I felt my other post today was a bit short. It was going to be a bit different, but I ended up with what I posted. So I thought I'd post another entry to make up for it...
In part this post comes out of my post about pets, more specifically mutts, also known as mongrels.
I grew up in the UK, a country influenced by its history of invasion, empire building and post war immigration. In London especially you can find people from all nations of the world (like pretty much every other major city in the western world) and this mix of cultures, creeds and colours has given the UK a wonderful mix of viewpoints, skin colours and culture.
I myself am a mix of 3 different nations (from my parents and many more from my grandparents and beyond), Scotland, Lithuania and Italy (via Israel). This doesn't make me anything unusual in terms of people of my generation born in Israel as there has been a massive influx of Jews from all over the globe to the country which led to a tumultuous mix of people united under one culture.
I grew up in Scotland, as I've mentioned before, and we were the only Jewish family in our neighbourhood for all of my formative years, we were also the only family who spoke a foreign language (Hebrew around the house and sometimes outside) and my mother was the only clearly foreign person for miles around (she still to this day speaks with a European accent even though she speaks fluent English).
Sometimes this wasn't such a great thing, I suffered some racial abuse (if you call Jews a race) and bullying, which wasn't helped by my being a fat kid for a long time (not super fat, but enough to get teased).
It took a long time before I realised that my family and my cultural mix made me more interesting than your average local who's family could trace generations of predecessors to the same insular area. I became proud to be a mongrel, rather than ashamed.
In the last 10 years, Scotland in particular has seen an influx of immigrants, certainly there were always Chinese and Pakistani populations while I was growing up (one thing that most bigots won't turn their noses at are the delicious foods that immigrants brought with them), Chinese and more recently Indo-Pakistani foods have been staples for most households, but now there's an even wider range of people and foods. Proper Mexican, Thai, Lebanese, Turkish, Ethiopian, Mongol, Caribbean, well you get my point.
As I've said, as far as multicultarlity (i hope that's a proper word) goes I'm nothing special, my parents and their parents all came from Europe, but considering the diverse cultures that developed in Europe, its still and interesting mix. What I'm trying to get at is I love multicultural societies and in Canada I've found a good one.
It took me a while to find this page and I hope it works, but just in case I'll summarise it briefly. In 2006 there were 31 million people in Canada, of that the majority are British and French, but after that most of the nations of the world are represented with a large skew to Europe, but there's more than 3 million of Asian origin and more than a million of African origin.
What can I say, I'm proud to be a mongrel and I'm proud to live in a multicultural society.
In part this post comes out of my post about pets, more specifically mutts, also known as mongrels.
I grew up in the UK, a country influenced by its history of invasion, empire building and post war immigration. In London especially you can find people from all nations of the world (like pretty much every other major city in the western world) and this mix of cultures, creeds and colours has given the UK a wonderful mix of viewpoints, skin colours and culture.
I myself am a mix of 3 different nations (from my parents and many more from my grandparents and beyond), Scotland, Lithuania and Italy (via Israel). This doesn't make me anything unusual in terms of people of my generation born in Israel as there has been a massive influx of Jews from all over the globe to the country which led to a tumultuous mix of people united under one culture.
I grew up in Scotland, as I've mentioned before, and we were the only Jewish family in our neighbourhood for all of my formative years, we were also the only family who spoke a foreign language (Hebrew around the house and sometimes outside) and my mother was the only clearly foreign person for miles around (she still to this day speaks with a European accent even though she speaks fluent English).
Sometimes this wasn't such a great thing, I suffered some racial abuse (if you call Jews a race) and bullying, which wasn't helped by my being a fat kid for a long time (not super fat, but enough to get teased).
It took a long time before I realised that my family and my cultural mix made me more interesting than your average local who's family could trace generations of predecessors to the same insular area. I became proud to be a mongrel, rather than ashamed.
In the last 10 years, Scotland in particular has seen an influx of immigrants, certainly there were always Chinese and Pakistani populations while I was growing up (one thing that most bigots won't turn their noses at are the delicious foods that immigrants brought with them), Chinese and more recently Indo-Pakistani foods have been staples for most households, but now there's an even wider range of people and foods. Proper Mexican, Thai, Lebanese, Turkish, Ethiopian, Mongol, Caribbean, well you get my point.
As I've said, as far as multicultarlity (i hope that's a proper word) goes I'm nothing special, my parents and their parents all came from Europe, but considering the diverse cultures that developed in Europe, its still and interesting mix. What I'm trying to get at is I love multicultural societies and in Canada I've found a good one.
It took me a while to find this page and I hope it works, but just in case I'll summarise it briefly. In 2006 there were 31 million people in Canada, of that the majority are British and French, but after that most of the nations of the world are represented with a large skew to Europe, but there's more than 3 million of Asian origin and more than a million of African origin.
What can I say, I'm proud to be a mongrel and I'm proud to live in a multicultural society.
No comments:
Post a Comment