National minority and racialized minorities: the case of Pakistanis in Quebec

Abstract

Canada is often characterized as a multicultural country with two official languages associated with two official population groups: the national majority of white, anglophone Canadians and the national minority of white, francophone Quebecers. Racialized minorities, including immigrants, are situated as the third node in the construction of Canada as a multicultural society. While there is often discussion of the minority/ majority relationship between the national majority and the national minority, or the national majority and racialized minorities, there is much less attention given to the relationship between Quebec and racialized minorities in the province. This paper examines the construction of difference in this relationship through the experiences of Pakistani Muslims living in Montreal.

Keywords:

• Islamophobia
• racialization
• Pakistanis
• Canada
• Quebec
• minorities

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Salman Sayyid for his valuable support and feedback.

Notes

1. To make a clear distinction between these two relationships, in this paper, I use ‘Quebec minority’ to refer to the minority/majority relationship between Quebec and Canada and ‘Quebec majority’ to refer to the relationship between Quebec and racialized minorities in the province.

2. Chantal Mouffe (2005) discusses how us/them dichotomies constitute political frontiers in her book On the Political.

3. Fears about the difference posed by Muslims to society can also be seen in the USA on the issue of ‘banning sharia law’ in Oklahoma, Kansas and other states (American Civil Liberties Union 2011).

4. Reports by Runnymede Trust on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the UK in the 1990s also encouraged Muslims to allay the fears of non-Muslims on these issues (see Sayyid 2011).

5. This is a similar pattern to the UK where Muslims are seen as a category that spans multiple ethnic and racialized groups, while Asians are seen primarily as an Indocentric group.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Uzma Jamil

UZMA JAMIL is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding at the University of South Australia