Canada is a Province of the China

[Rambo Wong]

Holy Angelina Jolie! If it wasn't for the racist TWIRLYBRAIN choaking the chicken CRAP'n DROOL head tax policy of the white people Chinese would be outnumber the racist TWIRLYBRAIN white people who stole the land of Vancouver from the Coast Salish native people. Chinese would be and should be an official language of the Canada and is an founding people of Canada just as much as the English and the French. The racist TWIRLYBRAIN English and the French are keeping the Chinese from being a founding people of Canada and a official language of the Canada because they don't want to recognise part in building the Canada. White people came to Vancouver on the railroad that the Chinese built and saw all these Chinese and natives and thought " we must get rid of them". CHINESE WERE ALREADY HERE! A Chinese coin was found in the Yukon and another found near a Chinese fort in the eastern Canada so Canada was also founded by the Chinese people and so the Canada is a part of China so it really is that everybody in Canada is a minority of China. Canada being separated from China hurts the feelings of the Chinese people who founded Canada and the Chinese demand that Canada be reunited with China.

[Anonymous]

Holy Angelina Jolie! If it wasn't for the racist TWIRLYBRAIN choaking the chicken CRAP'n DROOL head tax policy of the white people Chinese would be outnumber the racist TWIRLYBRAIN white people who stole the land of Vancouver from the Coast Salish native people. Chinese would be and should be an official language of the Canada and is an founding people of Canada just as much as the English and the French. The racist TWIRLYBRAIN English and the French are keeping the Chinese from being a founding people of Canada and a official language of the Canada because they don't want to recognise part in building the Canada. White people came to Vancouver on the railroad that the Chinese built and saw all these Chinese and natives and thought " we must get rid of them". CHINESE WERE ALREADY HERE! A Chinese coin was found in the Yukon and another found near a Chinese fort in the eastern Canada so Canada was also founded by the Chinese people and so the Canada is a part of China so it really is that everybody in Canada is a minority of China. Canada being separated from China hurts the feelings of the Chinese people who founded Canada and the Chinese demand that Canada be reunited with China.

You haven't changed Rambo..



You're still a rational, calm person.

[Anonymous]

Holy Angelina Jolie! If it wasn't for the racist TWIRLYBRAIN choaking the chicken CRAP'n DROOL head tax policy of the white people Chinese would be outnumber the racist TWIRLYBRAIN white people who stole the land of Vancouver from the Coast Salish native people. Chinese would be and should be an official language of the Canada and is an founding people of Canada just as much as the English and the French. The racist TWIRLYBRAIN English and the French are keeping the Chinese from being a founding people of Canada and a official language of the Canada because they don't want to recognise part in building the Canada. White people came to Vancouver on the railroad that the Chinese built and saw all these Chinese and natives and thought " we must get rid of them". CHINESE WERE ALREADY HERE! A Chinese coin was found in the Yukon and another found near a Chinese fort in the eastern Canada so Canada was also founded by the Chinese people and so the Canada is a part of China so it really is that everybody in Canada is a minority of China. Canada being separated from China hurts the feelings of the Chinese people who founded Canada and the Chinese demand that Canada be reunited with China.

Chinese people have the best of both worlds. They have a government that puts their interests first and we have a government that puts their interests first too.

[Anonymous]

Holy Angelina Jolie! If it wasn't for the racist TWIRLYBRAIN choaking the chicken CRAP'n DROOL head tax policy of the white people Chinese would be outnumber the racist TWIRLYBRAIN white people who stole the land of Vancouver from the Coast Salish native people. Chinese would be and should be an official language of the Canada and is an founding people of Canada just as much as the English and the French. The racist TWIRLYBRAIN English and the French are keeping the Chinese from being a founding people of Canada and a official language of the Canada because they don't want to recognise part in building the Canada. White people came to Vancouver on the railroad that the Chinese built and saw all these Chinese and natives and thought " we must get rid of them". CHINESE WERE ALREADY HERE! A Chinese coin was found in the Yukon and another found near a Chinese fort in the eastern Canada so Canada was also founded by the Chinese people and so the Canada is a part of China so it really is that everybody in Canada is a minority of China. Canada being separated from China hurts the feelings of the Chinese people who founded Canada and the Chinese demand that Canada be reunited with China.

Chinese people have the best of both worlds. They have a government that puts their interests first and we have a government that puts their interests first too.

Canada is far from the only country that has fallen for the fake charm offensive from Peking.

[kiebers]

Should we call this a troll...why yes I think we can......

[Anonymous]

Should we call this a troll...why yes I think we can......

It sure is kiebers..



But, the other RW's appearances here are always dramatic.

 

[Rambo Wong]

Holy Angelina Jolie! Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States are settler colonies that were built around white supremacy. White supremacy is an overt structuring of society that gives privileged access to resources to those who could be considered white. One of the "unresolved legacies of colonialism and white supremacy in British Columbia", are the "policies designed to erase non-English language use among children" in Canada. Mandarin, and other Asian languages should become official languages.



The English language "stunts diversity. English and French are colonial languages, and the long silenced Asians  demand that Asian languages, long silenced by white supremacists be given the same official status. Also the high number of Whites in leadership positions in Vancouver with the legacy of a long history of apartheid and white supremacy.



Our city Vancouver will soon be over 50 percent visible majority, with the vast majority of these non-whites of Asian heritage. Who is the minority in a city that has such strong historical and demographic connections to the Pacific? It has proven that this new Pacific Canada marks a return to a Canada that was originally Pacific, that it was only the dominance of white supremacy in immigration policy between the 1920s and 1960s that disrupted this original Pacific/Chinese orientation. The history of Vancouver, British Columbia, and Canada between the 1920s and 1960s should be seen "as an aberration" to the original, and future, Pacific Canada. Now the most integrated Asian city in North America...in Vancouver, you can't go to a neighbourhood now where Chinese aren't living in significant numbers. It's incredible! Vancouver is an Asian city and white supremists must stop calling Vancouver a European city.

[Anonymous]

Holy Angelina Jolie! Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States are settler colonies that were built around white supremacy. White supremacy is an overt structuring of society that gives privileged access to resources to those who could be considered white. One of the "unresolved legacies of colonialism and white supremacy in British Columbia", are the "policies designed to erase non-English language use among children" in Canada. Mandarin, and other Asian languages should become official languages.



The English language "stunts diversity. English and French are colonial languages, and the long silenced Asians  demand that Asian languages, long silenced by white supremacists be given the same official status. Also the high number of Whites in leadership positions in Vancouver with the legacy of a long history of apartheid and white supremacy.



Our city Vancouver will soon be over 50 percent visible majority, with the vast majority of these non-whites of Asian heritage. Who is the minority in a city that has such strong historical and demographic connections to the Pacific? It has proven that this new Pacific Canada marks a return to a Canada that was originally Pacific, that it was only the dominance of white supremacy in immigration policy between the 1920s and 1960s that disrupted this original Pacific/Chinese orientation. The history of Vancouver, British Columbia, and Canada between the 1920s and 1960s should be seen "as an aberration" to the original, and future, Pacific Canada. Now the most integrated Asian city in North America...in Vancouver, you can't go to a neighbourhood now where Chinese aren't living in significant numbers. It's incredible! Vancouver is an Asian city and white supremists must stop calling Vancouver a European city.

Would you prefer to speak Punjabi Rambo?

[Rambo Wong]

Holy Angelina Jolie! The main thing I would like to do today is to concentrate on the question of where the history of racial scapegoating in Vancouver originated. To do that it's important to begin from the beginning.



One thing that I find helpful in these conversations is to think about the question, "Who belongs here?" – "here" meaning where we are in Vancouver, but also in Canada in general. Many of you have probably heard that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States are settler colonies that were built around white supremacy as a way determining who does and does not belong.



When I say white supremacy a lot of people think I'm calling people Nazis, but white supremacy is a lot more complicated than that. In its most basic form, it is an overt structuring of society that gives privileged access to resources to those who could be considered white, starting with European migrants. In reality the process was very uneven, so for a long time if you were from Italy, you weren't actually white. If you were Catholic, you weren't white; if you were Jewish, you weren't white; and, if you were Armenian, you weren't white.



This phenomenon touched all aspects of society, including the labour movement. If you go back to 1907, the people who were forming unions used white supremacy as one of their key rallying cries. One of the most popular bar songs in 1907 for example – the year of a big anti-Asian riot in Vancouver, organized around anti-Chinese, anti-Punjabi, and anti-Japanese agitation – was called "White Canada Forever."



Apologists for the past



Today there are a lot of people attempting to apologize for the past, and there are also apologists for the past – but those are two different things. It's one thing to say we had a racist past and to ask how we can work through the legacies of the history of white supremacy. It's another thing to say that racism didn't really exist.



As a historian I have no time for the apologists, because the people who were organizing white supremacy didn't try to hide it. There was a Ku Klux Klan in Shaughnessy, they didn't try to hide it. There were also anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Chinese groups and groups against people who were "Oriental or Asiatic." There were a lot of things they didn't like: they didn't like Native or Aboriginal peoples, and they didn't like Blacks. It's very hard today to swallow the position that white supremacist racism didn't exist then.

[Rambo Wong]

We have to always remember that this land is unceded. While violent tactics were certainly used, there was no Battle of Vancouver, Battle of Burnaby or Battle of Chilliwack where the British definitively defeated the Coast Salish peoples and then took their land. And secondly, there were no treaties (except for a few signed on Vancouver Island by the first Governor James Douglas – about 2% of BC), which is the other approach that was bypassed. There was no process where a deal was made: "You give us this and we'll give you something in return." So neither of those things happened. By our own laws, by anyone else's laws, by any moral or legal accountability, this land remains unceded. This land is indigenous land. That's why 98% of BC is unceded territory and there's no way around that.



One of the things I think is crucial to consider is, in light of this history, what is the norm here in Vancouver today? One of my friends from university grew up in the Interior of BC and then moved to the Lower Mainland. He looked around at different communities in the region and picked North Vancouver. I said "Why North Vancouver? It's a heck of a commute downtown over the bridge and all that," and he said, "Oh, because it's like how British Columbia used to be." We've been friends for a long time, so I didn't say, "What the fuck do you mean by that?" But the little guy in the back of my head was going, "What the fuck do you mean by that?" I didn't press him, but if I had the question would be, "Do you mean it's overwhelmingly white?"



Building the colonial myth



I'll throw in another anecdote that I think is important. My kids went to Carnarvon School, it's an elementary school on 16th and Blenheim. One of the things that they taught my third grader, my eight year old, was about how Canada initially had "free land." All the kids made posters with, "Canada, free land, free axes, free horses, come to Canada!" This exercise was supposed to be their history lesson about who populated Canada.

[Rambo Wong]

I tried to explain to my 8 year old, "Well, it's free for some people, because at the same time you're taking it away from the people already here, so it's kind of stolen land given away as a free gift. I'm not sure I would celebrate this 'free land' in this way since it was someone else's, and especially given that so many other people weren't allowed to come because of anti-Asian exclusion. So it was only free for some people." Even though she was 8 at the time, my kid understood the concept of why it was easy to give something away for free if it has been dispossessed from someone else. The idea we still have of Canadian land as "free land" – that's an example of the legacy of white supremacy.



Remember that 98% of British Columbia has neither been ceded by treaty by the Indigenous peoples who have lived here for over 10,000 years. The unilateral declaration that all of British Columbia is "Crown Land," as if it was all owned by the King of Britain just because he said so, is a myth which recent Supreme Court cases have fortunately no longer been able to fully uphold. We are beginning to see the legal system consider the legal flimsiness of the colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and that all of this land was taken from someone else. Yet myths about "free" land still remain dominant.



The reason I bring these stories up is to point to the ways in which white supremacy has become so normalized in the mythic history of Canada. It is this process of myth-making that has made it so hard for people to even think about what white supremacy is and what it means.



Anti-Asian racism and the rewriting of history



For another example, why did the Chinese build the railroad? The answer that is usually given is because they were "cheap." But what does that mean? On the one hand, Chinese workers were cheaper because of racism – because they were seen as more expendable. But there is another factor that often gets overlooked. Chinese labour was cheaper because they were already here, and because it cost less to get to the West coast by water by crossing the Pacific Ocean.



The irony is that from California, to Oregon, to Washington State, to British Columbia, the Chinese built the railroads. In both Canada and the US, the western ends of the railroads were built with Chinese labour. It was only after the railroads were finished that it became cheaper and easier to get to the West coast by land, by riding the same railroads that the Chinese helped build. It's ironic because as soon as settlers started to come en masse along the cheap transportation that the Chinese had just built, people getting off the trains looked around and said, "What are all these Chinese and Natives doing here? Let's get rid of them." And they did, or at least they tried to.



Every time you think of the railroad, remember that the Chinese built it because they were already here to build it. Why that's important is because it takes a massive amount of narrative violence to change the whole story of British Columbia and Canada. Right from the early years the narrative was changed to, "the Chinese are latecomers who are trying to undercut us and take our jobs away."



The truth is the exact opposite. Unionization in San Francisco and Vancouver was based on taking jobs away from Chinese and Japanese workers who had arrived from across the Pacific. That's crucial to understand because it's one of the ways that we still accept the normalcy of the world that white supremacy built.



What's wrong with Kitsilano?



I wrote an op-ed piece once asking what's wrong with Kitsilano? What's wrong with North Vancouver? What's wrong with any neighbourhood that is "overwhelmingly white" in a census? People attacked me, asking "What do you have against Kits?" I said, "Nothing, my kids go to school in Kits, my best friends are from Kits." What's wrong with Kits is that there is nothing wrong with Kits. If you have a century and a half of white supremacy, you get Kits.



And then when the neighborhood shifts residents go, "Oh shit, there's non-white people coming in." When you've built a place around white supremacy, anything that destabilizes the status quo becomes abnormal and threatening. What's wrong with Kitsilano? Nothing, it's normal. That's what is wrong. That's the work that white supremacy did, and continues to do.



In the 1990s, after a wave of immigration from Hong Kong anticipating the transfer of its sovereignty from the UK to China, Vancouver was called "Hongcouver." People in East Van weren't saying "Hongcouver," because East Van was already a diverse place with lots of Chinese. The places that were really resistant to this new diversity were West side communities such as Kerrisdale and Shaughnessy – areas that you could say had been living on the fumes of white supremacy for decades.

[Rambo Wong]

Yes, people were coming from Hong Kong. In making the decision between a one-bedroom condo in Hong Kong or a six bedroom mock Tudor mansion in Shaughnessy, many decided to go for the latter (the price at the time was about the same). The discovery that Vancouver's real estate was relatively inexpensive in comparison to places such as Hong Kong may have been a shock. That some of the discoverers had Chinese faces was probably more shocking. I will talk more about the economic aspect later, but it is important to understand that one of the mainstays of displaying shock throughout Vancouver's history has been racialized scapegoating.



We should look closely at dynamics that unfold when non-whites move into neighbourhoods that were built around white supremacy, like Shaughnessy or the British Properties. Properties in these areas historically had legal covenants stating, "Do not sell to a non-white person." As in California and throughout the West Coast, property came with covenants stating, "don't sell to Jews, don't sell to Blacks, don't sell to Natives, don't sell to Chinese." Of course, we don't enforce these covenants legally anymore, but they were there. Particularly in those neighbourhoods that reacted the most emotionally to immigration in the 1990s.



A couple years ago, there was a controversy about whether places like UBC and U of T were "too Asian." Maclean's Magazine put "Too Asian?" on the front cover of one of their issues. The question only makes sense in the context of a society built around white supremacy. Questions like this can only go unquestioned if the assumption is that white society is the norm against which everything else is measured. They can only come unquestioned in a settler colonial province, like British Columbia, settled on 98% unceded territory.



Speculative real estate market is the problem



I put these ideas together about who and where we are as a way to understanding our past, but also our present, and to argue that if we want to move forward in solving any of these issues we have to think through the complexities of what it means to live in a settler colonial society. Racialized immigrants have since the beginning been scapegoats, but we also have to understand settlers as experiencing different degrees of class and privilege.



Today a lot of people are undeniably coming to Vancouver with a lot of money, and they are investing in speculative housing, because there is a speculative housing market here. They're not the problem, speculative capital in real estate is a problem. It is the structure of our city right now. Indeed, from the moment of colonial dispossession of Indigenous land this has been a speculative real estate market. New immigrants didn't cause this. If we don't like it, then we need to change it. We have to ask what kind of structure we want to create in its place.

[Rambo Wong]

The Chinese is the new and the white is the old bad colonial legacy that the Canada must be ashamed of. The CHinese have suffered under the white supremacy for so long. Canada built Canada so Canada was founded by the Chinese people.

[Anonymous]

That's a very long article Rambo..



Too long actually.

[Rambo Wong]

Holy Angelina Jolie, this is long article but the History of the PHD professor need to say it all. Why the kits not have the Chinese people. Canada is a province of the China and the Richmond is capital.