... Look, it is easy to divide on those lines - Canadian as a "racial category" doesn't mean anything, and almost a third of the country is Francophone.
And beginning with the 15%+ who speak Spanish as a primary language add adding up all the other non-English as primary language I doubt the US' population (in linguistic terms) is more monolithic. How commonly is French spoken outside of those regions that were historically French? Spanish instructions/directions can be found across the US because the Spanish speaking population is not limited to California, New Mexico, and Texas.
Beyond that too, what makes up that largest section, the 32%, and to what extent are the boundaries so defined?
This would seem, from the entire article, to have been Canadians of predominantly European heritage who do not clearly associate themselves with a single nationality (English, French, etc...)
You see, you are breaking categories down by race, as is the, from what I understand, standard practice of such things in the US. Even the category of Black/African in Canada would, by most people, considered to be racist. Simply put, the definition of the US would seem more race-obsessed than the Canadian one.
That's just PC double-talk. Certainly there are differences between the experiences of blacks in Canada and the US related to slavery, the tension between the North and the South, the huge exodus of Black Americans into the big Northern cities, segregation, poverty, etc... The Black American population is huge compared to that of Canada... nearly equal to the entire population of Canada. It is certainly diverse. There are Black Americans of Latin-American descent, those who trace their roots back to slavery, those who came from Africa after... and any number of mixtures. The size and the experience of African Americans, however, amount to culture within the larger culture... and one that holds firm to its identity rather than one that is simply labeled as such by others.
Your concepts of American culture are naive, to say the least. Based undoubtedly upon what you know through the media and perhaps through the experience of one or two major cities. The image of Canada that you put forward is equally skewed. The world of academia and that of one or two major cities does not mirror the whole of any nation. Canada has its racism as well as any nation. One need only look to the questions of the secession of French Canada. How integrated are the Native people into the larger culture? Are you certain to find Black, Asian, and Native First Peoples in any upper scale suburb in any province?
Think of it this way - why is the marking of "African-American", or "Hispanic" so defined? Look at, for instance, the markings on the Canadian graph of geographic locations - there isn't a headlined "European" or "White" is there. The whole nature of the graphic seems a bit fishy, don't you think?
I don't see anything "fishy" about it. The Hispanic, Black or African-American populations have clearly-defined cultures quite different from the larger American populace of European heritage (although admittedly all three are no where near being monolithic in form). The same might be said of any cultural minority... the Chinese, Vietnamese, Russians, Italians, Jews, etc... but the Hispanic and Black Populations of the US are also huge.. both as large or larger than the whole population of Canada. As such they have been able to assert themselves... in culture, the media, politics, etc...in a manner in which we don't see with smaller minorities
You seem too preoccupied by absolutes - and in a sense, the United States is preoccupied by absolutes - think of, for instance, the fact that Obama is the first African-American President - what does that say about the conceptualization of Race in the United States, given that his father is from Kenya, and his mother, an American, who raised him in Indonesia, and Hawaii - clearly that would imply a sort of cosmopolitan identity of mixed traditions - why then is he regarded as "The First African-American" president - why such a defined identity, and fixed labeling?
Obama was touted as the first African-American president because of the fact that he represents such most importantly to the African American population who saw his inauguration as the culmination of what they had been struggling for since the Civil War. There are certainly Americans (as there are people in any nation) who imagine that they represent the only "true __________" (Insert term of choice: Americans, Canadians, Germans, British, Russians, Japanese...) and see the world in terms of absolutes... in terms in which anyone unlike themselves are not only outsiders but a threat to their way of life and to the survival of the nation. This, of course, is the polar opposite of the truth. At the same time, I don't think the image of the "melting pot" has ever adequately described a nation like the US (or any other). This symbol suggests that each new immigrant gives up his or her own identity and becomes part of the whole. A more apt metaphor might be that of a stew, where each new ingredient adds to the whole... but also retains its identity.
If the US struggles with issues of race and nationality and immigration it is because it is undergoing continual growing pains far beyond what any other nation deals with. The US takes in over 1 million legal immigrants per year... far beyond that allowed by any other nation. (This does not even begin to address the issue of illegal immigrants. Currently there are over 40-million Americans who are identified as having been legal immigrants... including nearly 1 million Canadians.:D
To bring it back to Canada - I mentioned the writers, not the citizens anyway - the poets themselves do not accurately reflect the "population breakdown" at any rate anyway... The difference again I will stress, is also in the way "Canadian literature" is not as easily and willingly divided into "White Canadian Literature" and "African-Canadian" literature, and "East-Asian Canadian literature" and "Jewish Canadian literature" and "Transgendered Canadian literature" and so forth, as is want to happen in the US - and is the backbone of division within academic circles...
And you imagine that this is how literature is broken down in the US? I've yet to see the Jewish- or Asian-American section in the book stores, although there are admittedly sections defined as "African-American" or "Gay and Lesbian". Certainly, this does owe more to the demands of these "subcultures" for separate recognition and certainly owing to the divisions of academia... which have more to do with politics and carving out a niche than it does with literature. In spite of this Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde, Toni Morrison, Anne Carson, Emily Dickinson, Tu Fu, Wang Wei, J.L. Borges, Julio Cortazar, Philip Roth, etc... are all to be found in the larger sections on poetry and fiction and not in the Jewish, Gay and Lesbian, Women's Studies, Hispanic, African-American sections.
The statistics you gathered say very little - they do not reflect either those writing, or how the people of Canada see themselves - perhaps American art is want to call itself by a categorical titles, but as I stated before, the whole Frye concept of a Great Code no longer applies in Canada, and the categorical has no longer held, so you get authors using different traditions within their works as well, for instance, the poet P. K. Page working in the past few years with poetry written primarily out of Spanish and Sufi traditions, and the collaborative group Pain Not Bread using primarily Tang Poetry as a foundation for one of their works, or whatever.
The first question might be how many of these Canadian authors are truly major writers? How many are producing literature that will transcend the barriers of time and place? Undoubtedly, I could dig up any number of obscure writers active in the US who work within almost any tradition you can name. There are more than a few major poets... especially on the West Coast... who have been building upon Japanese and Chinese traditions for decades. Latin-American literature... and its parent traditions in Spanish and Portuguese literature have been engaged in a mutual influence for nearly a century. Poe, Hawthorne, and Whitman (among others) have been a major source of inspiration on Spanish/Portuguese/Latin-American literature but no less than Borges, Neruda, Garcia-Lorca, and now Pessoa in the US. Undoubtedly the Islamic/Middle-Eastern traditions are gaining in recognition as we now find that any serious bookstore will undoubtedly carry at least a collection by Hafez, Rumi, and Omar Khayyam... as well as the Qur'an... if not Sa'di, Nezami, Attar, and the Shanameh. The notion the US literature is some monolithic entity is simply an absurdity.
My point about bringing up Canada was not to put it against the US - quite simply, I am a Canadian Contemporary Poetry reader more so than a reader of American Poetry...
And we all thought you were now majoring in Chinese Studies...
