It is All in the DNA or is It?

This Article first appeared in Storytime Tapestry and gather. com

My grandmother warned me about marrying Tony. At the time I took it to mean it was because he was mulatto, a term no longer used in Canada and I was white. Years after the break up she said to me,

"You always thought it was because of his colour but that had nothing to do with it. It was because he was just not right for you."

I was convinced our divorce gave her a way out of her original thinking. I was young and I was an idealist. She was from a different generation. The race issues of her generation were no longer prevalent in 1976, when Tony and I married, and so I keep to my original beliefs about her and about racism.

We got our first taste of reality when we looked for our first apartment. I telephoned and got an interview. We were to meet the landlord at 7.pm. In order to make the interview, Tony had to come straight from work and I was already home from work at the time. I got there earlier than he did.

When I got to the interview, there did not seem to be a problem at all. I was greeted by the person showing the apartment. He said I would have to wait for the landlord and since my husband was on his way and he needed both signatures on the lease, he didn't see a problem. We chatted about anything and everything while we waited.

My husband showed up and the man's demeanor changed. He went into another room and made a phone call. He came back to inform us not to bother waiting any longer the apartment was taken. You guessed it; he assumed my husband was white while I waited for an apartment that would never be rented to us in the first place.

When my son was little he had a birthday party every year. When he started school he invited his own friends. I asked a friend of mine to help with his 6th birthday party and to bring her daughter who was the same age as my son. My friend is a black woman.

During the party, my friend said to me,

"Do you notice anything peculiar about this party?" I said I didn't.

She told me to look again at the children, but I still did not see anything strange. So she pointed it out. There weren't any white children at the party. Her daughter was the only full black child, which was by default because I invited her not my six-year-old son. All his friends were bi-racial like himself.

I made excuses for him. These were the children he gravitated towards and probably identified with the most. He was young. He was brought up with parents who did not tolerate racial discrimination.

Later as an adult he told me about his elementary school days. He was an outsider. He was never accepted in a white or black peer group. So the bi-racial children had to form their own peer group. Even at the tender age of six, though he saw no differences himself, he felt the sting of racism and the feeling of not belonging anywhere. I did not have a clue. I was still the idealist.

Later still, we went to a movie together. There was a gang of white teenagers in the theater. My son was 19-years-old at the time. As soon as we walked in the racial slurs began. They were making fun of him, calling him "sheep head". Neither one of us could understand why. He has straight dark brown hair just like mine. But we both knew they knew he was black.

In Montreal, people of negroic decent call themselves "black" not African Canadian. My son identifies himself as being a black man. The blacks in Montreal maintain the "one drop theory" (see Jim Crow's) point of view to determine who is black. This theory postulates that if you have even one drop of black searing through your veins you are black.

When my son first met the mother of his child; another bi-racial person, she did not believe he was black. She thought he was a "black wannabe" as she put it. I asked what she thought he was. She replied, "I don't know Spanish or something." My son looks just like me. He is not accepted by the whites, and questioned by the blacks. So where does that leave him today?

It leaves him in a worse position still. Since the onset of 911, he has been looked upon as an Arab terrorist; only because he has a swarthy complexion. He went to the grocery store one evening and came back upset. He was practically accosted by a drunken French women yelling at him in French to "go back home to the Arab country where you came from; we don't need your kind here!"

The last straw for him came at Christmastime. He was purchasing a electronic "game boy" and game for his son." We were at Walmart. You have to understand the setup to understand what insulted my son to the core of his being.

The electronic games were all encased behind glass and locked. It took us 20 minutes to find a salesperson. Only one person had the key and therefore the authority to open the case so that my son could get the games. Even then, after he made his selection he was not allowed to handle it. The salesperson took it directly over to the cashier to place on the side for him, where he would pick it up from there.

We waited in queue for our turn at the checkout. My son had to pay for his purchase before he was allowed to touch it. Bear in mind he has not yet physically viewed or examined it. He paid for it and was given the receipt of purchase.

Before he actually was given his purchase in his hands, the cashier went through the process of wrapping it. My son waited patiently until it was wrapped. Once it was given to him, he started to open it. The cashier was very snarky. He yelled he was not allowed to open it. My son gave him one dirty look and ripped the package open in front of him.

My aunt and I ushered him out of the store as quickly as we could, all the while my 28-year-old half black, half white, Arab looking son is yelling "racial profiling - that cashier did not do that with anyone else but me. I paid for my purchase and I am not even allowed to look at what I bought! I will never come to this store again." He was fuming all the way home.

What a shame that people still to this day judge based on looks and not the character of the person involved. Do I still believe as I did before I got married that the world has changed and racism is a thing of the past?

Is racism dead in Canada?

Not at all - we live it every day of our lives