Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Hijabed "Canadians" on Canada Day

Screen shot from CBC report "Canada Day on Parliament Hill"

This interview snippet starts at the 1 hour and 42 minutes point on the video, which is available here.


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These were hijabed "Canadians" at Parliament Hill for the Canada Day festivities (the one at the far right is a Sikh). They were interviewed by a CBC reporter, and each spoke in perfect, unaccented, English. The interviewer introduced them with: "None of you girls were born here, but you love to Celebrate Canada Day. Tell me about one of your favorite Canada Day memories."

There is great prestige in "not being born here," but these hijabed girls clearly spent a large part of their life in Canada, from their perfect, unaccented English. It looks like they immigrated here as very young children, and any associations with "back there" are just nostalgic imagery propagated by their parents.

Research has shown that second generation immigrants from non-white backgrounds are assimilating less into Canadian society than previous white immigrants. These second generation immigrants seem even more "ethnic" than their parents. Muslim girls are now frequently seen fully robed in Islamic clothing, which even their parents are not donning.

I don't think this means these younger generation of immigrants are any more attached to their homelands. I think their parents were much more cautious about exhibiting their true identities when they first arrived, and tried to blend in as much as possible with the rest of Canada superficially. But, they were inculcating and teaching their children that their true identities lie elsewhere.

Now that multiculturalism has won, these same families can send their children to the forefront, to display and maintain their original cultures. Muslims are no different.