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multi-ethnic groups in their different nationalities and religions but who are totalized as simply Black on arrival in Canada and are expected to automatically assume ethnic characteristics based on this construction.37 Therefore, there is always the need to return to Canada’s primordial beginning—its ethnicity as it were—for a fuller understanding of today’s race and ethnic relations and for a better understanding of the historic underpinnings of Canadian multiculturalism. On the level, then, of the very foundations of this society, Black History Month challenges the officially accepted narrative. As Homi Bhabha suggests, this demand for recognition and inclusion subverts the prevailing narrative by demanding full acceptance in the national consciousness of those traditionally excluded, so that the teaching of history in Canada would have a place for Black stories , so that Canadian history would be full of “ambivalence in the narration … that repeats, uncounselled and unconsolable, in the midst of plenitude .”38 In so doing, Black History Month—even though coinciding with the shortest calendar month of the year—highlights the breaks and discontinuities that are so often papered over in the construction of a singular and linear Canadian history that is by nature white and European. We should now look at the reality of living Black in Canada: the real message and story behind Black History Month. Indeed, as Charles Taylor suggests, multiculturalism is a struggle for recognition.39 Black History Month, therefore, is a discussion not so much about ethnicity, but of racism, in Canada. In this way, it subverts the national narrative, which talks of Canada as a heaven of pluralism, as multicultural, multi-ethnic and multiracial, with no officially recognized hierarchies within or among these many multi-identities. This discourse helps to remind us that even if Canada is indeed a paradisiacal garden, where people from all over the world can live side by side, that there is still the ageless snake in the grass in the form of racism. These ethnic groups, perhaps so that they may live in this world of make-believe harmony, still have to accept a hierarchy of claims, acceptance, and entitlement in a practical arrangement that is the social, political, and economic ordering deemed necessary for daily living. This is a hierarchy based on superiority and inferiority of these claims, acceptance, and entitlements. This is a structuralist acknowledgement in praxis that some groups have a more just claim to the good life in Canada, with those constructed as the Blacks historically placed at the bottom of this hierarchy and in the national imaginary considered least deserving of the good life. Black History helps Canada to recognize that on questions of belonging, citizenship, and entitlement , race, and not ethnicity, is what matters most. 356 Cultural Dissidence Conclusion In this chapter, I have looked at the dialectical changes that have presented us with a situation where a noticeable segment of the Canadian society feels there is a need for celebration of a particularistic history and culture that challenges and even subverts many Canadian norms and notions of identity, belonging, and well-being. There is no denying that this segment feels left out of the Canadian mainstream and that it is not part of a Canadian consciousness that professes to be based on difference, diversity, and egalitarianism. Part of the problem, I argue, is that this difference is based on the recognition and even creation of ethnicities, and that Black is not an ethnicity but a racial category, originally based on notions of superiority and inferiority as criteria for inclusion and exclusion, and later reconstituted as an ethnicity. What ways are there out of this ethical and moral problem of appearing to belong but not feeling accepted fully in a society that is still stratified along race, even if it pretends this is not the case? Part of the solution, I would argue, is equality of opportunity for everyone regardless of social standing and stratification—an equality that gives to individuals the rights to decide what of their past they want to preserve , set aside, or carry forward into the future, an equality that gives individuals , and then groups, the chance to determine who they really are, how they want to be constructed, and how they see themselves going forward from the present to the future. Equality of opportunity would at least allow Blacks to move out of a false consciousness based on a perception of feeling constrained by an other—a perception of...

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