Khan: I’m not offended when people praise my spoken English

2025/07/21 Leave a comment

…These days, the people who most often compliment my spoken English are Uber drivers from the Middle East or South Asia. Go figure. When I tell them I’ve been in Canada for more than 50 years, they understand. And then we move on to other topics, learning a little about each other’s life experience.

I have been at the other end as well. Once in Petra, Jordan, I came across a local girl – no more than 10 or 11 years old – who was selling postcards and trinkets to tourists. Her English was impeccable; her diction divine. I couldn’t help but remark how well she spoke English, and asked her where she learned to speak so well. She pointed to a collection of buildings, beyond the surrounding hills. I could see satellite dishes. “BBC,” she said. I was amazed at her intelligence and ability to absorb linguistic skills. 

Language expectations can lead to comical situations. At one of my daughter’s soccer matches, the opposing coach was yelling instructions at his players in a thick Scottish brogue. I could barely understand a word. A fellow parent concurred. We both laughed at the imaginary scenario of a brown woman (me) yelling, “Speak English!” at a Caucasian male.

Not everyone sees these exchanges as innocuous. As Mr. Harris, the Liberian youth advocate, alluded, the main issue is the set of low expectations behind the compliment. Even though well-intentioned, it can be viewed as a “microaggression” – a term popularized by Columbia psychology professor Dr. Derald Wing Sue to describe “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioural or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative attitudes toward stigmatized or culturally marginalized groups.” 

To be honest – and I speak only for myself – I haven’t figured out how sincerely complimenting my language skills is hostile, derogatory or a reflection of negative attitudes. As for expectations, the most important are those that I place on myself – not those held by others. And if someone appreciates my language skills, why not simply accept a simple act of kindness?

I do know that in our attempts to avoid offending sensitivities, we sometimes close the door to simple, personal communication that can actually strengthen common human ties. And if there are misunderstandings, these can be cleared up without causing too much fuss. Let’s have a bit more faith in the better side of human nature. 

Source: I’m not offended when people praise my spoken English

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Driven to distraction by racism, we mourn the people we could be

2019/07/22 Leave a comment

A reminder that all is not sweetness and light in Canada with respect to acceptance of our diversity, even if most indicators confirm that we are doing a relatively better job than elsewhere:

A particular Toni Morrison quote springs to mind as the world continues to engage with Donald Trump’s latest cruelty.

“The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

Through a tweet aimed at four freshmen Democrats – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley – the U.S. President mused: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.”

All four racialized women are U.S. citizens, and with the exception of Ms. Omar, were born in the United States.

Although the tweet is consistent with his specific brand of racism and xenophobia – a Muslim ban, you’ll recall, was a top priority for him after he was elected – Mr. Trump somehow lowered the bar on how you can counter criticism from your opponents, and it is worrying what kind of precedent this will set for other people in power. But focusing on the women he views as extreme can also be seen as an attempt to distract from the larger issues.

So we must not lose sight of these facts, as his tweets draw the ire of a stunned audience: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began raids last weekend in an effort to round up about 2,000 undocumented immigrants ordered by the courts to be removed from the country. Mr. Trump’s Labor Secretary Alex Acosta resigned last week, as criticism grew over a 2008 plea deal he gave to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Both stories were dominating the news before Mr. Trump unleashed his latest racist tirade.

And while we watch the more explicit outbursts of racism in the United States, Canadians risk being distracted from what’s happening here in our own country. We are not immune to people being singled out because of their race and religion.

Random ID checks by immigration officers in the past week in Toronto have alarmed migrant advocates. The number of hate crimes in Canada reached an all-time high in 2017, largely driven by incidents against Muslim, Jewish and black people, according to Statistics Canada.

Then there’s the other noxious way in which we are distracted: Racism and xenophobia slowly chip away at one’s self-confidence and sense of self-worth. When you are made to feel like you don’t belong enough times, it adds an additional layer of weight of fear, self-doubt and paranoia as you try to make your way through your daily life interactions: as police officers walk by you, as you pray at your mosque, while you are in meetings, and as you take public transit.

“Go back to where you came from” is a phrase as intensely familiar to immigrants as the open blue sky. It was directed at me as I walked down the hallway of my school when I came to Canada at the age of 10, as I strolled home on a beautiful spring day wearing a hijab as a teen. Instead of enjoying the lovely breeze, my mind would wander to scary thoughts, such as whether or not I would be attacked. Its impact, as potent as being called a Paki, has been ingrained on my psyche and tints the lens through which I see the world today.

Targeting people based on their race has real consequences on their livelihood, their ability to contribute to the public discourse and their sense of connection to their immediate surroundings, resulting in a lack of social cohesion. In a study conducted by the University of Arizona, 18.2 per cent of black participants reported emotional stress from perceived racism while 9.8 per cent reported physical stress. The numbers were significantly lower among white participants of the study; 3.5 per cent reported emotional stress, while 1.6 per cent reported physical stress.

Racism disempowers the people it’s directed at; it’s a distraction, as Toni Morrison said, a soul-sucking threat to our collective progress. And there is simply too much work to be done, too many policies to change and too many laws to be challenged to afford to sacrifice any person who is forced instead to spend any amount of time or energy defending their right to belong.

Sometimes I wonder what it might be like to not get distracted by the racism and microaggressions I experience. Would I be bolder and braver? Would it increase my sense of belonging? How does it feel to go about your daily life without carrying all these experiences?

I wonder if even these four powerful women, feeling obliged to respond to the remarks at a news conference, on social media, and likely for longer than the life of this controversy on its own, felt that way too.

Source: Driven to distraction by racism, we mourn the people we could be: Samra Habib

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Let’s not dismiss the painful pattern of microaggressions: Adams and Smith

2017/10/12 Leave a comment

Michael Adams and Joseph Smith on their research findings from the Black Experience Project, including micro aggressions:

The resignation of University of Toronto emeritus history professor Michael Marrus from a senior fellowship at Massey College has provoked discussion far beyond the college. In an exchange covered elsewhere, Mr. Marrus made a slavery-related remark to a black junior fellow, in reference to the approach of the college’s head or “Master,” that concerned the graduate student and others nearby.

As word of the incident spread, petitions demanding action from the college attracted hundreds of signatures. The upshot to date, in addition to Mr. Marrus’s resignation, has been an official apology from Massey College and the suspension of the use of the title “Master” for the head of the college, among other commitments.

There has been much public debate over whether the consequences for Mr. Marrus were proportionate to his action, which he described in an apology letter as “a poor effort at jocular humour.” The contours of this debate are familiar: Should a joke that causes offence be shrugged off or taken seriously as a symptom of a larger problem? Are those who don’t laugh along oversensitive, or rightly holding people and institutions to account?

Our goal is not to revisit the specifics of the Marrus incident. We propose to widen the scope of the conversation with some unique and recent empirical evidence drawn from a seven-year study of the experiences of self-identified black people in the Greater Toronto Area.

What is the context into which a joke is launched? How often might black people – especially those in institutions where they’ve been historically underrepresented – find themselves on the receiving end? Is it a rare event or quotidian?

The Black Experience Project (BEP), whose results were released in July, was an unprecedented survey of 1,504 self-identified black people aged 16 and over in the GTA. The focus was their experience of being black in everyday life in our city region: at school, at work, at leisure, in civic and political life, when shopping, or simply moving around the city.

Four in five participants in our study reported experiencing unfair treatment based on race, in one or more forms of microaggressions, on a regular basis. Examples of microaggressions included: general condescension; intuiting that others expected their work to be inferior; or being treated as an intimidating presence. (It’s worth noting that microaggressions were by no means the whole story; other forms of discrimination – for example, involving employers and the police – were also widely reported.)

Some people who aren’t subject to microaggressions view them as small, unimportant experiences that are blown out of proportion. But BEP participants told us their effects are real and cumulative. One respondent called these day-to-day harms a form of “quiet violence.” Another, a member of Parliament, described the relentless experience of subtle discrimination as “death by a thousand cuts.”

Most of us go through life hoping to be judged on our behaviour, not on what others can surmise about us based on our appearance: our gender presentation, the colour of our skin, the clothing we wear, including religious dress. Martin Luther King Jr.’s hope that his children would be judged “not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character” remains poignant – in part because it remains unrealized.

The Black Experience Project and other surveys show that many Canadians are treated differently because of the face they show the world; anti-black racism is an especially stubborn force. Institutions of learning have an important role to play in helping their members understand and address manifestations of racism, large and small.

Debates about language, codes of conduct and the nuances of social life may seem granular to some who don’t feel at risk of “quiet violence” or “death by a thousand cuts.” But to dismiss microaggressions as unworthy of attention treats each one as a minor, isolated experience with no meaningful consequences instead of as a painful pattern that shapes the landscape many (our survey suggests most) black people navigate in their daily lives right here in the GTA.

Source: Let’s not dismiss the painful pattern of microaggressions – The Globe and Mail

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Mississauga woman’s demand for English-speaking doctor spoke volumes: Paradkar 

2017/06/22 Leave a comment

Interesting reflections on perceived micro-agressions following the open aggression displayed by the woman asking for a white doctor at a clinic.

My mother bristled at the same question – “where do you come from” – given her slight Russian accent.

Since them, I have been particularly sensitive in not asking that question whenever being served by medical professionals, despite my curiosity in terms of how easy or how hard it was for them to become certified and practice in Canada:

The woman’s behaviour comes as a surprise to some because it shatters the delicate veneer of equality that surrounds the idea of multiculturalism.

While her demand for a “white doctor” has received the most attention, it’s her insistence on one who speaks English — in a clinic where everybody clearly speaks it — that interests me because it sheds light on a language-specific “micro aggression”— a term used to describe seemingly inconsequential offences that stem from deeply biased attitudes.

The most commonly known micro aggression is the otherization implicit in “Where do you come from,” invariably asked to people of colour.

Another — and this one also raises the hackles of some white people — takes the form of a compliment: “How articulate you are. How well-spoken.”

So colonized was I that it took me a while to comprehend the offensiveness behind what I thought was essentially a handshake between two equals.

It was also slow to dawn on me because — confession alert — I was busy turning up my nose at the grammar deficiencies of spoken Canadian English, with dropped g’s and h’s, or mispronunciations; “pome,” for poem, airplane for “aeroplane,” all-timers for “Alzheimers,” or missing prepositions; “He wrote me” as opposed to “He wrote to me” or mistaken tenses; “I wrote him” instead of “I have written to him,” among countless others.

How fuddy-duddy of me, you say?

Very.

Urban Indians, who speak English with varying degrees of fluency, are brought up being constantly upbraided on the “proper” way to speak it. The ultimate authority of “propah” were the old men from the upper ranks of the army, navy and air force. Men who would say things like “brolleh” for umbrella, and whose penchant for propriety would have made the Mississauga woman feel considerably provincial.

While I love the English language and try not to see evolution as transgressions, I see the condescension now, and how it cuts across colonial and class lines.

I understand now that when people tell me, “How well you speak!” it’s an expression of surprise at how fluent I am in the Queen’s language, despite my accent, despite where I come from.

My colleague, feature writer Jim Coyle, has experienced this micro-aggression, too.

“As a son of immigrants whose own parents didn’t go past Grade 7, I have an acute ear for the veiled slurs of my betters,” he once told me. “As I moved up in social class, it was often remarked on with surprise how “well-spoken” I was. As if this was remarkable in an Irish Catholic from the wrong side of the tracks.”

It’s a way of patting you on the head for aspiring towards a benchmark modelled on upper-class English ideals.

The establishment of a narrow expression of English as the standard has come at the cost of suppression and erasure of native languages across this land and world over.

The English spoken in the Mississauga clinic wasn’t the woman’s kind of English. Ergo, it was faulty and invited contempt.

The ranter said what many unconsciously feel but don’t express.

When we judge as unintellectual or uneducated someone who speaks differently, we give meritocracy a sucker punch and place mediocrity with the “right” voice above brilliance with the alternative one.

Linguistic bias blinds us to great ideas, gifted stories and scientific advances. It further marginalizes and silences women who, having faced barriers to English education, are now rejected from the simplest of jobs. This hurts our productivity and leaves us culturally impoverished.

In the end, it leaves us well beneath the promise of the potential true multiculturalism holds.

Source: Mississauga woman’s demand for English-speaking doctor spoke volumes: Paradkar | Toronto Star

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