Underground Negroes

...Then the example of civil rights struggles in the United States combined with Canada's desire for recognition in the Third World to bring about a diminution of the more obvious disadvantages of being a black in Canada...

...But discrimination in the form of color bars in public places and school segregation continued and even gained some judicial support until as late as the 1950s...

...If his book suffers from a major fault, it is a lack of discrimination between important and trivial detail...

...at times the reader is apt to feel that he might have emerged with a clearer picture if he had not been told quite so much...

...This failing is encouraged by the Canadian social ideal, which rejects assimilation, derides the myth of the melting pot, and puts in its place the mosaic of ethnic minorities, each allowed to go its own way as far as possible without interference...

...More than ill will, Canada's great sin toward Negroes—as well as Indians and Eskimos—has been indifference...

...Canadian Literature": author, "Canada and the Canadians" UNTIL RECENTLY it was customary for complacent Canadians to congratulate themselves with some moral unctuousness that their record in racial persecution, as in political witch-hunting, had been considerably better than that of Americans...

...Nevertheless, Canadian Negroes still remain a people about whom their fellow citizens know surprisingly little, and The Blacks in Canada is therefore an immensely useful and timely book...

...My own experience bears out these views...

...The only black ghettos in Canada have been small and scarcely known rural or suburban communities, mainly in Nova Scotia and Ontario...

...Both were chosen by constituencies where black voters were infinitesimally small minorities...

...Winks' treatment of these experiments is exhaustive, and occasionally exhausting...

...The Blacks in Canada is a comprehensive account of the various Negro groups who have arrived in Canada, sometimes on their way to Sierra Leone, sometimes only to return to the U.S., but often to add their descendants to the complex mosaic of Canadian social life...

...In 1964 the first black was elected to a provincial legislature...

...The cynics among us were inclined to reply: "Of course we have no racial conflict: we have no blacks...

...The negative side of not interfering is not caring, and lack of concern has characterized the Canadian attitude towards blacks since the U.S...

...Forms of discrimination once practiced are now illegal and rarely encountered, and today it is lack of skill rather than color of skin that is likely to keep out a prospective West Indian immigrant...

...West Indians keep apart from "Americans," but even here differences persist between the few descendants of Maroons brought from Jamaica in the early 19th century and those who emigrated in large numbers from the Caribbean islands after the repeal a decade ago of discriminatory clauses in the Canadian immigration laws...

...Because they have never been concentrated densely in any one area, they have attracted little public attention since the dramatic days of the abolitionists and the half-mythical Underground Railroad...

...Active persecution has been slight and usually kept under control by judges and law officers, who early in the 19th century conspired to end slavery in Canada by a liberal interpretation of the law...

...elsewhere the blacks have tended to merge rather inconspicuously into urban communities, often losing their identity through generations of intermarriage with whites or Indians...

...If Winks means what he says, it is the most curious fable about Negro sexuality I have yet encountered...

...Apart from the author's excessive re-tentiveness of detail and a somewhat limping style, the only faults I have to find are minute ones of fact...

...Civil War...

...Now Robin Winks shows us that both of these beliefs are based on ignorance...

...And it is misleading to say that in Canada the Indian is "often called a Sikh, although many were Hindu...

...The status and attitudes of Canadian blacks have changed during the past decade...

...one wonders why nothing like it has been written before...

...And the last atrocious circumlocution illustrates how confusedly sensitive one has become to the possible offense that any of the existing ways of describing a black man can, in various quarters, arouse...

...few in numbers, its members have probably fared better than their brethren in the rest of the country...

...in 1968 the first Negro member of the Federal Parliament took his seat in Ottawa...

...Since the book is printed in the United States, the publishers have bowed to current feeling by using the fashionable epithet "blacks" in the title...

...Furthermore, there is a record of a Negro having died at Port Royal in 1606, the year after the founding of that first settlement on the Canadian mainland, and blacks have been living in Canada almost continuously ever since...

...Yet it seldom appears in the actual text, where the author generally adopts the word "Negroes," a practice both sanctified by Canadian law and accepted by most Canadian blacks...

...If the lynching of blacks has been unknown in Canada, color bars and more subtle forms of discrimination have existed from coast to coast...

...For the truth is that Canada's record has been by no means as blameless as most of its citizens have been willing to assume...

...Instead of being the largest minority, Canada's Negroes hardly number more than 100,000—less than half of one per cent of the population?making them one of the country's smallest ethnic groups...

...In far western Canada, where Negroes fleeing repressive California laws came with the first miners during the Fraser Valley gold rush of the 1850s, a quite distinct community exists...

...As Winks remarks, however, "Many wish to be styled colored, a term which most American Negroes have come to despise...

...Although instances of black activism are so rare and so mild that the destruction of the computer at Sir George Williams University is still remembered with peculiar horror, Negroes in general are no longer content to keep a low profile and have become steadily more active over the past decade in improving their own position and in entering into the broader community...

...Interwoven with the history of the blacks in Canada is a whole series of communal and educational experiments, developed sometimes by paternalistic whites and sometimes by the blacks themselves...

...The whole issue of appropriate terminology indicates the great differences between the blacks of Canada and those of the United States...

...the most common Canadian word for a native of India is in fact "East Indian," and the term "Sikh" is always used quite explicitly to describe people who display the outward signs of that sect, i.e., the beard and turban (few true Hindus actually settled in Canada until the 1950s...

...It was in 1858 and not 1859, as Winks has it, that Negroes first came to the territory that later in the same year became British Columbia...

...Finally, there is the puzzling account—and I quote the author verbatim—of a Negro named George Freeman "who had kept a 13-year-old white girl in his hovel and forced her to father his child...

...I remember an incident at a writers' conference only two years ago when a West Indian novelist who lives in Canada attacked a white colleague for using the "degrading" word "black...

...He adds that "few Canadians prefer black, though the number clearly is increasing...

...on the other hand, I have found American radical friends looking askance at me when I have said "Negro" to refer to a person of ultimate African descent...

...The descendants of the slaves who were quickly freed following their arrival with the Loyalists in the 1780s consider themselves a kind of aristocracy and regard the progeny of those who fled the U.S...

...These have usually failed, largely because for two and a half centuries the educational standard of Negroes had been below that of any other group in Canada except Indians, Eskimos and Doukhobors (who resisted education on religious grounds...

...in abolitionist days as plebeian and inferior...

...What will strike the reader at once is a curious conflict of usages...

...Winks points out that varying origins have created divisions among the Canadian Negroes themselves...