Nitin Deckha: Now we're going to look at how the sociological perspectives would look at
issues of race and ethnicity.
We've got functionalists again, and they would look at the issue of ethnic enclaves in an
interesting way.
Think about ethnic enclaves, what we've seen with the history of multiculturalism and even
the growth of it, is that kind of something that the symbolic interactionists would say,
the idea of birds of a feather flock together.
If you know that saying, the idea of solidarity and leads to sort of identity, and that's
really important because you're sharing that culture, those symbols of that culture, and
you are coming to Canada.
You want to have culturally-relevant services, people who speak your language, they become
a key social resource in finding jobs and opportunities, and so we have these ethnic
enclaves.
For the functionalists, that can be a good thing because in a way it creates what they
love to see as relative harmony and stability even if some might think that there's segregation.
Okay, so that's one approach to the diversity of ethnicities for the functionalists.
I mentioned with the symbolic interactionists over here, they are looking at this idea of
solidarity, at the sense of togetherness, but then of course the flip side could be
a kind of us versus them approach in which because everyone is just sort of sticking
with their own kind, so to speak, their own ethnic group, they don't get to learn about
each other.
The feminist would look at how does race, how does ethnicity connect with gender?
What's called the intersectionality of identities and how they play, and the post-modernists
would say that, "Well," just because they're concerned about the individual experience,
how do people re-imagine their identities in Canada?
Right now here we are, a new land, a new space.
They are not necessarily responding to their homelands directly.
Of course, you have the satellite televisions and internet, all of digital culture whereby
you can maintain those identities, but you also have the possibility to re-imagine them
in Canadian context, with the different kinds of ethnicities that are here.
There's a lot of play and imagination creativity that's possible here with the post-modern
perspective.
The conflict one again is looking at the divisions that are created, and one of the things would
be what happens in the job market.
They often talk about the two-tiered job market, so that for example those that have been here
longer, if you remember that vertical mosaic idea that are higher up, they're going to
have more power and prestige, so they're going to have an advantage in the job market, and
so they're going to get the jobs where there's more autonomy, security, room for growth,
whereas a lot of our newcomers to Canada who may not have the language skills, who may
not have what we call the Canadian experience, get stuck on sort of the lower tier, which
is jobs where they're more what we'll talk about also precarious.
They may not have that same opportunity to grow, and they're often paid differently.
Things like the immigrant wage gap, if the divide between what newcomers might get paid
and more established Canadians.
These are kinds of the sociological perspectives on it, and if you think about the other kinds
of issues in terms of racism, just a little here, I'm just going to put a little area
here for that, I want you to think about institutional racism where it's things like what are the
impact of these ideas of hierarchies and equalities when they're played out in things like in
our institutions like schools, our courts, the police, which has been under the microscope
lately, our hospitals.
We don't have formal racism where it's legislated by the government, but given our ideas and
given people's experience of ethnicity and race, do we have manifestations of that inequality?
Do we have manifestations of that vertical mosaic playing out?
Do certain groups get more opportunity?
Do other groups have more disadvantage?
That would be the impact or the effect of institutional racism playing out.
The individual racism might just be a racial slur, a comment someone makes one-on-one that's
at the individual level, but more pernicious would be this institutional racism whereby
our institutions are meting out racial inequalities by virtue of how they operate.
I hope that gives you a better perspective of race and ethnicity in contemporary Canada
connecting the older notion of the vertical mosaic with a little bit of understanding
of the five sociological perspectives and how they interpret race and ethnicity as well.
Thanks for listening!