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Re-Pressing Racism: The Denial of Racism in the Canadian Press

2000; Jilin Academy of Agricultural Sciences; Volume: 25; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.22230/cjc.2000v25n4a1177

1499-6642

Bohdan Szuchewycz,

Multilingual Education and Policy

A long-standing and pervasive element of Canadian national identity is the idealization of Canadian society as uniquely tolerant and free of racism. This national myth was seriously challenged when the results of a federally commissioned survey on attitudes toward immigration were made public. Using the methods of critical discourse analysis, this paper examines how the results of this survey were presented and interpreted in The Globe and Mail. Specifically, the press reports are examined with respect to: (a) how the situation of discrimination and intolerance revealed in the survey is encoded, (b) the meaning of the terms “Canadian” and “Canadian culture” in the context of these texts, and (c) how the texts account for the reported change in “Canadian” attitudes towards “visible minorities.” I argue that The Globe and Mail adopted an overall semantic strategy of denial of racism which reinterprets, marginalizes, and mitigates evidence of racism in Canada, and thus reinforces the dominant and preferred view of Canadian society as tolerant, pluralistic, and free of systemic racism.