‘Is it in my head?’ International students recall covert racism, gaslighting in Canada
After a police officer killed George Floyd in May, a new wave of anti-racism protests engulfed many parts of the world. Protesters demanded defunding of police and justice for Black men and women who have died because of police brutality. This reignited a debate about whether racism exists in Canada.
Young adults from around the world come to Canada to pursue their dreams, attracted by its image abroad as a diverse and tolerant society. But once here, their self-esteem is often shattered when they are subjected to many forms of discrimination, particularly one of the less talked about but most prevalent examples — covert racism, coupled with gaslighting.
Gaslighting is a psychological phenomenon in which one person makes another question their sanity, a tactic used to amplify power over a victim, making them doubt their reality, explains Psychology Today .
Mikaela Kawaley-Lathan’s, grandmother came to Canada on a boat during the Second World War. Since then, everyone in her family has acquired higher education in Canada.
But Lathan’s experience was different from her family’s, after she moved from Bermuda to Vancouver. Shortly after, she says she was sometimes used as a “token of support for Black people” by her peers and at other times discriminated against and gaslighted.
“After moving to Vancouver (in 2018), a Black man had gotten pulled over by the police and it was the first time I was experiencing racial tensions in Canada. I was shocked that I kept trying to talk to people about it and asking: why don’t we have a Black group on campus, why don’t we have support for Black students? And people told me that I was ‘overreacting or that I’ve been watching too much Dear White People.’
“[They said] I was reading too much into it and that this Black guy was in a sketchy area and he deserved it,” she said.
However, her experiences were not confined to interactions with peers. When she started dating in Vancouver, she met men, mostly white, who would tell her that “you should feel honoured because you’re the first Black girl I have been on a date with,” or “I only date Black girls, I hate white girls,” in an attempt to calm her nerves.
*Covert discrimination in class*
According to the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada media outlet, CIC News , international students annually add more than $22 billion to the Canadian economy. Unfortunately, these students often feel excluded and unwelcome in the country, and their experiences in classrooms play a major part in that.
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Students are most commonly mocked and misunderstood because of their accents and ethnicity within educational institutions — places where they would hope to feel encouraged. Kiran Nazish, a professor at Brandon University in Manitoba, shed light on how some of her students have been treated differently because of their English proficiency and ethnicity.
“A Nigerian student was once asked about Boko Haram just because he was from Nigeria,” she said. “Students are told that they come from a backward country and their peers cannot imagine living in the country they come from. A lot of white people tell Black people that they’ve been to Congo or the Safari. This is like telling a Canadian that I have been to Texas.”
Anna Beatriz Moraes L. Carneiro, 22, moved from Brazil to Toronto with the belief that Canada is polite and welcomes diverse people, in comparison to the United States. But since her arrival, Carneiro mostly finds herself clarifying that her native language is not Spanish, a common assumption about Latin and South Americans.
“During a test, I asked a teaching assistant if spelling mistakes will result in deduction of marks, to which he said that I should take help from the accessibility centre at UBC and ask if ‘you can bring a Spanish dictionary to class.’ Most people know that in Brazil, Latin America’s largest country, Portuguese is the official language, not Spanish,” she said.
Carneiro is not alone in this experience. Working at a mobile store in early 2020, Pruthvi Desai, 23, from Vadodara, India, noticed that he would often have to repeat his words because people repeatedly claimed to not understand what he was saying. Desai added that he’s amused by the reactions, especially because he speaks slowly.
“I don’t speak in a Canadian accent. I’m not Canadian, I’m Indian. Sometimes, I try to be funny and joke about it, but people tell me that ‘you speak funny.’ And I wonder what’s funny about it? I am speaking normal English. I don’t know if people do it deliberately or not, but oftentimes I have to repeat my words again and again because people tell me that they cannot understand what I’m saying,” he said.
Research by the Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE) suggests that foreign students come to Canada not only for better education but also because of the country’s “reputation of multiculturalism and diversity.”
However, Safa Sheikh, 23, who moved from the UAE to Montreal, was often told to “go back to her country,” not only on the Internet but in-person as well. She shared an incident that made her think about covert racism and how this behaviour is unacceptable.
“My mother is white-passing which is why people treat her a bit better, so once we were walking down the street when a lady in front of us suddenly turned around and started yelling at me in French. At the time, I didn’t know how to speak French, but I think she was saying some kind of a slur. I thought maybe she doesn’t want anyone to walk behind her, so I apologized and in French, she said, ‘speak French, this isn’t an English country.’ My mother said maybe she was impatient. But I realized it much later that this isn’t normal,” she said.
*Detecting covert racism*
Discussions about covert racism are often short-lived because of the notion that there’s no way to measure inexplicit racism. But if it’s not quantifiable, does that means it’s non-existent?
John Paul Catungal, a professor at the Social Justice Institute, UBC, explained what counts as racist behaviour and how it can be measured.
“Oftentimes, racist behaviours are embedded in what people learn while growing up. The assumption is based on the idea inherited from somewhere which equates freedom, modernity and everything nice to here [West] and everything bad to people residing somewhere else,” he said.
Catungal said that gaslighting a person who feels discriminated means all power is handed to the racist and they suddenly become the “sole bearer of the whole truth,” making it less about the individual and more about the person who is racist.
At the University of Toronto, students started a petition to demand a reduction in international student tuition fees. The university announced earlier this year that while it’s freezing domestic student tuition, there would be a seven per cent increase in tuition for international students.
Joseph Zhou, one of the founding members of the petition, said that comments like “go back to your country” and “if you have a problem, why don’t you leave?” are rampant. He added that “drastic fee increases for international students is a form of inexplicit racism as well.”
According to a study by academic Rodney Coates, covert racism can often hide under the cloak of norms, personality traits, and traditions. While overt racism is visible and causes direct harm, covert racism is hidden behind coded words, victimizing racialized groups on a day to day basis.
Canada’s colonial history reflects itself in many laws and regulations, especially in relation to First Nations, to this day. Even though Indigenous people are the only ones who did not immigrate to Canada , they’ve long been subjected to overtly racist policies, such as being deprived of voting rights up until 1960, and being forced to relocate to reserves, to name just two.
Canadians are perhaps uncomfortable acknowledging the racism that is deeply embedded in their society. But if a nation is unwilling to accept it has an issue with explicit racism, the question arises: when, if ever, will it recognize covert forms of racism?
