Illustration by Hanna Barczyk

About five years ago, a rumour began circulating in South Korea that Indian and Filipino nationals might become eligible for E-2 English teaching visas. At this time, I had already been teaching in Korea for eight years on and off. It had been a wonderful resource for paying for backpacking trips through Asia and boozy Saturday nights out—never mind food, shelter, and clothing. Yet, while I knew there were likely millions of Asian teachers equally or better qualified than me, I feared an influx of new teachers would probably result in significant pay cuts and fewer job vacancies.

I needn’t have worried. In the end, as a long-time Korean friend casually told me, “Korean mothers want white teachers.” As a white Canadian it meant my job was safe—an uncomfortable relief, if there ever was one. Today, E-2 visas for Native Speaking English Teachers (NSETs) are still confined to Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. No matter how fluent your English, if you are not a national of those seven countries (or a Korean) you may not legally teach English in South Korea. Of the seven countries, Canada is the second most well-represented, after the U.S. In 2012 , 17.5 percent of E-2 visas were stamped in Canadian passports, representing about 3,500 individuals—the vast majority of them white.

Besides the right visa, the only requirement for potential hires is to have a four-year university degree in any subject. Though the market has tightened in recent years, jobs are still plentiful compared to home, with between 20,000–25,000 positions opening every year. Some teachers who travel to Korea are placed in public schools, but most—about two-thirds, according to a 2012 article in the Korea Times newspaper—teach at private, for-profit after-school academies called hagwons. They are usually placed there by recruiters, who work freelance and are paid by schools to find them teachers.

By far, the vast majority of those hired are white. It is Korean custom to include photos with resumes, making it easy to screen out non-whites—not to mention anyone who might be considered too old, too big, or insufficiently attractive. Education-obsessed Korean parents pay an average of $200 per month per student for English lessons at hagwons, though the fee often tops $400 , about the same as my share of the monthly rent and bills, or two weeks’ worth of groceries for a family of four. NSETs usually earn between $2,400-$2,800 per month, usually with free housing. Combined with low taxes and a marginally lower cost of living, it’s easy for a teacher to save up to $1,000 per month, plus a mandatory bonus, equivalent to one month’s salary, paid at the end of the contract—a tempting offer for any young graduate drowning in debt.

According to BBC News, in 2013 there were just under 100,000 hagwons in the country, with over three-quarters of Korean children reportedly attending one—not just for English, but for math, Korean, science, as well as non-academic subjects like martial arts, swimming, and piano. The best hagwons (meaning the ones with the most graduates attending top universities) are located in rich neighbourhoods like Gangnam, where real estate prices are through the roof. NSETs are hired because it’s felt their pronunciation is superior to Koreans’, but also because it’s prestigious to have a foreign teacher for your child—even more so if that teacher is white.

Like everywhere else, whiteness has a pedigree in Korea. I have never had to dig deep to explain “white privilege” to my students—they immediately understand what I mean. In 2009, for instance, a study at Ehwa Women’s University in Seoul (a university set up by American missionaries), detailed how Korean students were more likely to want to make friends with whites than blacks or Southeast Asians. And in 2009, Lee Incho, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, published an article in the journal Language & Literacy, analyzing Korean English textbooks. He found the vast majority of artists profiled in the texts were white and Western, and only white and Western authors, in particular, were profiled.

Profiles of non-Western arts and artists included value neutral descriptions, rather than the glorious descriptions paid to Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and the ballet. “In addition to the continued recognition of education as a means for gaining more power, Koreans eagerly search for role models who have already achieved what they perceive to be global power,” Incho writes. “Koreans are eager to position themselves closer to these groups, as opposed to the non-West, the Periphery, or non-Whites.”

Nadia Kim, a Canadian-born academic at Loyola University in Los Angeles, argues in her book Imperial Citizens that it’s white North Americans who most convey the concept of advanced, global society to South Korea —Koreans who, only 60 years ago, were some of the poorest people in the world. Blacks, Asians, and others are perceived to represent the “backward” Third World. Kim writes that Koreans “have been profoundly affected by U.S. mass-media saturation, whether in the form of pro-military programs on American Forces Korea Network, Gone with the Wind, commercials for Uncle Ben’s rice, Mission Impossible III, Peyton Place, or CNN’s coverage of the 1992 LA unrest.” She adds that when mixed with Korea’s national myth of a single bloodline, many Koreans’ erroneous conclusion is that “real” Americans and Canadians are white.

Jenny Jackson-Smith, 40, is from Ottawa and black. She has always loved travel, and after completing a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages certificate, she decided to try her hand at teaching in South Korea. When dealing with recruiters, she was often asked to hide her race—or otherwise be told she couldn’t get the job she wanted. Recruiters weren’t happy when they discovered she was born in Bermuda, she says, and at least three asked, “Oh my goodness, are you a black person?” She could tell then that the interview was not going anywhere good.

Jackson-Smith did get a job (she doesn’t remember how long it took) but her first day at school was brutal. She’s not sure whether the school’s director knew she was black, or whether he thought she may be light-skinned enough to pass as white. Either way, when Jackson-Smith arrived, the director, as she puts it, “freaked out.” He commanded she not tell the children she was black, hoping apparently, that they wouldn’t notice. “I pretended that I didn’t understand him,” she says. “It pissed me off so much.”

A few months later, Jackson-Smith, returned from a vacation in the Philippines with braids and a dark tan. Even if she wanted to, she could not longer hide her blackness and phones at the hagwon were ringing off the hook. Parents wanted to know why they weren’t told earlier the teacher was “an African.”

Genny Vu, 24, a Vietnamese-Canadian from Montreal, estimates that for every job offer she received, her similarly qualified, white boyfriend would get at least three. “It usually started with one of us sending the recruiter an email with our information and it ended when we sent them our pictures,” says Vu.

It was once common to see recruiters advertising “whites only” jobs, but these are becoming scarcer, not least because the newest recruitment tool of choice, Craigslist, won’t allow them, per its terms of use. But recruiters say most schools privately ask for white teachers only. For the past four years, Jay Ahn has worked for a large recruiting firm, dealing with many of the large hagwon chains in Korea. He says most hagwons “pretty much demand North American, white-looking females, who are somewhat attractive.” If those requirements are met, often the hagwons won’t even ask for an interview. They will simply hand him a contract and say, “proceed.”

In the case of white males, he adds, a school will usually wait a few days, and then ask for an interview. If he sends an Asian or a black teacher’s resume, “most times they just ignore me.” He says hagwon directors twice questioned his abilities as a recruiter when he sent nonwhite teachers, asking “is this all you’ve got?” In one instance, Ahn sent a hagwon director a non-white teacher’s resume, and received no call back. Ahn then sent a white male’s name, and was told he would get a call back later. Then he sent a white female’s name and was called back in 30 minutes, with a request for an interview. It’s a common pattern, he says.

He says it’s the biggest hagwon chains that want the whitest teachers, because parents pay the most money to send their kids to those hagwons. While Ahn refuses to do so, he also says many recruiters will charge hagwons $1,300 for placing a white, North American female, but only $800 for a visible minority. Ben Glickman, CEO of Vancouver-based Footprints Recruiting, adds there are jobs for non-white teachers, if they are persistent. He says potential teachers should consider working at public schools instead of hagwons, since there is no profit motive at the public schools.

I repeatedly contacted five of the largest hagwon chains for comment: YBM/ECC, Jeongsang Language School (JLS), GnB, Avalon, and Chungdahm. All are household names in Korea, and together they run hundreds of hagwons throughout the country. I received no reply from any of them. However, the manager at one branch of Chungdahm was quoted in the Korea Observer, an internet newspaper, about a “whites-only” ad posted in March this year. “John,” who wouldn’t give his real name to the paper, confessed: “I am acutely aware of discrimination as I am a Canadian citizen. We cannot hire non-white teachers because we get too many complaints from parents.” He continued, “Hiring only Caucasians is not a rule but a common practice in Chungdahms as well as other language academies.”

Though it’s easy to simply categorize Korea as a virulently racist nation—as newspaper polls, dozens of academics, and even I have done—the racism reflects back on us, in Canada and the West. Koreans are acutely aware that whites continue to dominate top jobs in Canada and the U.S. They see minorities represented in the Western media as gangsters, pizza delivery boys, befuddled immigrants, or nothing at all. If Korean mainstream society embraces racism, it picked up on these racist cues from the West.

“I have a lot more forgiveness towards Korean racism than towards Canadian racism,” says Jackson-Smith. “The racism in Canada—Canadians often times don’t want to admit that it’s racism.” Just like in Korea, in Canada Jackson-Smith feels she’s black first and an individual second. Ziem Phala, a black Canadian who has taught in Korea for four years, agrees that in Canada, Canadian-ness often equals whiteness. “When people ask, ‘Where are you from?’ and I say I’m from Ottawa, the second question is, ‘No, where are you really from?’ Whereas no one is going to ask that of another white person, even if they’re straight off the boat from Italy.”

While looking for a new job, a black American friend of mine complained that he had never had to deal with discrimination like this ever before—and he’s from Los Angeles. But he admits that race is a tricky thing, and told me what is said out-loud in Korea is simply said under a person’s breath back home—or just shown on TV. Korea, a nation sealed off from the world only 120 years ago, did not develop its racism in a vacuum. It was imported, just like its English teachers.

But now they’ve hit a snag.

It’s a snag that is thousands strong. Law students and alumni across Canada are fighting back with a letter-writing campaign. They’re criticizing the “Community Covenant Agreement” that all Trinity Western students and staff must sign. If the Bible had a list of rules for schools, this would be it. One of its passages states that “sexual intimacy is reserved for marriage between one man and one woman.” Failure to comply can result in expulsion.

On Monday, students from eight Canadian law schools signed joint letters to the FCLS. “TWU’s definition of marriage deprives LGBTQ students of rights that others enjoy, and is therefore discriminatory,” reads the letter.

The students’ stances vary, but most want Trinity Western to remove the covenant agreement or stay out of teaching law. A major concern is that this law school would be, in a sense, illegal—and a mockery of law schools by not following the law.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms doesn’t apply to private schools like Trinity Western. But as the letter reads, “law schools are to propagate the values of the Canadian legal system, including those set out in the Charter.”

These laws that guarantee our rights and freedoms and pretty crucial to our society, if you ask me. The Charter describes that happy place where every individual has the right to “equal benefit of the law without discrimination.”

It’s understood that Trinity Western is exclusively for students of the Christian faith. Hell, it says in their Student Handbook from 2011-2012 that staff and students should engage each other in the school’s “mission to prepare godly Christian leaders.” But Canadian citizens won’t benefit from lawyers who marginalize them.

“Christian lawyer” is an actual job title. Thomas Schuck, lawyer and member of the Catholic Civil Rights League, represented anti-gay activist William Whatcott in 2011. Forty-five-year-old Whatcott, from Edmonton, appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada to defend the freedom of (hate) speech. He was previously fined for handing out homophobic and anti-abortion flyers and offending passersby. Whatcott is currently trying to reopen his case to prove his flyers aren’t a form of hate speech.

It should be noted that the Whatcott VS homosexuality case was deemed a freedom of religion case. Lawyers represent both the good guys and the bad guys, the victims and the perpetrators. So would Trinity Western be creating hate-speech representatives, under the guise of freedom of religion?

“We’re not against the freedom of religion,” says Jill Bishop, president of a gay-straight alliance at the University of Saskatchewan. Bishop attended Trinity Western, and is one of the letter’s signatories.  “[The school] should appreciate the values of the Canadian justice system.”

This is really a question of what Canadian law should exist to protect. How free is the “freedom of religion” clause, really, when it impedes the freedom of non-heterosexuals and non-Christians to attend a school?

Two weeks ago, Dalhousie’s Schulick School of Law held a meeting to discuss the proposal. Many straight attendees said that religion shouldn’t play any part in teaching law. Many others were indifferent. A Christian speaker retorted that attending the school and signing to the covenant is a personal and voluntary choice. The point is that Trinity Western only accepts one voice. Like the meeting held at Dalhousie, the law best serves us when all voices are heard.

November 13, 1971, The Pas, Manitoba. Four young white men drive past Helen Betty Osborne, a 19-year-old Cree girl. They call for her to get in the car and party with them. “I think I heard a yes,” one man taunts. When she refuses, the men pull her into the car and drive off.

Flip the page, to illustrated panels showing the RCMP knocking on her mother’s door, about to deliver the news of Osborne’s rape and murder. Winnipeg author David Alexander Robertson uses the advantages of a graphic novel to detail the horrific event in his book, The Life of Helen Betty Osborne.

“Her story is really close to my heart. All of us involved in it really got to know her,” Robertson says. His father comes from Norway House, the same small northern community where Osborne spent her early years.

Robertson had self-published two novels when the Helen Betty Osborne Memorial Foundation asked him to write a book about Osborne’s murder to use in schools. He came up with the idea for a graphic novel telling the story of the girl’s last days, showing her hanging out at high school with her friends and dreaming of becoming a teacher—depicting her as a person, not a victim. What’s left for discussion is the racism, sexism and indifference behind the fact that only one of the four men implicated was ever convicted, and only sixteen years after the fact. It’s a tale of sloppy police work, townfolk who wouldn’t speak up about what they knew, and official indifference to a pattern of white men sexually harassing aboriginal women and girls.

The racial tension that divided whites and aboriginals in The Pas in the 1970s has lessened, but Robertson argues his book is relevant all these years later because the problems that played a part in Osborne’s death are still very much at play. He sees a connection between Osborne and hundreds of other disappeared aboriginal women. “There are 520 murdered and missing aboriginal women in Canada, half of them in this decade. By telling Helen Betty Osborne’s story to a wider audience, it’s bringing a new awareness to the issue. We’re seeing the awareness build, but it’s a long slow build.”

Robertson’s book is just the latest in a string of non-fiction Canadian graphic novels to surface. Many landmark works are personal projects, like Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki—which, like Robertson’s book, sketches the life of a teenage girl. Others, like Chester Brown’s footnoted history Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography or Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles take a more documentary approach. These home-grown examples follow in the footsteps of global successes like Joe Sacco’s pointillist reportage on the Bosnian War with The Fixer, Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of an Iranian childhood in Persepolis, and Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning holocaust memoir, Maus.

Unlike these creators, Robertson writes the script but leaves the art to others. For Osborne, illustrator Madison Blackstone applied a range of graphic techniques, including full-colour paintings and black and white drawings. Some panels mesh drawings and photographs, underlining that this project is based on a real woman; the photos show the flowers and cigarette lighters that continue to be placed on Osborne’s grave and memorial, the hold she has on people’s memory in a town that cannot forget her death.

“I love the way that graphic novels offer different ways to engage people, from elementary school to people in their sixties,” Robertson says. For his next project, he’s working on a comic book series called 7 Generations, a historical work of fiction focused on the Plains Cree area. “It’s all about the impact of history, how can we address that and move on.”

Graphic novels are long past being comic relief. Robertson’s new book joins a growing tradition that expands our idea of what to expect from the un-funny pages.

British Columbia’s adherence to the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has been recently assessed by the West Coast Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) with disturbing results. West Coast LEAF’s first annual Report Card has assigned the B.C. government a grade of “D” when it comes to women’s equality.

Canada ratified the UN CEDAW in 1981. The Convention contains various measures that call for the end of systemic and direct discrimination against women in the legal, occupational and judicial realms and require the protection of women’s rights by public and legal institutions.

To ensure that Canada, and all other signed parties, comply to the Convention, a national report documenting progress must be submitted every four years. Between the four-year CEDAW reporting periods, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), such as West Coast LEAF, can produce shadow reports that monitor provincial compliance to UN CEDAW obligations that fall within provincial jurisdiction.

In all areas assessed by West Coast LEAF, BC’s performance is abominable. When it comes to social assistance, protection against violence, access to childcare, housing and legal support, and the treatment of Indigenous women, the B.C. government still has many obligations to fulfill.

For example, the Report Card notes that the prevalence of unaffordable housing in areas like Vancouver, exacerbated by the upcoming 2010 Olympics, have left women of colour, Indigenous women, new immigrant women and impoverished women particularly vulnerable. Furthermore, according to the Report Card, there “has been little progress on improving social assistance for women since the last CEDAW Committee review in 2008. In fact, B.C. continues to have the highest overall poverty rate in the country at 21%, which includes disproportionately high numbers of women, children and Aboriginal people. With the economic crisis resulting in 47% more recipients of social assistance between September 2008 and May 2009, the government needs to work harder on ensuring equal access to sufficient social assistance for women and marginalized people.”

The West Coast LEAF Report Card examines a total of seven key areas, identifying problems and offering solutions to them. Essentially it calls for a much greater commitment by the B.C. government to uphold international obligations on women’s rights and to stop the feminization of poverty and systemic discrimination against women that are perpetuated by the lack of affordable childcare, housing, and legal aid services, access to social assistance, and protection against violence.

Overview:

1) Women & Social Assistance — Grade: D
2) Missing & Murdered Aboriginal Women and Girls – Grade: F
3) Violence Against Women and Girls – Grade: C
4) Women and Girls in Prison – Grade C
5) Access to Childcare – Grade D
6) Women & Housing – Grade D
7) Women & Access to Justice – Grade D

It becomes apparent that although British Columbia is touted to be “The Best Place on Earth” all the pristine wilderness can’t make up for one fact: BC is not the best place on earth if you’re a woman, especially an impoverished, Aboriginal, recent immigrant, or nonwhite woman.

As in so many immigrant families, weekend mornings in my house always meant one thing: “our shows” on TV. We are of Indian descent, and the sounds of the latest Bollywood hits were a staple of our Saturdays and Sundays, as much a part of our weekends as omelettes and the newspaper. But for all the nostalgia, we had little choice. For years, if you were an immigrant looking for your own media, your only other option was one of the “ethnic” grocery-cum-video stores that still pepper neighbourhoods today. And while these shops function as impromptu community centres, there was always something a little unsettling about having to drive to an out-ofthe-way plaza only to pick up a poor-quality knock-off DVD.

The web allows immigrants to straddle two worlds like never before. Illustration by Matthew Daley

It was a disquieting state of affairs that only added to the isolation so common to the immigrant experience. But thanks to the web, things are changing. Minorities are no longer confined to gathering around a TV on weekends or driving to the nearest bazaar. With the mainstreaming of the internet, immigrant minorities have exponentially more access to film, music, and literature from their root cultures.

The difference in diversity between traditional and online outlets is striking. Zip.ca, Canada’s most popular online DVD service, currently has 728 Bollywood films available, which, last time I checked, is approximately 727 more than at my parents’ local Rogers Video. Walk into a Best Buy or HMV and you will be lucky to find a handful of “world music” CDs. In contrast, eMusic.com, Canada’s second-largest online music seller behind iTunes, currently has more than 33,000 artists under their international category. The disparity is staggering.

At the core of this pluralist promise is the “long tail.” Coined by Wired editor Chris Anderson, the term describes how the web’s massive capacity as a distribution network, coupled with its greatly reduced cost of delivery, allows online retailers to offer a much greater variety of content than bricks-and mortar stores. Rather than relying on selling huge quantities of a few blockbusters (the head), the theory suggests that online stores can thrive by selling just a few units each of a huge catalogue of titles (the tail). But though most of the technorati have focused on the long tail’s economic benefits — which might not be as lucrative as once predicted — few have yet to think through its impact on minority cultures.

After all, beyond merely having more choice, what does it now mean to be an immigrant in the face of this greatly expanded access to culture? My parents’ generation spent much of their life in a sort of cultural limbo. Unwittingly alienated by a majority culture, they sought out the familiar and the known. Yet, the trips to dingy stores around the margins of cities were more symbolic than anyone cared to admit and, despite a growing immigrant population, quality, selection, and currency were all lacking. Put off by mainstream culture and unable to connect with the contemporary culture of their homelands, they were stuck.

Flash-forward to today, and my mother can watch the most current movies from Bollywood at full quality, a few even in high definition. My father has a large MP3 collection composed of ghazals and classical Indian tracks he never thought he would find again. This is just the start: it says nothing of the radio streamed from Taiwan, the news sites from Somalia, the poetry from Pakistan, or the podcasts from Jamaica. The internet allows immigrants to engage in the currents of the cultures they know with an immediacy and range that simply could not have happened before.

The obvious danger is increased ghettoization. But in an unexpected way, the web allows for an equality of participation. The ebb and flow of media, the contemporary pulse, was once privy to those with Globe and Mail or Saturday Night subscriptions. But, though it is perhaps anecdotal, it seems no coincidence that, after finding Bollywood clips there, my mother also turned to the web for reports on the U.S. election or video from Oprah.com. Suddenly a part of the swirl of popular culture, my family’s cultural isolation lessened.

If minority alienation is a question of access and inclusion, then perhaps more than anything, the long tail means that the choice between assimilation and traditionalism has ceased to be an either/or proposition for immigrants. When one is no longer forced to cling to an imaginary past but can instead engage the cutting edge of both cultures, the movement to the contemporary Canadian becomes degrees easier and less threatening.

The web in itself might not be a magical panacea, but when immigrants are neither asked to constantly look back, nor entirely conform to an alien present, perhaps the ideal of multiculturalism has found a practical friend in the long tail of the internet.

On April 17, thousands of “Lost Canadians” will finally have the opportunity to claim their longdenied Canadian citizenship, thanks to Bill C-37. Intended to restore citizenship to those stripped of their nationality without their consent or often even their knowledge, Bill C-37 will also rectify what some see as a violation of their human rights.

A Lost Canadian is an individual who was born in this country between 1947 and 1977, but automatically lost Canuck status when his or her father became a citizen of another country. Others who will benefit from Bill C-37 include certain war brides and babies, those born to Canadian parents outside the country, and those who had an illegitimate grandparent or even great-grandparent. In all, Bill C37 should enable nine categories of people to reclaim their status.

These problems stem from the Canadian Citizenship Act of 1947. By today’s standards, many of its provisions seem blatantly discriminatory. Ottawa modernized the act in 1977, but the changes were not made retroactive, as they were in many other countries that had updated these laws.

No wonder Don Chapman, the man who spearheaded the drive for change, thinks the latest amendments are long overdue. “For a country that espouses human rights around the world, Canada has been all too ready to disenfranchise its own citizens,” he says.

Chapman, who coined the term Lost Canadians, knows this first-hand. Born in Vancouver in 1954, he moved with his parents as a child to the U.S. where they became naturalized Americans in 1961. He remained proud of his ancestral roots and as an adult applied for a Canadian passport, a request that was denied.

Soon Chapman was buttonholing anyone he thought could help him. Media coverage and his website led to other Lost Canadians contacting him, and what began as a personal quest soon morphed into a full-fledged campaign to rewrite the law. The lobbying paid off when Bill C-37 received royal assent on April 16, 2008.

Now Chapman is anxiously waiting to see whether Parliament’s act has the desired results. Repeating a prevalent concern among Lost Canadians, he explains, “Just because a bill becomes law doesn’t mean they have to process our applications.”