Visible Minorities

Just wondering what you’ll all think of this. I haven’t formed an opinion yet. :s What could “visible minorities” be replaced with?

[quote]
Term ‘visible minorities’ may be discriminatory, UN body warns Canada
Canada should reconsider using the term “visible minorities” to define people facing discrimination, a United Nations anti-racism watchdog reports, suggesting the phrase itself is discriminatory.

The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination released a report Wednesday on how Canada is living up to an international treaty aimed at eliminating racism.

While Ottawa is praised for some initiatives — including the establishment of a number of committees to fight discrimination and the toughening up of legislation against hate crimes — a number of concerns are raised relating to other issues.

Among those is the use of the term “visible minorities,” which the committee says “may not be in accordance with the aims and objectives of the convention.”

The convention is the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which says distinction based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin is discriminatory.

It calls on Canada to “reflect further” on the use of the term visible minorities.[/quote]

cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/03/ … ities.html

Interesting. But it’s unclear from the short article exactly what the concern is.

If the concern is that the words “visible minorities” might offend some people (in the same way that some in the US prefer the words “African American” to “black” or the words “Native American” to “Indian”) then I guess you might just spell it out using different words. Something like: “minority citizens with respect to whom membership in the relevant demographic category is generally apparent to an observer due to the physical characteristics/appearance of the citizen in question.”

Seems pretty ridiculous to me, but there you go. :idunno:

If, on the other hand, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is saying that Canada’s government should not be classifying its citizens based on race, then there would be no semantic solution. The only solution would be for Canada to stop putting their citizens into different boxes based on race.

Somehow I doubt the Committee is saying that though.

In my experience the proposition that “All people should be treated equally regardless of race” is a proposition that is rejected by most organizations that purport to oppose racism as their primary goal. Witness, for example, the support of many such organizations for dividing children up according to skin colour and ancestry and then treating each group differently in blatantly racist “affirmative action” programmes whereby white students get preferential treatment over Asian students in admission to many schools and universities in the US.

How about just calling them “bi-atches?”

That’s so 1997. :smiley:

Hobbes, I’m a bit confused too. I guess this is a semantic objection to what was originally determined to be a semantic solution.

I think the committee has misunderstood the point of the government calling some people ‘visible minorities.’ Identifying yourself as such on forms is always voluntary. The gov’t is doing it for affirmative action purposes - they want to hire more visible minorities, or give them other advantages. Something that I’d guess the committee is in fact in favor of.

If you can’t argue facts…argue semantics

silly pc buggers

I don’t think the objection is because blind people can’t see them…

I think what they mean is, being a member of a minority group is not primarily about whether the majority sees you as one. Many such people are indistinguishable from the majority, at least by many people.

Another possibility was that somebody thought this language was an attempt to exclude gays as a protected group.

Albino?

Canadian government forms also ask people to (voluntarily) self-identify as aboriginal - and aboriginals are the group in Canadian society most likely to be discriminated against, AND the group most likely to include someone indistinguishable as an aboriginal - for eg., there are many blond-haired, green-eyed ‘Indians’ in my home town.
The ‘visible minority’ box is for people who are black, Asian, etc. - and who LOOK it - because these are the people likely to be discriminated against based on appearance. If they don’t look black or Asian or whatever, they won’t suffer discrimination, or at least not the kind that the government feels it needs to address in affirmative action campaigns.

Just because other people don’t know you’re a minority, and don’t discriminate against you, doesn’t mean you didn’t grow up disadvantaged. But yes, it sounds like they do have the so-called First Nations in mind.

It seems the governement and the universities don’t care so much about growing up disadvantaged - they seem to care about the race per se.
For example, at the university in my home town (the University of Saskatchewan), law school students are divided into two groups. Those (self-)identified as aboriginals get extra time to write their exams (I think double time). The school’s rationale is that many aboriginals grew up speaking Cree or Dene, not English, or a pidgin of Cree and English, and so deserve the extra time because of their difficulties with English.
BUT: the division is actually between aboriginals and non-aboriginals. An aborigial who grew up in a middle-class family in the city and can’t speak a word of Cree gets the extra time; a recent immigrant from China still struggling with English doesn’t.

I recall a similar situation at Berkeley, after they supposedly dismantled affirmative action. They tried to give extra credit in admissions to people (regardless of race, of course, though the office cheated) who had overcome hardships. For example, if your parents didn’t go to university, or were divorced early enough, you got points. The result was basically to punish those whose parents had their lives in good order, or who were not clever enough to make up “hardships” of their own.