Race Discrimination Basics

If we define Race Discrimination it is when a person is treated different or unequally because he belongs to a certain racial group. The saddest fact about racial discrimination is that it can occur in many different situations. A person can be treated unequally on his working place (or while attempting to get a job), harassed during education, have problems with finding a home or unequally treated by the police. As for the more serious things the person can receive bad service as customer, receive a refusal to extend credit and even have problems at voting. Like Orwell said “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than other”.

In most of the civilized countries the rights of any person are protected, but sometimes they are protected only after the discrimination already happened. Racism lies deep in the minds of people and humanity will need decades to get over it.

In Canada the race discriminatio problems can be divided into three main types: the problems with aboriginal people, the problems with emigrants and the recent racial issues.

Like in the United States the aboriginal people suffered big losses during colonization and what is worse they were a target of a partial ethnical genocide even during the 20th century. But in the modern days there are more and more laws that give more rights to aboriginal people. Today the communities of the first nation are provided with additional special laws that allow people to preserve their culture and traditions. As for the colored people and immigrants, the Chinese and the black people who were brought to Canada as cheap working force or slaves gained their rights in 1793 by the Act Against Slavery and in 1923 by the Chinese Immigration Act. Both of these acts can be considered to be the early cornerstones of equality, nevertheless the slavery problem was not as big in Canada as it was in the United States.

The thirds type of racial discrimination is related to modern world problems like terrorism or other conflicts. For example the recent scandals connected to banning Israeli Academics from teaching in Canadian universities. The whole issue had nothing to do with racial issues and was targeted against the Israeli foreign politics, but in the end it came up as a racial discrimination against Jewish people. Also after the 9/11 and the terrorism issues the Arabic people became a target of minor racial discrimination. All these cases of racial discrimination can be explained by the fact that people are sometimes too scarred by the mass-media and very often mass-media twists the facts to make them more scandalous, naturally that leads to misunderstanding. Also there are some modern day race discrimination issues with emigrants, like the infamous case when a Polish emigrant was shocked to death with tasers in Toronto Airport, because the security couldn’t communicate with him. This case shows that even the people who represent the law can’t guarantee equal treatment during a critical situation.