“Can I see a doctor, please, that’s white, that doesn’t have brown teeth and speaks English?”In proper English, that would be, “May I see a doctor, please, who’s white, who doesn’t have brown teeth and speaks English,” but why quibble with racists?The woman captured on a video that was viewed thousands of times on Tuesday, making obnoxious demands in a Mississauga clinic, also has her stereotypes mixed up. It’s the English who are supposed to have terrible teeth — what would she have done if a proper English doctor showed up, with brown teeth?That, too, is beside the point; racism is the refuge of the ignorant, and thank goodness for her display of it in that overt form because it’s often the only type of discrimination that people understand and acknowledge as racism.The man who filmed it while in the waiting room, Hitesh Bhardwaj, told the Star’s Alexandra Jones that a sense of responsibility led him to do it.“I could have just ignored it, but some inner voice convinced me that it is totally wrong, and there is no room for misinterpretation,” he said. “I am a realist, and I know that these things exist … (but) watching something like this in front of your eyes, and it happening so openly and boldly — it just shocked me.”The woman’s behaviour comes as a surprise to some because it shatters the delicate veneer of equality that surrounds the idea of multiculturalism.While her demand for a “white doctor” has received the most attention, it’s her insistence on one who speaks English — in a clinic where everybody clearly speaks it — that interests me because it sheds light on a language-specific “micro aggression”— a term used to describe seemingly inconsequential offences that stem from deeply biased attitudes.The most commonly known micro aggression is the otherization implicit ...
|
