canada) would face structural marginalization for no other reason other than the fact that they weren't white. Canadian history towards Aboriginal groups is truly despicable.
The issue becomes a little more complicated than that when you consider the fact that Canadian immigration policy deliberately excluded other nationalities that were white, but were deemed socially undesirable (i.e the Irish, Eastern Europeans). I think our first immigration policy flat out did not accept 'undesirable' whites into the country, and when they did change the immigration policy to include them, they did so with the sole intention of using them as cheap labour.
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Originally Posted by Mariana Trench  I don't know about the particular cases mentioned, and I do not want to send more traffic to that vile rag of a website; but I do know that, while anyone can experience racism, in the US, whites are not the ones that experience it systematically--unless you want to argue it takes the form of affirmative action, which personally I don't buy but I don't really have a good argument against it except that it pales in comparison as far as effects go to what other races, especially blacks, experience here. (The state I just moved away from, flew the confederate flag at the statehouse. What statement does that send? "We are officially proud of historically supporting slavery!") |