Democracy, Multiculturalism, and Racism

Many people consider the existence of racism in liberal democratic societies particularly troubling because democracy is rooted in equality and individual rights. In principle, at least, the distribution of scarce resources based on people’s heritage and ascriptive characteristics is inimical to democratic ideals. Yet even a country like Canada, with its stellar human rights reputation, is challenged in this regard. The ethnically rooted material inequality that pervaded Canadian society in the period before the 1960s is depicted in detail in John Porter’s 1965 work The Vertical Mosaic, which laments a lack of meritocracy in modern Canadian society, the lack of opportunities for upward class mobility (especially in comparison to the U.S.), and the country’s social stratification along ethnic lines. Porter refers to the British and French Canadians as “charter groups”; they were the first ethnic groups to take control of a newly conquered territory, and as charter groups they were the “gate-keepers” who determined the fates of subsequent entrants or immigrants to Canada in accordance with their notions of cultural and racial capacities. Time has demonstrated the need to modify some of Porter’s findings because many European groups of the postwar era have overcome their disadvantages (see, e.g., Lian & Mathews 1998; Urmetzer & Guppy Reference Urmetzer, Guppy, Grabb and Guppy2009). Nevertheless, scholars insist that “unequal relations” (Fleras Reference Fleras2012) still exist among racial groups in Canadian society. While Porter (Reference Porter1965) focused on ethnic inequality, contemporary research pays attention to the more serious problem of “racialization” (Galabuzi Reference Galabuzi2006), which particularly affects immigrants of color in Canada. ^{Footnote 7}

In the Colour of Democracy: Racism in Canadian Society (2006), the Canadian scholars Frances Henry and Carol Tator develop the concept of “democratic racism” to explicate situations “in which two conflicting sets of values are made congruent to each other” (2006:22). That is, while racism and democracy are antinomies, they co-exist in a democratic society like Canada in which “commitments to democratic principles such as justice, equality, and fairness conflict but coexist with attitudes and behaviors that include negative feelings about minority groups, differential treatment, and discrimination against them” (2006:22). Despite the Canadian “discourse of multiculturalism,” which espouses “tolerance, accommodation, harmony, and diversity” (2006:27), democratic racism manifests itself in key Canadian institutional domains of education, media, arts, judiciary, and human services, and in the state’s shirking of its responsibility to implement policies that would ameliorate the marginalization of minorities. Henry and Tator argue that multiculturalism actually conceals unequal power relations in Canadian society, and many Canadians, including immigrants, themselves hold an ambivalent view on the nature of race relations in the country (see Adeyanju 2010). Yet it is instructive to note that some studies on African migration to Europe and North America have shown that many prospective immigrants may be oblivious to anti-immigrant attitudes and sentiments in the West. The principal reasons are the favorable representations of the West that are prevalent in the local media in African countries (see, e.g., Togunde et al. Reference Togunde, Ojebode, Vocke, Yewah and Togunde2010) and also the tendency of existing immigrants in the West to emphasize the positive aspect of their experiences and conceal the less favorable ones (see Adeyanju & Oriola 2011).

Globalization and the Influence of Transmigrants

Globalization generates flows of people, objects, and information (Ritzer 2011). These flows are expedited by both communication technologies and neoliberal capitalism. Anthony McGrew (1992:65–66) refers to globalization as

For Anthony Giddens, globalization is more than economic; it encompasses political, cultural, and technological changes and “has been influenced above all by developments in systems of communication, dating back only to the late 1960s” (2003:10). Time–space compression by telecommunications and improved transportation that accelerate globalization also enable immigrants and transmigrants who traverse multiple nation-states to interact with their co-ethnics (see Hall Reference Hall, Hall, Held and McGrew1992; Reynolds Reference Reynolds2004).

McGrew (1992:68) notes that globalization has two interrelated parts. First is the “scope,” defined by “a universal process or set of processes which generate a multiplicity of linkages and interconnections between the states and societies which make up the modern world system.” Second is the “intensity,” which refers to the “intensification in the levels of interaction, interconnectedness, or interdependence between the states and societies which constitute the modern world community.” Some observers such as Thomas Friedman (Reference Friedman2005) have claimed, metaphorically, that the “world is flat,” in the sense that globalization provides a level playing field for individuals, states, and societies. George Ritzer (Reference Ritzer2010), by contrast, claims that globalization, far from “flowing” around the globe and affecting all regions equally, “hops” over Africa, where most of its inhabitants are constrained even from traveling beyond the continent by uncontrollable social, political, and economic forces. Giddens, in turn, claims sardonically that for Africans the current world is less like a global village and “more like global pillage” (2003:16). Although globalization connects societies, it also creates, as Ulrich Beck points out, “a legitimation crisis of the national morality of exclusion” (2005:144), particularly with regard to refugees, migrants, and cultural minorities. Indeed, global inequality is one of the driving forces of contemporary African migrations to the West (see Falola & Afolabi Reference Falola and Afolabi2007).

It is also not always the case that communication technologies integrate the world. In her study of Guinean immigrants in Portugal, Michelle Johnson (Reference Johnson2013) shows that communication technologies do not integrate African immigrants and their African co-ethnics into the global economy or turn them into transmigrants or transnationals. In fact, while African immigrants in Lisbon use the cell phone to valorize their social statuses within their ethnic enclaves, they can rarely afford to make long-distance calls to relatives and co-ethnics elsewhere in Portugal or beyond. They therefore are cut off from their origins, at the same time that they are separated from mainstream Portuguese society by their “race” and low social class. Paul Stoller and Jasmine McConatha’s (2001) study of West African traders in New York City paints a similar picture of the poverty, racism, isolation, and alienation experienced by African immigrants in the West. Nevertheless, both ethnographic studies demonstrate the resilience of Africans in these situations, and their use of information technology locally to coordinate community activities and find fellowship and support. Other studies have shown that youths and second-generation African immigrants use text messaging and social networking sites like Facebook to update members of their home society (see Jua Reference Jua2003).

It also is undeniable that the forces of globalization, if not working to connect the world equitably, spread information about life in other countries. In a highly mediatized world, prospective immigrants therefore have some knowledge of other countries, even without any direct experience. Togunde et al. (Reference Togunde, Ojebode, Vocke, Yewah and Togunde2010), for example, found that Nigerian university students have knowledge of the U.S. through newspapers, magazines, films, and popular music, and that the media influence their desire to immigrate to the U.S.

In commenting about the relationship between the media and human behavior Giddens, while acknowledging its significance, strikes a cautionary note: “The media do not mirror realities but in some part form them; but this does not mean that we should draw the conclusion that the media have created an autonomous realm of ‘hyperreality’ where the sign or image is everything” (1991:27). Nevertheless, it is clear that the influence of the media is enormous, and that it has an impact on Nigerians who desire to migrate to the U.S. or any of other popular destinations in the West, including Canada, the U.K., Austria, and Australia.

The influence of direct communication and observation is also considerable. Most of the research participants in this study claimed that they derived their overall knowledge of Canada from narratives shared by friends, acquaintances, and family members living in Canada and the West during their visits to Nigeria or in telephone conversations. A male participant describing the presence of transmigrants from Europe in his local community said “They change clothes, cars, and go to the best boutiques, and parties. . . . They just want to show that they’ve gone and come back. . . . Parents want their children to be like that.” This finding is consistent with the observations of Riccio (Reference Riccio2001) and Komolafe (Reference Komolafe2008) among, respectively, Senegalese and Nigerian immigrants residing in Europe who flaunt material wealth during visits to their home communities. Participants in the focus group agreed that some of the transmigrants “show off” to “overawe” their peers and members of their social groups who remained in Nigeria. That is, their “presentation of self,” to quote Erving Goffman (Reference Goffman1959), is intended to give the impression that they are living a better life in their host society.

In his discussion of racial categorization, Stuart Hall (Reference Hall1996) asserts that the body can be read like a text. Also relevant here is the work of Thomas Perks (Reference Perks2012), who, drawing on that of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, employs the notion of “physical capital” to shed light on the role that the corporeal form plays in everyday life, specifically in regard to gender stratification and income, economic, and class distinctions. Perks’s concept of “physical capital” is instructive for analyzing the image of transnationals among their peers and social groups in their home country. Perks claims that “class inequality can find expression in embodied ways, such as physical appearance, pronunciation, stride, style, posture, nonverbal communication, diet, handwriting, and so on” (2012:3–4). Similarly, immigrants do not have to express themselves verbally in order to create the impression of prosperity and success. More often they impress others merely by their attire, appearance, or even more intangible qualities. During the interviews, many participants made similar comments about the immigrants, observing, for example, that “they look good” (both in photographs and in person), “the color of the skin has changed,” “their intonation [accent] has changed, and is better,” and “their dressings are neat.”

Participants in the focus group were not in complete agreement over why transmigrants are celebrated in Nigerian society. Some argued that the key issue is money—that regardless of where people were visiting from, including other African countries, they would be valorized if they returned with money to spend. Others, however, argued that individuals are celebrated particularly if they had returned from the West and had interacted with the white population. According to one participant, “Africa–Ghana, Niger, and the rest are the same; . . . crossing the Atlantic Ocean is different. Once you have crossed the ocean, things will change. If you tell the people that you are from Takoradi [Ghana], you gain no respect; but if you were from Germany, U.K., Canada, or the U.S., people would treat you differently.” According to another participant, “they are different because they’ve been with the whites” and “those who have been to the West behave differently from those who have been to other African countries. ” One of the participants offered a particularly nuanced analysis of the situation. Rather than commenting merely on the prestige value of associating with white people, he suggested that the transmigrants’ self-presentation had some validity and that their sojourns abroad had indeed brought self-improvement. Although his comment was an implicit critique of his own people, it was both accepting and compassionate: “It is the character of whites that make their country the way it is . . . ,” he said. “Tough times in Nigeria mess us up. . . .”

This influence of transmigrants on their home country is not a new occurrence; rather, it is a long-standing phenomenon in the postcolony. In the 1960s Frantz Fanon noticed the strong influence exerted upon Francophile populations in Africa and the Antilles by black expatriates who had been to the “mother country” and returned home to show off their mastery of Western culture. “The Negro who knows the mother country is a demigod,” he says in Black Skin, White Masks. He adds, “Many of them, after stays of varying length in Metropolitan France, go home to be deified” (1967:19,23). Such an individual, he says,

Transmigrants get positive reinforcement from members of their community when they appear in social events. For example, in the focus group discussion some of the participants explained that in their NYSC orientation camp those who lived and studied abroad received special treatment from the staff for this reason alone. Another social arena where transnationals take “front stage” (Goffman Reference Goffman1959) is in church. “Sometimes those who have been overseas give thanks in our church,” said one participant; he added, “but I find it stupid at times because I see that they just want to show off. Everyone calls them ‘Ara ilu oyinbo’ [“those from the land of Whites,” in Yoruba] and says ‘let them sit down here. . . .’”

While individuals and groups actively craft their “presentation of self”—which Goffman (Reference Goffman1959) also calls “impression management”—other cultural influences serve to enhance that image. Participants recounted how they were fascinated by stories they heard from their schoolteachers about their sojourns as students and visitors in the West, and many of them said that their parents wanted them to have similar opportunities. Thus agents of socialization, including teachers, priests, and parents, are consciously and unconsciously involved in encouraging transnational migration.

Nations also “act” via the media to attract immigrants with desired skill sets in a competitive global market. The language of the Canadian immigration policy in the postindustrial era focuses on the productivity, efficiency, and flexibility required of new immigrants—that is, on the goals of neoliberalism (Simmons Reference Simmons2010). For its “imagined future,” the Canadian state desires “‘designer immigrants,’ consisting of individuals who are selected as if they were custom designed to meet the specific criteria of a neo-liberal nation intent on productivity, cost recovery, and immigrant self-settlement” (Simmons Reference Simmons2010:85). To this end, the Canadian government uses the media to construct a particular image of Canada. For example, literature directed to prospective immigrants in the Philippines boasts that

In an increasingly globalized world, the large backlog of applications by prospective immigrants to Canada is an indication that such advertisements work.

Poor Quality of Higher Education in Nigeria and the Emphasis on Foreign Credentials

Most of the participants in the study mentioned that part of the appeal of emigration or transmigration had to do with the inadequate funding and poor quality of postsecondary education in Nigeria, as well as the growing interest of Nigerian employers in foreign credentials. As Adepoju and van der Wiel state, “Locally in Nigeria, employers prefer students trained abroad. Some, especially multinational corporations, even mount recruitment drives abroad and pay graduates’ way back home with handsome incentives and attractive wage package” (2010:328). One participant explained that “Nigerians go overseas for higher education because universities are poorly funded in Nigeria. It is so because our leaders are corrupt. [They] do not help Nigeria to grow. Imagine what the quality of life would be if Nigeria had a high standard of education. . . .” Another participant lamented her experience as a science student: “They don’t have enough facilities here. My friend went to do his Master’s in microbiology . . . [overseas]. . . . He said all the compounds and adenosines you only read here, you see them physically. . . . That is, here illustration is more theoretical; over there you see it real. . . .” One participant spoke about the attraction of Canada in particular: “Canada has a good standard of education. . . . A Speaker of the Nigerian House of Representatives once lied that he studied at the University of Toronto. He chose Canada because he knew the place had a high standard of education.” ^{Footnote 8}

The students were expressing some obviously long-standing problems in the Nigerian education sector: the underfunding of postsecondary education, the concomitant underemployment of Nigerian postsecondary graduates, and the involvement of corrupt public officials. All of these factors have contributed to the desire of African youths to migrate to the West, especially the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. for postgraduate studies, and often for permanent gainful employment (see Dako-Gyeke Reference Dako-Gyeke2016). In 1996 Segun Osoba lamented that

Perception, Reality, and the Realignment of Expectations

In the focus group session, many of the participants claimed that they were not aware of racism or any settlement problems that new immigrants might be experiencing in Canada. In the interviews, some said that they found reported cases of immigrants experiencing hardship in Canada and the West difficult to believe. One of the participants, whose uncle and aunt live in Canada, said “they often say it is not easy for them, you understand, but they cope, and when they come to Nigeria we see a good difference in their lives, but they keep saying it is not easy.” He added, jokingly, “someone was telling me that he liked that kind of life where it is not easy. . . . They continue to say it is not easy, and they are doing great.” Another respondent said, “In my own view, I have never seen anyone that went there and came back with negative stories.” And another expressed skepticism that some Nigerians face unemployment even in Canada: “I don’t think it is difficult for Nigerians to get jobs in Canada. If they didn’t have jobs, I see no reasons they should be living there. . . . If it is tough there, they would have run back to Nigeria.”

This is not to say that Nigerians are unaware of the myriad challenges that confront African immigrants in Canada and the West. Some mentioned the fact that Western governments, including the Canadian government, tend to criminalize blacks and “illegal immigrants” of African descent and stated that if they encountered challenges beyond their control in Canada they would return to Nigeria. One of the female participants seemed to capture the view of the majority when she said, “if I go there and meet what I don’t expect, I would come back to my fatherland.” However many, as discussed earlier, claimed that even in the face of unexpected hardships they would be resilient and remain in Canada. Togunde et al. (2010:27) found that four out of five of their research participants who held a negative impression of the U.S. as a country of violence and pornographic images still planned to visit the U.S. The position of the focus group seemed to be that life is full of challenges and that one must confront these as successfully as possible. One participant captured this perspective with the comment, “There is no easy way to success. Is there an easy way to heaven?”

In general the respondents attributed migration from Africa, including illegal migration, to the high level of poverty on the continent, and for most of the youths, the advantages of living in the West outweigh the disadvantages. It is noteworthy that these youths are not “ideological dupes,” unconscious of the implications of their decisions. They are not merely “interpellated” (Althusser Reference Althusser1971) or entrapped by Western materialism; they are actively participating in the construction of their own views (see Hay Reference Hay1996), and they approach some of the issues pertaining to the Nigerian economy, migration, opportunities, and challenges critically. For example, during the focus group discussion, some of the participants were aware that with the improved economy in Nigeria, the desire to emigrate would decline. This understanding of the political economy of underdevelopment in Nigeria and its relationship to migration was expressed particularly eloquently by one participant.

Social Inequality and Racial Categorization

Yet while the participants are in many ways clear-eyed about not only the conditions in Nigeria but also the potential difficulties of life elsewhere, many of their comments suggested some reductive elements in their understanding of the relationships among international migration, development, and ethno-racial diversity. They displayed qualities of what Loseke (2003:17) calls “typification,” a mental process by which humans comprehend the material world and the complexity of their social world by simplifying them and settling for “an image of the typical.”

One particularly pernicious aspect of “typification” is racialization—racial categorization and its inevitable outcome, racism. As is well known, colonialism, through its discourses and ideologies, categorized Africans as the “other,” relative to Europeans, on the basis of culture and somatic features. Through the process of racialization, Europeans attributed meanings to phenotypical variation in human populations (see Satzewich Reference Satzewich2011; Miles Reference Miles1989). But racialization is by no means a simple matter of imposing domination. It is a complex process with not only material ramifications but also psychic consequences for both the colonized and the colonizer. Both, that is, are involved in a dialectical process in which “ascribing a real or alleged biological characteristic with meaning to define the Other necessarily entails defining Self by the same criterion” (Miles Reference Miles1989:75). In colonial times these psychical consequences affected the relationships between the colonized and the colonizer. And these discursively constructed categories of self and “other” have been sustained, in turn, by ideology. As Hall (1981:31–32) explains,

People are not normally conscious of the naturalization of the social that is entailed in ideological discourses that are passed down to successive generations. Hall refers to the interaction and intermeshing of the old with the new, the past and the present, as “traces” of the past. Thus traces of colonialism persist in the present and continue to resonate in everyday discourse. They represent what Fairclough (1998:149) calls “the lifeworld discourse of ordinary people”—that is, the shared world of everyday experience.

Many of the exchanges in the focus group and interviews suggested that the participants themselves have absorbed many aspects of typification, racialization, and their supporting ideology. Some of them, for example, have effectively sorted the world into “good/favorable” and “bad/unfavorable” zones, with the former characterized by economic development and the latter by underdevelopment. They also engage in typification; like the member of the focus group who valorized the “character of whites,” they tend to believe that Canada and Australia, for example, are similar simply because they are “white societies,” and for this reason as well they are inherently different from countries in Africa. Even these participants, who specifically chose Canada as their preferred destination, seemed to think of the West as one homologous entity. Most participants, in fact, lack specific information about Canada, and in their responses to questions about Canada many of them simply referred to their mediated knowledge (via television and Canadian expatriate family and friends) of the West as a whole. Their specific knowledge was on the order of “Canada is a pacifist country that is respectful of other countries”; “Canadians do not interfere in other countries’ affairs”; “Canada has two official languages”; and “Canada is USA’s neighbor, developed, and white.”

Although most participants detest the corruption that is rampant in Nigeria, implicitly agreeing with the judgment that it incapacitates “the legitimate authorities to provide fully for the material and spiritual wellbeing of all members of society in a just and equitable manner” (Osoba 1996:372), they seem to have a resigned sense that inequality is simply a fact of life in Nigeria and that their best option is to advance their own position in the world by migrating to the West. In this sense transnational migration, according to Basch et al. (1994:13), is hegemonic, in that “the social order is sustained by daily practice, habit, and common sense.” The study participants seemed more interested in re-creating themselves in the image of the transmigrants they admire—and, as we have seen, in living up to the expectations of parents, teachers, and priests—than in fundamentally transforming Nigerian society. In this way, of course, the behavior of transmigrants—and those of their elders—reinforces socioeconomic inequality among their fellow citizens by reinforcing the social distinction between immigrants and those who stay behind.

Only one participant in the study seemed to have reservations about the special status accorded to transmigrants and their role in modeling the aspirations of the next generation. When probed about the deference given to foreigners and Nigerians who have lived in the West, he offered the following, rather poignant, response.