By DOROTHY W. WILLIAMS - I am not an immigrant. My family's roots pre-date Confederation, and in Quebec we have sojourned for about five generations. I am a Quebecer. (Call me a Québécois if you will; it does not matter to me.) This is my home, too. My roots are in the southwest of the island, straddling the communities of Little Burgundy, St. Henri, Point St. Charles and Verdun. I am a southwest girl, though to many of the community I am simply from "downtown."
Despite this lineage, my sense of belonging has always been questioned by non-blacks. "Where do you come from?" is a query I often tackle, usually in the first five minutes of meeting someone. Fair enough. With the exception of First Nations peoples, aren't we all from somewhere else? But it is disconcerting that "Montreal" is rarely a sufficient response. The followup question - "But where were you born?" or "Where does your family come from?" - indicates that to them I am either foreign, non-Quebec stock or, as some politicians say, part of "les autres."
So what pegs me as different or foreign? What do they see or hear in those first five minutes? Do they hear an accent? I don't have one. Perhaps it is the way I dress? I don't dress that differently, though I will admit to being fashion-challenged. Maybe it is my family name; after all, Williams is very English. Still, I don't think it is my name. Rather, given some of the more testy exchanges I have had, it must be because of the colour of my skin. Ah, brown skin - a black woman, clearly not from here .
Yet how wrong and how destructive that assumption is. Though many white Quebecers still perceive black Quebecers as "other," many blacks are actually old-stock. Their ancestors might have been here when Parliament burned, before the Durham Report, during the conscription crisis, during the Prohibition vote, and they even voted in the election of Maurice Duplessis. It has been my mission over the past two decades to challenge that assumption by revealing the fact that blacks have played a role in Quebec since New France.
Last month I hosted a workshop at CEGEP Marie-Victorin. Students asked me why they were never taught black history in school. I challenged these students to think about what is gained by not talking about or not including blacks in the Quebec narrative. I asked them to consider their understanding of themselves as a "distinct people" and how that belief might be challenged or enriched by a narrative that included the diversity of Quebec - a diversity that has always existed.
This perspective might have a profound impact on the province's inadequate struggle to address tenuous intercultural and intercommunity relations and on the tepid grassroots efforts to bring about real economic and social justice in Quebec. This, I believe, is why, despite the numerous commissions, change has come slowly. Indeed, blacks are often caught in the crosshairs of the debate over accommodation or tolerance, because the debate often devolves into language, leaving little room for discussion about discrimination, profiling, marginalization and racialization. If it is only about language then my voice is silenced. It is a personal fight, yes, but also as a historian I believe that Quebec's discourse needs to be open to exploring the multicultural landscape often rendered invisible in Quebec history.
Why is this important? Why should this matter to you if you are a Quebecer in Abitibi or in the Gaspé? Well, as with you, this province is my home. And like you, I cannot "go back to where I came from," because my roots are deep in Quebec's soil. I remain here by choice, desiring to contribute and to make the province a better place for all Quebecers. I am working so that faces like mine are commonplace in the corporate boardrooms, in the echelons of government, in the judiciary and in Quebec nongovernmental organizations. My ethno-racial background might differ from yours, but we do not have to be the same to be proud to call Quebec home. I too appreciate Quebec culture, its joie de vivre; heck, as a sports nut I rarely miss les Canadiens or Alouettes games.
Creating a sense of belonging means that we need to build up vibrant and vital communities so that all members can contribute and their ethnic and cultural institutions are adequately supported. We must celebrate their artists, support their cultural venues and explore their voices through their literature. Workforce diversification must accelerate to ensure that our brightest and best are not underemployed, nor chronically unemployed. The civil service needs to open wide to a broader spectrum of society so that all of Quebec can benefit from new ideas and innovations resulting from global diversity.
The world is changing much faster than we can keep up, but we need not fear change. As we delve deeper into our history and into what we are today, we will realize that we have always hung onto tradition while embracing change. Now we need to move forward and not retrench into solitudes, or lapse into our cultural bunkers.
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Dorothy W. Williams is a historian and program director at the Black Community Resource Centre. This commentary was written at the invitation of Interculturalism 2011, in the context of the International Symposium on Interculturalism that will take place in Montreal May 25 to 27. For more information: [www.symposiuminterculturalisme.com->www.symposiuminterculturalisme.com].