Immigration

This past term I completed a course in Diversity and Social Justice.  As I result, I have been actively processing "who" I am and "what" I think with all who will listen and engage.  For me, I need to process before I can write and the process of writing allows ideas to coalesce into a coherent whole. So, consider the following entries a summary of several months of dialogue.

For the past two months or so, I have been reading two books: Diversity and Social Justice and White Privilege.  Both are challenging to read for someone who has rarely thought about matters of privilege, race, diversity, prejudice, and all the other "isms" that are.  In my circle of friends, community, and country, these are not topics that come up often - particularly when I personally have felt on the margins of Canadian culture in the first place.

So, how does a white, educated, middle-class man feel on the margins?  As a child of immigrants, my parents raised us to blend in with Canadian culture.  Compared to other immigrant families from the Netherlands, we did not have many of the stereotypical features: Mom shopped at the grocery store and only occasionally bought dutch treats at the local dutch store in town.  They primarily spoke English at home unless they had something to say to one another which they did not want their children to fully understand.  They rarely returned to the Netherlands - mostly because my Opa (grandfather) would visit us for six-eight weeks each summer.  Mom decorated the house without the typical delft blue pottery, lace curtains, and wooden shoes and cooked fairly "Canadian" food.  I never learned the Dutch language, except for a good list of slang, cuss words (well, words that feel like cuss words when spoken but are fairly clean), and enough to track an hour of after-church coffee conversation with Dutch relatives.

On the other hand, as I child, I was blonde, blue eyed, fair skin, lean, and tall.  When I worked at the local market selling apples, most adults quickly identified me as being Dutch (sorry, no photo blog will be attached).  I went to a Christian Reformed Church (CRC), an independent, parent-run Christian elementary school, a newly started Christian high school, and joined a Christian College in the second year of its operations.  Church and schools were all started by Dutch immigrants who had a vision for an education that connected home-church-school and reflected a common set of values, goals, theology; a worldview which sees all things under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  The majority of my friends were (and are) children of Dutch immigrants. There was a real sense of separation between "us" and "the world" - to the point that those who had a long history in Canada were seen as "others" and not one of "us".  Non-CRC churches were seen as "other" which led to a sense of "the Church" as being just the CRC.  After all, those who went to a Baptist or Pentecostal church only went to church once on Sunday and even would eat at restaurants following the Sunday service - which was like breaking the 11th and 12th commandment in my circles.

Those who immigrated to Canada from the Netherlands post-World War II did so for economic opportunity and to find more room a country which was less crowded and restrictive.  My father often noted, as he renovated and built houses, that he would not have had the freedom in the Netherlands to do this without layers of government control, paperwork, and taxes. Some also left to escape the painful memories of war and occupation - the work of hiding Jews and resisting the Germans cost lives and forced painful life and death decisions.  Upon arriving in Canada, church and school became a central part of forming a foothold of community in a new land, particularly for those who left family and years of tradition behind.

My parents were early leaders in our community in their push to send their children away for university.  Mind you, we all went either to the Calvin College (a CRC denominational college) or Redeemer College (initially a "Calvin in the North). Their desire was that we would receive an education which would broaden our experience, develop our gifts, and deepen our knowledge of God.  Oh, and meet a spouse...hopefully dutch-CRC, but definitely Christian (and it worked).  For me, going away to college it was a release from a community which valued the trades as career options - a kid like me who would rather bake or read a novel did not really fit into the hammer-swinging construction industry.

While I was, and am not, a visible minority in Canada, the sense of marginality exists.  Perhaps counter-cultural is a better description, but it did evolve into a sense of otherness.