Since the liberalization of Canadian immigration policy in the late-1960s, a
significant development has been the increase in the ethnic and racial diversity of
Canada's population. Indeed, the visible minority status of many immigrants to Canada
has powerfully shaped interpretations of social and physical change. In the context of
substantial Asian immigration to Greater Vancouver, a number of commentators have
argued that critical responses to change on the part of long-term Caucasian residents
represent a 'reinvented', and often subtly expressed, racism. It is the contention of this
author, however, that such conclusions are compromised by an uncritical assumption of
what constitutes racism and a diminished empirical focus on sensationalized media
accounts.
Working from this premise, this thesis attempts to examine in greater depth two
categories poorly examined in these accounts: racism and the long-term resident. It
traces the emergence of the category of race, the analytical and political imperatives
which gave rise to a shift in focus from race to racism, and how—under the rubric of
social constructionism-—theories on racism have been deployed to understand
contemporary social relations in Greater Vancouver. A critique of this literature provides
the springboard for further analysis of long-term resident responses to change. Extended
interviews conducted with fifty-four long-term residents of Richmond, BC—a Vancouver
suburb that has received considerable numbers of Chinese immigrants over the past
twelve years—strongly suggest that our understanding of social and physical change at
the community level cannot be reduced to one dimension. Moreover, the complexity of these responses also demands that the analytical and political import of evaluative terms
like racism be prised open and subjected to scrutiny and open debate. Perhaps most
importantly, the diversity of long-term Richmond residents' responses cautions against
the production of racialized stereotypes in immigration research, and points to the need
to provide more nuanced and contextualized interpretations of immigration and its
impact on society. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/8224 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Rose, John Stanley |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 13881832 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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