Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
sometimes follows, if unintentionally, partisan interests and the media when
it errs toward simplifications of complex relations, ending up by offering
premature closure in an all too coherent narrative. This intellectual error is
compounded when it slides into implicit or explicit political accusation.
However unwittingly, such slippage reproduces the cruel fashioning of racist
categories: from simplification to typification and the ascription of a singu-
lar, usually prejudicial, characteristic to a whole population. In its eagerness
to expose racism, the genre courts the danger of reproducing the dualistic
mind of the racist. To repeat Bonnett's (1996) warning, 'the myth of white-
ness' in critical race studies can readily lead in this direction.
Those who resisted landscape change in some, but not all, of Vancouver's
Westside neighbourhoods, usually had more complex and intersecting
motives and subjectivities than racism. They occupied a political space
where resistance to the unequal power relations of a branch-plant economy
had mobilized a majority of the national population against free trade rela-
tions with the United States, mobilization that peaked in the 1988 general
election a month before a new front opened up in overseas purchases in
Vancouver's land market. Property transactions also ran into local politics
where, since the late 1960s, a neighbourhood movement had advocated
local jurisdiction to control major land use change; preservation of charac-
ter neighbourhoods had already been approved in several areas, including
First Shaughnessy and Chinatown. Underlying preservation was a strong
feeling of sentiment and symbolism, a synthesis of place and identity.
Massive change thereby impaired identity and for some led to grieving for a
lost home, in Shaughnessy as in Chinatown.
These were the intersecting dimensions of the political environment that
new immigrants entered in Vancouver's Westside neighbourhoods. Neo-
liberal business interests did not underestimate the strength of these politi-
cal barriers. They employed the reports from the Laurier Institution, the
dirty tricks of the
Vancouver Sun
series to undercut political opposition and
the accusation that resistance was just a matter of racism. That some strains
of racism did exist, but in a much more complex constellation of motives,
gave this accusation some traction, complicating local political culture and
the problem-solving task of the local state as it was embroiled in the old
conflict of property rights versus neighbourhood rights, but now with a
troubling multicultural twist.
