Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Associate professor Rajnish Dhawan, from the University of the Fraser Valley, makes a distinction between hate-based and ignorance-based racism.
He is quoted in a series of programs that Fraser Valley Community Radio recently broadcast about Abbotsford’s hushed racist history.
That prompted me to think about the community I was raised in, across the river in Maple Ridge.
For the most part, the racial prejudices where I grew up in the 1950s and 60s were almost invisible. While I knew that First Nations people had once occupied our land, there were probably less than half a dozen at my school. I think I was in my teens when I first heard of the Katzie Nation. Decades would pass before I learned they still claim title to the land.
The more immediate problem was what happened to the Japanese. There were so many Japanese immigrants prior to World War II that Maple Ridge acquired the nickname ‘Japtown’ and one of the principal streets along the road to my home was ‘Jap Alley.’ Their lands were confiscated.
As I remember it, Ray and Colleen Nagai eventually bought back about 17 of the 120 acres the Nagai family owned prior to the war.
I learned this because they were friends of my family.
On the other side of the ledger, if you are keeping a ledger, is the fact that the commissioners who took away the lands of Maple Ridge’s Japanese immigrants stayed in my maternal grandparent’s summer home.
Were my maternal grandparents ‘racists’?
To a certain extent, I believe we have all (regardless of our ethnic origins) been exposed to ‘racist’ ideologies. )More in podcast
