So my Mom and I were chatting the other day and the subject of race came up, for reasons I will share soon. We’re the kind of family which often discusses social issues and political climates with genuine concern for the core problems that affect the people whom our God created and loves.

The women, anyway. The men are more likely to resurrect tired old racist jokes and laugh uproariously. This despite the fact our family stopped being 100% white in 2005 and is well on its way to becoming even less white!

So race came up, as it will these days. My Mom has a unique vantage point of being Canadian, white, and living in Houston, Texas. She’s also lived overseas multiple times, in countries where to be white was to be one of the visible minority. For her, it was a tremendous adjustment to live in a city where it is an actual issue. Canadians tend not to predict how an encounter will go based on what ethnicity the other person is. At the very least, I don’t. For me and some other Canadians I know, I wait until the person starts speaking before I make my snap judgments and steretypical assumptions.

Because for many of us, it’s not the people who don’t look a certain way that bother us… it’s the people who aren’t like us at all. It’s the people who leave India or China because of the lack of human rights or the atrocities of honour killings – and then bring those foul ideas with them. The people who want to enjoy our incredible freedom, our luxuries, our peaceful way of life, while arranging the hitmen who will hunt down and kill their daughter who is dating the wrong boy. It’s the people who leave because their wealth will go farther here, and allow their kids to go to the clubs packing weapons, or turning our streets into their own personal racing strips where our citizens are maimed or killed.

We concluded that for Americans and Canadians, the issues are indeed very different. I don’t care what a person looks like, I only ask that he embrace the values that make this country the greatest one on earth. Canada is the only country I know about who is expected to just accept every single cultural difference as being a legitimate and valid one, simply because it is Canada. We watch Australians announce that certain cultural ideas are simply not welcome in Australia and we wonder how on earth they get away with it. What we should be wondering is how on earth we became the only country in the world who can’t? I, for one, refuse to accept that being Canadian means being a pushover, or accepting any value or tradition at all simply because it is someone else’s. I am one of the few Canadians around who can say that my ancestors actually built this country and they established a long family line whose tradition I refuse to abandon simply because there are others around me who don’t agree. The Canadian I was raised to be accepts a variety of physical features, dress, food, languages, and any religion which doesn’t directly oppose Christian values. I don’t care if you believe in Jesus, that’s between you and God. But I will not support any religion that espouses or even condones killing for “honour” or censoring our papers from saying anything that is “disrespectful” to a religious figure. I’ll say what I want about who I want, and those who don’t like it can go back to the countries where they can cut a tongue out for that kind of thing. Why do they think we’re doing so well over here? I’m going to bet it’s partly because we don’t cut out tongues for expressing dissenting opinions!

From what I’ve seen, Americans have completely different issues. They get upset about having to press 1 for English… I wonder what they would make of having to look for English in a drop-down menu with four or five other languages… on a government website! There is a strange homogeneity in many areas of many states and cities… like oil and water, they slide past each other with some interaction and a great deal of friction. In San Antonio, Texas last May, I noticed an Asian man on a balcony on the River Walk and realized, with a start, that he was the first Asian (East, South or otherwise!) I had seen since I’d gotten off the plane some three weeks earlier. And yet I had felt a constant “us-and-them” feeling the entire time. It was puzzling how it never looked to me like there were “foreigners”, and yet my American friends would purse their lips and shake their heads at “those people” time and time again. I was reminded each time that I was a member of a camp. Straying over the line earned me strange looks and frowns. I became very stressed out, feeling like I didn’t know who was friend or foe, until I toed the line and simply stayed within the circle that had been drawn by Americans centuries ago. My parents lived in a very predominantly black community and were truly perplexed by the reactions they garnered when they went for walks, or to the pool, or even just grocery shopping. In Canada, a Wal-Mart in Richmond is exactly the same as a Wal-Mart in Langley or Calgary. I mean right down to the aisle number the bath mats are in. In Houston, the Wal-Mart in one community is dirty, unkempt, poorly (and differently) stocked, than the one in a much better (dare I say, whiter) neighbourhood. My parents were determined not to conform and stayed in the black community for two years. Eventually, they decided that they weren’t going to change the world at their ages and got tired of carjackings in their building’s parking lot, and moved. My Mom says life in the “race-appropriate” (white, again) community is like being in another city. Different issues indeed.

Five minutes after I hung up, I opened my e-mail and saw this:

So funny and so close to true, Mom!