Quote:
Originally Posted by Docere
I don't think Canadians associate Asians with L.A. in particular. I think they'd associate it more with its huge Mexican American/Hispanic population and with Hollywood/celebrities etc. In the 90s a lot of Canadians seemed to think L.A. was a city of "blacks and whites" (thanks to the L.A. riots, O.J. Simpson trial and the West Coast rap scene), even though the Hispanic population was already much larger than the Black population then and even the Asian population was probably about the same.
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Well, a lot of American cities in general are portrayed as consisting of "blacks and whites" with other minorities (Hispanics, Asians, native Americans etc.) much more rarely depicted, and in some cases, it's only recently that some of the smaller minority groups' under-representation in media got attention.
Up until the 1940s and 1950s, African Americans were still significantly underrepresented in media, despite making up the largest racial minority in American history (double digit percentages for at least a good part of a couple centuries). Throughout the later half of the 20th century, black Americans eventually got better media coverage. Later still, did Hispanic Americans start to get a significant media presence. (East) Asian Americans are the current or contemporary group I hear about being vocal about media coverage. South Asians are even later than East Asians in American media portrayals and also vocal about representation now.
As previously mentioned, there's some "lag time" for diversity to trickle down into popular consciousness, and it often takes a generation or more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by saffronleaf
Of course, and we should.
Not always. In Toronto? Yea, probably 95% of the time, unless they're very recent migrants, White people might see themselves as a community of sorts. However, in a place like Montreal it could be different. I don't think the Francophone White folks view the Anglophone White folks all that differently from the South Asians in Montreal. Well, maybe they do view them differently from South Asians, I don't know, but just that they may not view them as "one of us".
Agreed.
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Up until the 90s, some European Canadian groups in Toronto were very vocal about not wanting their identity confused with other groups (eg. the Greek vs. Macedonian identity thing).
A lot of racial or "pan-ethnic" identities are really products of the "New World" as I've discussed before in another thread. I mean much has been made of the fact that Irish, Italians etc. who immigrated once were not only fiercely proud of their national identity (prior to immigrating to the US) but often smaller ethnic groupings (eg. Sicilian), but only generations later became seen as or saw themselves as "white Americans". Likewise, Chinese or Japanese only became, and saw themselves as "Asian-Americans" in the 1960s or later, and African immigrants such as Nigerians often still have ambivalent feelings about whether or not they identify as "African American" but many of their children eventually do.