Canadian Ethnic Relations

Explores the ‘everday’ of Canadian society and how ethnic relations follow a pattern of exclusion.

As a way to begin to understand how Canadian society is structured aa a racist/sexist patriarchy, it is crucial to find examples of these relations in the ‘everyday’ experiences of social life. This paper will argue that it is easier for the middle and upper classes to deny racism, because they may not be able to identify the way gender and ethnicity are woven through class dynamics. This paper will consider in more detail this notion of the “everyday” as a site for understanding the relations of racism, of sexism, and of class privilege in a Canadian context. This will raise the abstract idea of the “everyday” into concrete forms and particular relations that have a materialist base in society. This paper will also argue that class privilege covers much of the racist and sexist assumptions so that it is difficult for certain classes to identify the whiteness of domination as an economic structure, because they are so implicated in all that the class privilege provides.