I Hate "Visible Minorities"

By 2017, over half the population of Toronto and Vancouver will be made up of visible minorities.

I'm not a visible minority today, but if I had shown up in this country 100 years ago I would have been. In those days, there were the "Children of the Empire", and then there were the 'Krauts', 'Bohunks' and 'Spics' (among others) who either worked for them or were taking up the crown on their generous free land offer. Was that inflammatory and racist? As historical commentary, I don't think so. What I do think is inflammatory and racist is the continued use of the term 'Visible Minority' long after an ethnic or cultural group has established themselves in Canadian society, and in some areas ARE the majority.

Two years ago, I moved into the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood in Vancouver. According to a recent City of Vancouver census, Visible Minorities make up 65% of my neighbours. That struck me as odd: I thought the people around me were Chinese, Indian, Fillipino, African, and Latino, not some kind of pod people the state needed to itemize to make them visible. What's even more odd is that if a government homogenizes these wonderful amalgamations of culture and DNA into a 'minority' category, how can the 35% of us remaining in Mount Pleasant be any kind of 'majority'??

Maybe this country would stop having issues surrounding minorities if we stopped believing in the cultural imperialist fantasy of 'the majority', and actually accepted our diversity instead of "us and them".