Identities in Transition

The Enkidu Summer Conference 2007

June 1 - 5, 2007

Mexico City

in:

“Speak White:” Remembering French Canadian Identities in British Columbia, Canada, 1909-1939

Genevieve Lapointe

Department of Sociology

The University of British Columbia

Canada

“Speak white.” Up until the 1960s, these words were used to insult Francophones in Canada. French Canadians would hear this slur whenever they spoke French in public. It meant “Speak English!” Linking whiteness with the English language, the remark suggested that to be “white,” one not only needed to “look” white, but had to “speak” white as well.

Today, with the increasing popularity of French immersion schools, as well as the official policy of bilingualism in Canada, “Speak white” is an expression that has fallen into desuetude. But what did the term mean for French Canadians who lived during this “Speak white” era? How is their collective past remembered (and forgotten)? How did French Canadians accommodate and resist this injunction to speak the dominant language, to “become white”?

In this paper, I will explore the complexities and contradictions of whiteness through the oral histories of 22 French-Canadian men and women who were interviewed in the early 1970s. More precisely, my analysis focuses on the discourses of the members of the small French-speaking community of Maillardville prior to the Second World War. Located 20 kilometres south of Vancouver – Canada’s second largest English-speaking city – and considered the pioneering lynchpin of “Frenchness” in British Columbia, the settlement became known as Maillardville after a few hundred French-Canadian lumberjacks from Ontario and Quebec came with their families to work in the lumber mill of Fraser Mills in 1909 and 1910.

Inspired by post-colonial and anti-racist feminist theories, I take the perspective that whiteness is a social construction “that is historically, geographically, and socially contingent and made up of various gradations and meanings” (Satzewich, 273: 2000). Also, as U.S. scholar David Theo Goldberg explains, “in class terms whiteness definitionally signifies social superiority, politically equates with control, economically equals property and privilege” (243:2002). As such, whiteness is not a monolithic and static category. Someone may be “more or less white,” according to one’s gender, sexuality, social class, linguistic abilities, accents, or religious affiliation, for instance.

Following this understanding of whiteness, I will analyze the oral histories of the participants to illustrate how the French Canadians of Maillardville occupied a space that disrupts the white/non-white duality, as well as complicates the colonizers/colonized dichotomy between 1909 and 1939. For instance, the working-class status of the French Canadians lumberjacks, along with their Roman Catholic faith and French language, shaped their “whiteness.” Overwhelmingly poor, with little (if any) formal education, and concentrated in un-skilled or semi-skilled jobs at the mill, the French-Canadians labourers were not considered completely white by the Anglo-Canadian majority. Furthermore, the exploration of narratives pertaining to French language and French schooling — which includes the Anglicization of French names, the necessity of learning English, and the struggle to remember French — illustrates how whiteness was indeed fractured in Maillardville.

Finally, given that whiteness is also a self-ascribed identity always in transition, I argue that the interviewees considered themselves as being radically different from white Anglo-Canadians — at times, not always. As they learned (and refused) to “speak white,” French Canadians had differential access to the benefits, privileges, and rewards associated with whiteness. Work Cited: Goldberg, David Theo (2002), “Racial States,” A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell: 233-258. Satzewich, Vic (2000), “Whiteness Limited: Racialization and the Social Construction of ‘Peripheral Europeans’,” Histoire sociale/Social History, 23: 271-290.

About Genevieve Lapointe

Genevieve Lapointe is a Master of Arts Sociology candidate at the University of British Columbia. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Laval University, Quebec. Her research interests focus on the histories of Maillardville, critical whiteness studies, Francophone groups in Canada, Quebecois nationalism and the interrelation of race, gender, class and sexuality as categories of analysis to explore nation-building.