The case for and against cultural and religious housing

canindia.com
February 14, 2014
By Pradip Rodrigues (opinion)

My piece last week on the Thornhill Muslim-only condo controversy stirred up quite a debate among readers and some people I happened to meet over the weekend. I had a lively discussion with one person who decided to play Devil’s Advocate. And this column is dedicated to writing the case for and against cultural and religious housing.

The case for religious and cultural housing
A significant number of ethnic minorities, some who’ve lived here for decades, are more comfortable living among people sharing their same religious and cultural background. Living among your own kind can be liberating, you don’t have to ‘act’ Canadian. You can dress in ethnic wear and not feel conspicuous and have people stare at you. You feel more confident to strike up conversations and become friends with people who share your cultural, social and religious background.

I know of 23 Gujarati families who decided to buy into a new sub-division and they considered it the best decision they had made since coming to Canada. They watch each others’ children, there are no backyard fences so children play cricket and soccer because it is okay with the neighbors. Block parties are the norm.

One mother of two told me she felt suffocated, lonely and depressed in her former neighborhood, because it was mostly ‘goras’ who all said hello and waved enthusiastically as they passed her by, but never once did they ever stop to get to know her or call her over to their homes. There was always an invisible barrier. Now that she lives in a desi neighborhood, the pangs of loneliness her family experienced are a thing of the past. They are constantly in each others’ homes, talking, swapping recipes and living the life.

Their children have good friends coming from stable families. All of them are academically oriented. And most of all there is a sense of community.

Living among people who share your skin tone, values, culture, religion and lifestyle makes it easier to form strong and meaningful bonds and relationships. You don’t have to put on a fake accent, try to ‘fit in’, act White and reduce your Indianess.

Your children will eventually enjoy the best of both worlds. It just has to happen. They will work among people from all backgrounds and won’t lose out on their values or feel ashamed of their culture or religion. At the end of the day, White Canadians are very friendly, but they seldom make good friends. Canadian people are friendly but very private. Everything is so formal. You have a better chance of being invited to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s home rather than your own Scottish neighbor’s home. The only ‘Whites’ and other Canadians who are friendly are Eastern European or Asian.

The case against religious and cultural housing
Immigrants to Canada signed up because it was a multicultural society, they willingly abandoned their homogenous neighborhoods back home to live in multicultural Canada. So now why is the need to re-create the same neighborhood they left behind in the old country? Have they really made an effort to understand the different cultures and traditions? Do they truly celebrate the multicultural feel of their adopted homeland? Have they tried to experience a new culture, get to know their new country, adopt some traditions and enjoy multi-ethnic cuisine? Simply opting for homogenous neighborhoods is weakening the idea of multiculturalism. By self-segregating along religious and ethnic lines, one may as well bring back official segregation so we don’t have problems like the Thornhill Muslim-only condos controversy. So if there was official segregation, then a section of Thornhill would be reserved for Muslims to create their self-contained village, the Hindus could have their own place in the sun, so could Whites, Blacks, Jews and Chinese.

Canada cannot be something of a campground where people coming to enjoy the place simply pay a fee, obey rules. Campers hang out with their own group. A country cannot simply be a collection of campsite-like neighborhoods with little or no interaction with each other. Campers on campgrounds have no long-term stake in the place. Their concern is just their friends and family on their segregated campsite. Do we seriously want Canadian neighborhoods to turn that way? What if White Canadians who are now technically a minority in large swaths of urban Canada were to self-segregate in order to preserve their way of life and hang with people just like them? Would a WASP (White Anglo Saxon Person) only condo complex get to see the light of day? How okay would that be with all the ethnic minorities who swear by multiculturalism but would feel mightily offended if Whites were to say they would rather live away from those mostly third-world immigrant neighborhoods?

If we allow ethnic minorities to segregate along religious and cultural lines, we risk crossing a red line. Once a precedent is set, there can be no turning back. Do we really want to live in a segregated society? If so, we’d be better off living in India.