(Here follows a long, rambling post that is only tangentially related to books or reading.)

Maybe it’s because so much world lit, especially that which is written in or translated into English, involves immigrant narratives, but I’ve been thinking about immigration and my own Canadian identity.

Perhaps I should start by explaining where I’m coming from—or in this case, where my parents came from. My mother was a typical white Ontarian: blonde, blue eyes, fair skin, ancestors all from the British Isles, mostly England and Scotland. Her grandparents were all born here in Southern Ontario, mostly in the Golden Horseshoe. So on my mother’s side, I’m at least a fifth-generation Canadian.

My father was born in Accra, Ghana in 1951, and emigrated to Canada in 1969, at the age of eighteen. He attended university here, and has had Canadian citizenship for three decades. The last time he visited Ghana was for his father’s funeral in 1982. English is his first language (Ghana, unlike most countries in West Africa, was colonized by the British rather than the French, and English is its only official language.)

So where does that leave me? I was born in Toronto in 1984, and I’ve lived here in pretty much the same neighbourhood almost my entire life. I’m a very light-skinned black woman, with black hair and brown eyes. My hair is naturally as curly as anyone whose ancestors are from Sub-Saharan Africa, although I have it chemically straightened. I could never pass for white (nor would I wish to.) It wasn’t until I was twenty that it occurred to me that I could actually be considered a second-generation Canadian.

Now, the point of all that background information was to make the point that, like the Molson commercial says, I am Canadian. 100%. Which maybe goes a long way toward explaining why I get ticked off when a fellow Canadian (usually one who hasn’t really heard me speak) asks me where I come from.

Here, you idiot. I was born here, I’ve lived here my whole life, and I will probably die here.

Of course, part of what angers me about people who ask this is that they’re making an assumption that because I am not white, I must be an immigrant. In Toronto, this kind of assumption is not only a kind of racial profiling, it’s also moronic; Toronto is supposedly the world’s most multicultural city, and most non-white people my age are at least second-generation Canadians.

I don’t want to make it sound like this happens often. It doesn’t, at all, and although Toronto isn’t a perfect place when it comes to ignorance, we’re improving all the time. I can remember, as a child, being asked many times what my background was, and on answering that my father was from Ghana, would usually then be asked where that was. (This excludes the rather disturbing number of times that adults insisted that, “you mean Guyana, dear.” Or Guinea, or Gambia, etc. At which times I had to insist that yes, even though I was only eight, or ten, or twelve, I did in fact know where my own father was from, and even how to pronounce it.) I soon learned to append “in West Africa” to any mention of Ghana.

Now, a decade later, when someone asks about my background, and I tell them that my father is from “Ghana, in West Africa,” the reaction is invariably an irritated and impatient, “I know where Ghana is!” So things have changed. (Sadly, my answer hasn’t; ten years may have improved the average Canadian’s knowledge of African geography, but childhood habits die hard.)

Anyway, I know that that I am bothered by the automatic equation of non-whiteness with immigrants because it reveals an essentially exclusionary and regressive view of what Canada is, but is that the only reason behind my ire? Is my attitude really any more enlightened than that of the person questioning me?

Sadly, I have to say that the answer is “no.” Because as quick as I am to claim immigrants as Canadians in other contexts (authors I like and respect, for example, like Shauna Singh Baldwin, Rohinton Mistry, or Michael Ondaatje—although Canadians in general are notorious for this (this funny post by an American living in Vancouver provides a good example)), I still seem to have internalized the mistaken idea that people who weren’t born here can’t be as Canadian as those of us who were. (I realize that even the concept of national identity is problematic at best, and the Canadian national identity is a problem of a wholly different sort, but I don’t see the world shedding them anytime soon.)

So where does that leave me? What does it make me?

As capable of acting on moronic assumptions as anyone else, I suppose. Something I’ll have to work on.