Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

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If I'm coming across as accusing you specifically of racism, I apologize, I did not construe your comment as such. FWIW, many "little X" towns in toronto are in fact caucasian...

You are entitled to your opinion and Trudeau to his, all I'm saying is that it's a bit callous to characterize a large number of people as "shallow" or buying into a meme (the thing about loving americanisms) on the same breath as claiming it's a quilt (the implication of which is that there are significant congregational, not-americanized bubbles).

One can also make negative remarks about Americans and their americanisms, there's no need to accuse subsets of other populations of doing things subsets of your own also do, as a crutch for a us-vs-them style of narrative. That's cherrypicking. In aggregate, people are more similar than they are different.

When I say torontonians got over differences, this is sort of what I mean: diversity isn't a driver of outrage narratives for us, just a fact of life.

> You are entitled to your opinion and Trudeau to his

If you’re referring to the point about Canada being a cultural mosaic, I don’t think this a Trudeauism. I recall learning that in high school 15 years ago. A quick google search leads to [1], which points to the term originating in the 1920’s.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_mosaic

I didn't mean it was a trudeauism, I literally meant he's entitled to subscribe to whatever idea he wants, just like anyone else. I was mostly speaking to the distinction (or lack thereof) between "melting pot" and "cultural mosaic". The bottom of your link summarizes this more explicitly:

> The "cultural mosaic" theory is not without critics. Some pundits, such as The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson and Carleton University journalism professor Andrew Cohen, have argued that the entire melting pot/mosaic dynamic is largely an imagined concept and that there remains little measurable evidence that American or Canadian immigrants as collective groups can be proven to be more or less "assimilated" or "multicultural" than each other.

My personal stance on this is that I do think there are some differences between american and canadian multiculturalism, but not enough to warrant making a pejorative distinction, and certainly not for the purpose of driving exclusionary us-vs-them narratives.

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