"The Fiction of Belonging": On Second-Generation Black Writing in Canada

Abstract

"The Fiction of Belonging":On Second-Generation Black Writing in Canada David Chariandy (bio) On January 12th, 2007, the Globe and Mail, Canada's longest running national newspaper, published a front-page story entitled "How Canadian Are You?" The story was based on a study by the sociologists Jeffrey Reitz and Rupa Banerjee, who had just finished analyzing the data from a landmark ethnic diversity survey. Apparently, some strikingly discrepant trends were taking place among self-identified ethnic groups in Canada. Among white immigrants, for instance, 47.9% of those responding to the survey expressed a meaningful sense of belonging to Canada, while among their Canadian-born children ("second-generation" white immigrants), 57.3% expressed the same. Among visible-minority immigrants, a full 60.7% expressed a meaningful sense of belonging to Canada (notably higher than white immigrants), but among their children ("second-generation" visible-minority immigrants) only 44.1% expressed the same. Perhaps most striking were the responses of those self-identifying as black. Among recent black immigrants, 65.3% expressed a sense of belonging to Canada. Moreover, among earlier waves of first-generation black immigrants, a full 69.1% expressed the same—an articulation of belonging, at least within the terms of the survey, that was higher than for any other categorized ethnic group. However, among second-generation blacks in Canada, only 37.0% felt it possible to articulate a strong sense of belonging to Canada—a statistic lower than for any other group. This clear waning of belonging on the part of Canadian second-generation visible minorities, but especially second-generation blacks, could not quickly be dismissed as a universal trend in an ostensibly "post-national" or "global" era, since white Canadian immigrants, at least over the generations, were apparently growing more likely to express a sense of belonging to the nation. Moreover, as both the study and newspaper story made explicit, considerable irony lay between the results of the survey and the existence of multiculturalism, a policy and act that has often been celebrated as a unique "success" by Canadians themselves and touted, across the world, as Canada's ideological gift to less enlightened liberal democracies. Despite the existence, in Canada, of seemingly robust policies, institutions, and discourses whose concerted purpose it is to instill a sense of cultural citizenship among all ethnic groups, the Canadian-born children of visible-minority immigrants were progressively identifying less with Canada. So what exactly was happening? How, indeed, to interpret these figures? Likely, the front-page status that news story enjoyed was not entirely due to the unusual scope and authority of the ethnic diversity survey (involving more than forty thousand respondents), nor to the meticulousness of the academic analysis of it, but to the fact that the story broke in the midst of a deepening climate of uncertainty and fear regarding the [End Page 818] place of second-generation visible minorities in Canada and, indeed, around the world. On November 12th, 2005, not too long before "How Canadian Are You?" was published, the Globe and Mail published another front-page story entitled "Could It Happen Here?" which referenced the "rioting" of second-generation Arabs and Africans in France, and which was accompanied by considerable editorial debate on the degree to which disaffection of that nature might emerge in Canada. Similarly, on June 3rd, 2006, the "rival" Canadian national newspaper, the National Post, ran its own front-page story entitled "Nevermind Foreign Terrorists, Why Is Canada Growing Its Own Extremists?"—a story alluding not only to the breakup, only a day before, of an alleged terrorist plot in Toronto, but also to the broader specter of "homegrown terror" that appeared to be looming in modern Western states, and which appeared most frightfully in the 7/7 London transit bombings (quickly observed to be the work of second-generation British citizens). Allen Gregg, a Canadian journalist and former pollster for the Progress Conservative Party of Canada, effectively indicated and elaborated upon this growing climate of fear and uncertainty in a magazine article entitled "Identity Crisis," and subtitled "Multiculturalism: A Twentieth-Century Dream Becomes a Twenty-First-Century Conundrum" (Walrus, March 2006). Gregg's thesis, that "multiculturalism" was now in...