White Like Canada

Abstract

On becoming Canada's first black member of Parliament in 1968, Lincoln Alexander pointedly declared that he would not speak on behalf of blacks. Eleven years later, in May I979, Haitian-born Jean Alfred, a Parti Quebecois member of Quebec's National Assembly, sparked a row when he told a meeting of the now-defunct National Black Coalition of Canada that he was more interested in the cause of Quebec's independence than in the call for national black unity. Today, there are three black members of Canada's governing Liberal Party and one black opposition party member in Parliament, but there is still no national spokesperson or leader for Canada's half million people of African heritage. This lack of racial solidarity has something to do with the scarcity of nonwhites in Canada: people of color -Africans, Asians, and First Nations groups-account, collectively, for only I2 percent of the Canadian population; blacks themselves make up only 2 percent. Then again, the counting of African Canadians is more an exercise in semantics than statistics: according to a 1997 McGill University study, almost half of the black people in Canada do not identify themselves such on census forms, choosing instead British (the tendency of Jamaican Canadians) or French (the practice of Haitian Canadians). Whatever the numbers, though, Canada's coloreds are an almost invisible presence in the country at large. Because most of them live in the largest citiesToronto, Montreal, and Vancouverone can travel huge tracts of the largest country in the world and never lay eyes on another person of color. Yet the vagueness of black identity in Canada does not merely reflect the relative paucity of souls. Rather, it is emblematic of a larger crisis of Canadian identity. It is difficult enough to figure out what it means to be Canadian, let alone African Canadian. The positive content of Canadian identity is unclear; one wag has it, one is merely as Canadian possible . . . under the circum-