The significance of mixed family backgrounds for mainstream integration in Canada

ABSTRACT

Recent research has shown that, in the U.S., individuals from mixed majority-minority families generally occupy positions in between whites and minorities but ‘lean’ white in the sense that they behave in ways more similar in key respects to white Americans than to minority ones; those who are partly black are an exception. Using the data from the 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey, we examine here whether the same pattern appears in Canada. We employ multiple indicators of integration – including self-classification as white rather than a visible minority, the perception of encountering discrimination, the choice of a marital partner, and household income – and find that, overall, Canadians from mixed majority-minority backgrounds are also in-between but lean white in some respects. The degree of this lean depends on the minority origin involved and tends to be strongest when the minority parent has an Arab background and weakest when that parent is black; individuals of white and Asian ancestry are intermediate. However, the distance of white–black Canadians from the others is not as extreme as is the case for white–black individuals in the U.S.

KEYWORDS:

• Integration
• mainstream
• visible minority
• mixed unions
• majority-minority background
• second generation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Canadian data thanks to Feng Hou of Statistics Canada.

2 In data collected by Statistics Canada, the term ‘visible minority’ has a meaning essentially equivalent to ‘non-white’ in US census data. The relevant census question provides similar response options of white, black, Chinese, and so on.

3 Apart from those of American ancestry, who we could exclude from analysis, others for whom non-European ancestry might include substantial racially white populations are those with South African, Australian or New Zealand ancestries. We believe that this group is quite small.

4 Our analyses exclude 15–17 year olds.

5 The EDS did not directly ask about ‘Canadian’ identity, but did accept ‘Canadian’ in response to the open-ended question about current ethnic identity (also Quebecois, French-Canadian, etc.). This explains why even some respondents of English or French backgrounds with both parents born in Canada did not always mention one of the ‘Canadian’ identities. Nevertheless, the data show racial differences that are notable and meaningful as indicators of the impact of race on identification with the Canadian mainstream (Reitz and Banerjee 2007). Our indicator focuses on those who mentioned only a ‘Canadian’ identity in response to the question, and not a ‘hyphenated’ identity (Canadian in combination with another identity).

6 The representation of multi-category age and education variables is with series of dummy variables. Such a representation maximises the explanatory power of these variables.

7 The significance tests for these comparisons are supplemented by a separate analysis to test for the significance of the difference between the two dummy-variable categories.